Today Meta announced that people can shop from JioMart via WhatsApp and pay directly within the app, using UPI.
This is a big deal:
- WhatsApp is central to daily life in India, Meta doesn't share numbers but estimates range from 450 million monthly active users at the low end to over 500 million at the high end.
- UPI has seen mass adoption among both banks and people, with 338 banks integrated and over 6.2 billion transactions processed in July 2022 [source].
Despite many attempts, conversational commerce has yet to become a thing.
This feels like the best chance it has to become one.
The combined ubiquity of WhatsApp and UPI makes for a foundation of familiarity and trust among people, reinforced by the brand recognition of JioMart.
Working with a single retail partner simplifies operations, logistics and customer service.
There are two big open questions:
- Discovery: how will people know that they can do this?
- Use-case: why would people do this instead of continuing to shop the way currently do?
For discovery it looks like WhatsApp will rely on word of mouth and network effects across their user-base, which makes sense at their scale.
As for the use-case, this is what has bedevilled conversational commerce - so far, it has been a solution in search of a problem.
This could be the beginning of how it breaks through.
Disclaimer: I worked on commerce at Meta from 2018 to 2022 but, other than some related early strategy work, I didn't work on this project.