With the vision of expanding and wanting a bigger piece of the online retail market in the country, Mukesh Ambani’s renowned brand- Reliance Retail is on plans to link its e-commerce application JioMart with Whatsapp within the next 6 months. This is a very intelligent move to make 400 million users of India’s most popular messaging service order products from JioMart, hence expanding its reach on a large scale basis. The users would be able to order products from JioMart without even leaving the application Whatsapp, making it more convenient for the users to order online.
JioMart was launched in May 2020 after Facebook inked a mega $5.7 billion deal with Reliance Retail for a 9.9% stake last year. This platform offers everything from fruits and vegetables to household products on its app just like Flipkart and Amazon.
This integration will result in JioMart catapult its reach across the country, India. This however also allows Reliance Retail to pose a serious challenge to Flipkart and Amazon’s domination in India’s fast-growing online retail market. Ambani is of hope to grab a bigger share of India’s retail market through such a move in order to reach $1.3 trillion by 2025 also considering the fact that Reliance is already India’s biggest offline retailer.
“It is essentially marrying of strengths for both companies. The JioMart integration is essentially adding a retail layer for WhatsApp chats. With payments now available on WhatsApp, it makes all the more sense. Now your chats, retail, and payments will all be integrated within the same interface,” said Jayanth Kolla, founder and partner, Convergence Catalyst, a research firm. A Reliance Retail spokesperson did not respond to an email seeking comment. “Through our investment with Jio, we’re going to bring millions of small businesses and the customers they serve into the digital economy. This will make it easier for businesses to connect with customers and close sales,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said.
Both the companies are believed to be benefitted from the integration. JioMart grows as an online platform and at the same time the idea is to keep users withing Whatsapp, increasing its engagement rate by users which the API’S (application programming interface) allows. APIs for any catalog-based service will be built in such a way that as soon as new inventory comes in, it will keep feeding two-directional data to both Jio systems and what is front-ended on WhatsApp.
