WhatsApp & Razorpay did a major announcement yesterday. A deeper integration that will change the game of India’s mobile commerce. Here’s the full breakdown & what future looks like ⬇️
Some context 🗓️
WhatsApp has 500 million users in India – it’s biggest market in the world. When Mark Zukerberg (Founder of Facebook) paid $16 Billion to buy WhatsApp – everyone wondered – ” How will he get the money back? “
Enter 2023 ⚡️
WhatsApp is moving from being the “Chat app” → “business app”. It wants to be the godfather of mobile commerce in India & boy – it has some good cards up the sleeves.
Let’s segment WhatsApp into 4 categorise.
→ Group communication
→ B2C communication
→ Logistics
→ Payments
First/ group communication 💭
The whole launch with “channels”, “screen sharing” & “broadcast” features – it’s all part of solving number of use cases around “communication” for it’s users.
Second/ business to consumer communication 🤝🏻
I wrote about it a week back – I will drop that article link in comments. But, short context – WhatsApp wants to replace SMS. It wants to get brands to communicate with their customers on WhatsApp as the primary channel.
Third/ logistics full stack approach 🚚📦
JioMart partnership was to solve for the complete end consumer delivery experience. It allows WhatsApp to scale to thousands of ping codes without having to build it on it’s own – unlike WeChat / Gojek.
And the most important piece – payments 💸
WhatsApp owns 0.1% of the UPI market. You see – the RBI broke WhatsApp’s UPI game by choking how many customers they can onboard on WhatsApp pay(on purpose)wrote a larger piece on this – will drop link in comments.
Enter, Razorpay – India’s largest payment gateway 💣
It understood the WhatsApp payments pain point. Plus, it has Payment Aggregator (PA) License from the RBI. It can do what WhatsApp UPI couldn’t.
Why is it so huge? 🥹
Short answer – “native shopping”
Think of it this way – imagine you are a D2C brand, say Tira beauty. You want to sell products to your existing customers. You can now push this through WhatsApp & customers don’t even need to visit your website – that’ crazy.
And, it’s more than just repeat purchases.
Think of WhatsApp as the new entry point for businesses who sell their products. Users don’t need to go to google/brand website to make purchases. They can do write within the WhatsApp 😎
This is huge for a large portion of Indians who have never bought online.
Yes, only 30 crores Indians / 140 crore have ever bought online. And this WhatsApp <> Razorpay integration will change the game for them. Their first online purchase could be on WhatsApp.
So if you are thinking WhatsApp is now competing with Meesho/ Amazon/ Flipkart, the answer is HELL YES!