WhatsApp Introduces Carts Feature In India; Eyes Traction Through Ecommerce

Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp has introduced a new ‘carts’ feature aimed at making the shopping experience easier for consumers by buying multiple items from a business account.

WhatsApp users will now be able to see the option to add items to the cart and send the order request as a message to the business. The feature went live on December 8 globally including India.

“WhatsApp is fast becoming a store counter to discuss products and coordinate sales. Catalogs have allowed people to quickly see what’s available and helped businesses organise their chats around particular items. With more and more shopping happening through chats, we want to make buying and selling even easier,” WhatsApp said in a blog post.

WhatsApp said that the catalogs feature allows users to quickly see what’s available and helped businesses organise their chats around particular items. 

“Starting today, we’re excited to bring carts to WhatsApp. Carts are great when messaging businesses that typically sell multiple items at once, like a local restaurant or clothing store. With carts, people can browse a catalog, select multiple products and send the order as one message to the business,” the blog read.

With this feature, WhatsApp is eyeing to get success through commerce as it hardly makes money out of it. India has seen a lot of businesses happening on the Facebook-owned application. 

For instance, Jaipur-based social commerce startup DealShare started its journey on WhatsApp. It sells grocery and household essential products through social media and messenger platforms like WhatsApp.

Recently, the messaging platform has launched a shopping button globally but will launch it in India sometime later. The company had announced its intentions of allowing users to add items to a shopping cart and check out, all within WhatsApp.

In July, WhatsApp claimed that there were 50 Mn WhatsApp Business accounts globally, of which 15 Mn were from India. The company had announced its plans of providing businesses with QR codes. 

The QR codes could be displayed on a business’ storefront or their product receipt and packaging material. Instead of having to save a business’ number and then starting a chat, users could simply scan the QR code to initiate a WhatsApp chat with the business. 

WhatsApp’s digital payments application WhatsApp Pay has experienced a slow start in India after it received the approval of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) last month to launch services in the country in a graded manner. 

For November, WhatsApp Pay’s first month on NPCI’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) network, it had less than 1% of the total market share in terms of the total volume of transactions. 

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