MUMBAI: JioMart, Reliance Retail's e-commerce, has gone live on WhatsApp in Navi Mumbai, Thane and Kalyan in Mumbai within days of announcing a tie-up with Facebook’s WhatsApp. This enables grocery shopping easier for people in these regions. JioMart seeks to leverage WhatsApp’s unrivalled reach of more than 400 million users.

As part of the collaboration, users can find local stores around them on WhatsApp, talk to shop owners and place orders from WhatsApp. People can initiate an order by texting “Hi” to +91-8850008000, which prompts a link that opens a mini store on the browser. The order details are then shared by JioMart with local stores over WhatsApp. The customer then has to pick up the order from the store.

JioMart, a joint venture between Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio Platform, seeks to test the novel ordering system on WhatsApp, as a consequence of its association with Facebook. Last week, Facebook announced it was investing $5.7 billion in Reliance Jio Platforms to secure a 9.9 per cent stake.

WhatsApp, however, is yet to get approval from the government for a pan-India rollout.

The company is replicating O2O model, (online-to-offline marketplace), which was pioneered by China’s Alibaba. This model enables a customer to search online for products and then buy through an offline channel.