Reliance Launches E-Commerce Venture ‘JioMart’ to Take on Amazon and Flipkart

In the New Year, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) is all set to take on the e-commerce giant like Amazon and Flipkart by launching its most anticipated e-commerce venture ‘JioMart’. Operated by Reliance Retail, the retail arm of RIL, JioMart has initially launched a pilot for the customers in Navi Mumbai, Thane, and Kalyan. 

Mumbai based JioMart is going to expand gradually across India. Last year, RIL Chairman and Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani first hinted at the e-commerce venture by calling it “new commerce initiative”. At the RIL’s 42nd annual general meeting in August last year, Mukesh Ambani has said that the e-commerce venture is projected to connect with three crores offline retailers with over 20 crores households in the country.

JioMart is going offer a portfolio of over 50,000 grocery products along with other offerings such as free home delivery against no minimum order value, no questions asked on return, and express delivery promise, as mentioned on the official JioMart website that declares the venture as “Desh Ki Nayi Dukaan” (the country’s new shop). These features would certainly help Reliance to persuade customers who are mainly using Amazon and Flipkart for their grocery shopping now.

Reliance Retail has also sent invites to Jio users to register for JioMart and avail of some preliminary discounts. The website of the venture also shows that early customers would get up to Rs. 3,000 for the pre-registration.

Reliance is building JioMart on an online-to-offline (O2O) marketplace under which it will source grocery items from the nearby merchants, which is similar to what Grofers and Amazon Prime Now used to do earlier. This also means that the new venture will emerge as a platform for offline retailers to cater to online customers in their locality.

Addressing the 42nd AGM earlier this year, Mukesh Ambani has said, “Our beta trials with thousands of merchants across multiple locations in the country established the premise of New Commerce with significant increase in sales and improvement in margins for the participating merchants. We are now getting ready to roll out the platform at a larger scale”.

JioMart is going to host products such as soaps, daily staples, shampoos, and other household items. This would certainly make things difficult for Amazon’s Prime Now that is aimed to offer two-hour deliveries of grocery products. In the coming future, JioMart is also planning to set up specific Android and iOS apps. The JioMart apps would thus, let users place orders directly from their mobile devices. 

In the month of March, Reliance has agreed to acquire the logistics services platform Grab A Grub in order to augment its e-commerce venture. The company is also dealing with software company C-Square that serves solutions to the distributors, retailers, online e-commerce and sales force automation.

The acquisitions would particularly focus on online retail operations. Reliance is also enhancing its presence in the worlds of artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) to develop some newer experiences for e-commerce customers.