By Kritika Arora
Marking its foray into e-commerce, which would also give an impetus to its payment app, messaging platform WhatsApp will offer a feature by the end of the year through which users will be able to discover catalogues of various retailers/ sellers and place orders for direct delivery.
“Users will be able to visit a business icon on Whatsapp through which companies like Boat, Netmeds, etc will be reachable. They will be able to explore their catalogue and place orders,” Arzan Singpurwalla, channel partner lead, WhatsApp for Business, said.
Also Read| Banks must ensure their systems speak to each other for better service to customers: FM
Aakrit Vaish, CEO, co-founder, Jio Haptik, which is the technology enabler for WhatsApp for this feature, told FE that a new tab, Contact Business, will be activated on Whatsapp for this purpose.
WhatsApp has been trying to break into the e-commerce market with its online catalogue integration for small businesses and D2C brands and recently announced partnership with Reliance Retail’s Jio-Mart, wherein JioMart will be available on the messaging platform for customers to do end-to-end online shopping. Simply put, customers can order groceries through WhatsApp.
However, Vaish said there are several other brands too who are in different stages of development of such conversational commerce with the messaging platform.
Jio Haptik recently launched exclusive WhatsApp and commerce products to help enterprises enhance customer engagement on messaging platform, proactively sell their products to customers and digitise the end-to-end shopping experience.
Also Read| Kerala govt to build its own e-commerce platform for MSMEs
At present, some websites have a chat button, which when clicked, engages with customers. However, some enterprises/ websites have a Whatsapp chat button and engage with customers through WhatsApp.
With conversational commerce gaining currency, many enterprises are likely to opt for the WhatsApp option to increase their footprint.
