Facebook recently acquired shares in Reliance, making it the biggest minority shareholder in the Indian company. Facebook’s daughter company, WhatsApp also signed a commercial agreement with Reliance Jio over its online venture JioMart. JioMart uses its technology to reach out to the vast network of small kirana (grocery) stores in India. Now, the company has already started rolling out the feature for WhatsApp users but on a very small scale.
The retailer is initially targeting the suburban Mumbai areas of Navi Mumbai, Thane and Kalyan. The company is expected to gradually start catering to other parts of the country.
In order to place an order on JioMart, users will first have to save the WhatsApp business number allotted to JioMart which is 88500 08000.
On just typing ‘Hi’, the company will then send a link to the customer’s Whatsapp account. This link should be accessed within 30 minutes after which it will expire. To get the link again, the user will just have to send ‘Hi’ on the same chat again.
Once the user taps on the link, it will take you to JioMart’s page where they’ll be asked for their mobile number, area, locality, the rest of the address and the full name of the person ordering. After that the user will redirected to the catalog of products.
After selecting the items that are required, JioMart will share the list of things with the local kirana on WhatsApp. Once the items are packed and billed, the customer will receive an alert with the store details. Since the feature is still in its nascent stage, the customer will have to go to the local store mentioned in the alert and pick up the goods. The mode of payment has been limited to cash only for now.
