Reliance launches e-commerce platform JioMart across several cities

Reliance has finally launched its e-commerce portal JioMart for several cities across India after running a pilot for limited pin codes in Mumbai, a move that is set to change the current positioning of the online grocery delivery service in India which is currently dominated by Bigbasket and Grofers.

The service is live across Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Delhi, Bengaluru, Jaipur, Trivandrum and some tier II cities as well. During the pilot, JioMart was working with a WhatsApp business account.

The JioMart website has listed essential grocery items as well as farm produce. The fruits and vegetables will be directly sourced from farmers that have collaborated with the brand. So technically, it would also compete with micro delivery platforms such as Swiggy’s Suprdaily, BBDaily and Milkbasket, and also farm to fork businesses including Ninjacart and Crofarm.

The platform covers everything related to grocery, FMCG and consumer goods. It also has as an introductory offer of a 5% discount on MRP for few products. With JioMart, Mukesh Ambani is eyeing to disrupt the offline to online or the O2O segment and likely to impact incumbents such as Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm, Swiggy, Zomato, Cure.Fit, Meesho and all others in the segment.

One of the biggest offline retailers in India, Reliance Retail is well equipped to evangelise the omnichannel approach better than others. Jio also ramped up its play and tamed competition with a hefty Rs 78,562 crore funding across five rounds in the past few weeks. Besides Facebook, the likes of General Atlantic, KKR and Vista recently invested in the firm.

The launch of the long-awaited platform has certainly sent the competition and their backers to the drawing board to explore ways to fight the country’s largest offline retailer armed with a rich war chest.

The horizontal e-commerce space has entered into an interesting phase in India with Reliance now joining the game that is being fiercely fought between the world’s largest offline and online retailers: Walmart and Amazon.