Reliance Now Set to Disrupt Indian E-commerce

Reliance launches its much-awaited e-commerce venture, JioMart, India’s newest online supermarket. Will it do to e-commerce what it did to telecom?

After disrupting the Indian telecom space with Jio, Reliance has now entered the e-commerce market. The company has launched JioMart, “Desh Ki Nayi Dukan’ its first e-commerce venture piloting in Mumbai, Thane, and Kalyan and plans to expand it to the rest of India soon.

With JioMart, Reliance will cater to the diverse needs of a modern-day Indian shopper, whose cart includes household items like stationery and home utility products beyond just groceries. The online supermarket offers a portfolio of over 50,000 products along with free home delivery, no minimum order value, no questions asked on return, and an express delivery promise.

The company has also offered its Jio users to register to JioMart and avail of preliminary discounts during the launch period. Mukesh Ambani had hinted at the establishment of ‘New Commerce’ at RIL’s 42nd Annual General Meeting, stating significant selling margins for participating merchants. This has opened doors for small-scale brick-and-mortar stores to expand their retail businesses online.

Instead of the traditional warehousing model, Reliance is building an Online-to-Offline business model where it will source orders from the nearest retail stores and deliver them to customers. Through this venture, Reliance aims to connect 30 million offline retailers with over 20 crore households in the country.

As it expands to other cities, the company could also potentially partner with local transporters and distributors for efficient last-mile delivery. Reliance is one of the first companies to start working with offline retail stores towards online expansion. The company has set the bar high with Jio and consumers certainly have higher hopes from JioMart for improved e-commerce last-mile delivery.

Will Reliance do to e-commerce what it did to telecom? This hyper-local online supermarket model could set a benchmark for other industry players and could dramatically disrupt the Indian FMCG supply chain. JioMart could possibly change the face of e-commerce in India by making next-day and same-day express deliveries easily affordable for the Indian commoner.

In order to keep up with the trend of same-day and express deliveries, other players in the industry will have to revisit their long-term business strategies. Adopting smart tech in logistics and implementing Artificial Intelligence in the hyperlocal supply chain could save the day for enterprises to sustain the potential threat posed by Reliance’s New Commerce venture, JioMart.

Locus helps enterprises in the hyperlocal market optimize supply chain operations with smart logistics solutions.