Meta and a joint venture between India's Reliance Retail and Jio Platforms will allow grocery shopping through WhatsApp, in what they described as an end-to-end shopping experience on the popular messaging platform worldwide.

The new feature comes as Meta and JioMart first started testing an integration two years ago. If this pans out, a commerce engine will be a major source of revenue for WhatsApp, which has altogether avoided serving ads to app users so far.

Customers in India will be able to browse JioMart's entire grocery catalog on WhatsApp, add items to a cart and make the payments via local payments rail UPI without ever leaving the instant messaging service, the companies said.

WhatsApp, which is used by nearly half a billion Indians each month, got the nod to take its UPI-powered payments service to 100 million users in the country in the first half of this year after an overdose of delay and setback.

"Excited to launch our partnership with JioMart in India. It's our first ever end-to-end shopping experience on WhatsApp. People can now buy groceries from JioMart right in a chat. Business messaging is an area with real momentum, and chat-based experiences like this will be the go-to way that people and businesses communicate in the years to come," said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, in a statement.

Meta holds a minor portion of Jio Platforms, the country's largest telecom subscriber with more than 421 million subscribers. Yesterday, Jio also announced that it would spend $25 billion to introduce 5G services in the country this October and plans to reach the South Asian market in "every town" by the end of next year.

JioMart is the $221 billion Indian conglomerate’s attempt at taking on Amazon and Flipkart in India. Ambani’s Reliance Retail is the largest retail chain in the country, but currently it has limited e-commerce offerings.

A speaker years ago, an ally of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, invoked Mahatma Gandhi and said, like Gandhi, who led a movement against political colonization of India, "we have to collectively launch a new movement against data colonization. For India to succeed in this data-driven revolution, we will have to migrate the control and ownership of Indian data back to India- in other words, Indian wealth back to every Indian.

Speaking at the company's general meeting, Ambani says Zuckerberg shares his vision of bringing more people and businesses online to create "truly innovative solutions that will add convenience to the daily lives of every Indian".

One example of an innovative customer experience that we are proud of developing is the first ever end-to-end shopping experience with JioMart on WhatsApp." Ambani said. "The JioMart on WhatsApp experience furthers our commitment of enabling a simple and convenient way of online shopping to millions of Indians.