After disrupting grocery, JioMart forays into fashion to heat up competition with Amazon, Flipkart, others

Mukesh Ambani’s e-commerce venture JioMart has now expanded beyond grocery segment nearly three months after Reliance’s Chairman had announced plans to foray into electronics, fashion, pharmaceutical and healthcare verticals during the 43rd AGM in July. JioMart has added fashion category onto its web portal and app for men, women, boys, kids and infants with limited brands, according to details available on the portal and app. JioMart, fulfilling orders through Reliance Retail, would further take on the likes of Amazon, Flipkart and other players in the e-commerce and grocery segment. Reliance Retail is the ‘manufacturer and ‘marketer’ for fashion products listed on JioMart app and website and has a 30-day return policy. The listed products already carry Country of Origin tag.

JioMart has also added subscription service to its grocery segment for delivering daily essentials such as milk, bread, fruits etc. in Chennai and Bengaluru as of now, according to the JioMart portal and app. The service will compete with similar services such as bbdaily from BigBasket, Milkbasket, Supr Daily by Swiggy etc. Customers can choose the frequency of deliveries between daily, alternate days, weekly and monthly. The service is likely to give the further edge to JioMart’s grocery service which had surpassed its rivals in terms of daily order volume within a few weeks after launch. “Within a few weeks of launch, JioMart has already delivered over 400,000 orders on a single day, which is significantly higher than any other grocery home delivery company,” Reliance had said in a statement announcing its Q1 results in July. JioMart currently competes with China’s Alibaba-backed BigBasket, SoftBank-funded Grofers, Amazon Pantry, and Walmart-owned Flipkart Supermart in the digital grocery war.

Doubling down on its existing physical presence of 11,806 retail stores in over 7,000 towns including 621 Reliance Fresh and Smart stores and more than 777 Reliance Trends stores, JioMart’s expansion ahead of the festive season assumed great significance in terms of customer acquisition and market share. The company is also likely to list electronics goods next on its platform that would further add to its existing strength and help compete better given that fashion and electronics are among the key categories for incumbent large players such as Flipkart and Amazon.

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The latest move by Reliance came weeks after Reliance’s subsidiary Reliance Retail Ventures Limited (RRVL) had announced the buyout of retail & wholesale and logistics & warehousing businesses of the Future Group for Rs 24,713 crore. The retail & wholesale vertical has been transferred to Reliance Retail and Fashion Lifestyle Limited while the logistics & warehousing business has been given to RRVL.

JioMart’s foray into healthcare and pharma is also perhaps round the corner as the company had in August acquired digital pharmacy startup Netmeds through Reliance Retail Ventures Limited (RRVL). Reliance Retail had acquired the stake in Vitalic Health and its subsidiaries, collectively known as Netmeds, for around Rs 620 crores in cash, the company had said. The deal would provide Reliance Retail around 60 per cent stake Netmeds and 100 per cent direct equity ownership of its subsidiaries including Tresara Health Private Limited, Netmeds Market Place Limited, and Dadha Pharma Distribution Pvt Limited.