Neighbourhood catch

Most businesses have been in survival mode during the lockdown, but not those of Mukesh Ambani. As soon as his Reliance Industries sprung a surprise by announcing a deal with Facebook, the business plan at the centre of it got a fresh leg up. JioMart—the company’s e-commerce platform that plans to link three crore neighbourhood grocers directly with consumers using Facebook’s messaging service WhatsApp—is now up on beta testing in three satellite towns of Mumbai.

The timing could not have been better. With malls and big department stores closed, people have turned to neighbourhood stores for essential shopping. A McKinsey report says grocery purchase frequency has increased by 39 per cent since the outbreak began. E-commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart, as well as online grocers BigBasket and Grofers, have their hands tied with either government restrictions or a breakdown in their distribution network.

JioMart, already available as a website and an Android app, is now accessible through a dedicated WhatsApp number, too. Making the service available through WhatsApp, it is assumed, will make it appeal to even the tech illiterate across India who may not use apps or surf the web, but still use WhatsApp to communicate. The messaging service has about 40 crore users in India.

Once the order is successfully placed, the user is notified which nearby store will be catering to his order, along with details of time and delivery status. When WhatsApp Pay gets active (it is currently under beta testing, full-fledged operations throttled by Reserve Bank restrictions as well as litigation) and JioMart goes pan-India, the experience could get far more seamless.