Meta announced that would be integrating its WhatsApp messaging app with Reliance’s JioMart, which will allow users to text a number “Hi” which would then take them to an in-app shopping experience. 

“Business messaging is an area with real momentum and chat-based experiences like this will be the go-to way people and businesses communicate in the years to come,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a blog post soon after Reliance’s AGM 2022 was over. 

JioMart, is an e-commerce venture run by Jio Platforms which in the past few years has been responsible for rolling out incredibly cheap phones at cut-rate prices, helping many Indians get online. The company is part of the massive Reliance conglomerate. Just yesterday, on August 29, the conglomerate announced its plans to roll out 5G across the country by the end of next year, and in major metropolitan cities before Diwali. The festival of lights is just a little over two months away at this point. 

For Meta, business messaging seems to be the direction it wants to take WhatsApp as the company is convinced that’s where the money is. The JioMart integration will be part in-chat services, part in-app browser. 

The Mark Zuckerberg-led tech conglomerate is on a mission to make WhatsApp a one-stop shop for all kinds of services, much like the Chinese messaging app, WeChat. As it stands, WeChat users can do a multitude of things ranging from paying rent to buying movie tickets to even paying for food, all through the app. 

For Meta to want to pivot to this kind of business model makes sense as the company makes most of its money off of ads. However, the social media company hasn’t come close to the dominance that WeChat and its two billion users currently hold. But the stronger push in the Indian market makes sense, as WhatsApp has the largest userbase in the world in the country, at 400 million.