Reliance Retail, the retail arm of billionaire Mukesh Ambani-controlled Reliance Industries (RIL), is unlikely to pump money into predatory online discounting to bring traffic and sales for its e-marketplace JioMart.
Citing two persons familiar with the development, ET reported that the oil-to-retail conglomerate is planning to make the platform profitable for almost every single transaction.
Further, it wants to rope in lakhs of small and medium businesses as sellers in JioMart and roll out an incubation programme for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands to expand them by giving marketing and distribution aid in an earnest attempt to make JioMart the country’s largest marketplace over the next couple of years.
The assortment during the 2022 festive season has climbed to 2.5 million products from 30,000 products last year. JioMart has already onboarded approximately 16,000 third-party sellers, and the independent sellers account for more than 15 per cent of business as against less than 10 per cent for non-preferred third-party sellers in rival marketplaces.
The financial daily quoted one of the executives as saying, “E-commerce discounting has already come down after the pandemic though on special days some platforms continue to indulge into deep discounting on a few categories like mobile phones and electronics.”
“However, JioMart will completely stay away from such a practice with prices and offers similar as it is sold in Reliance stores or by third-party sellers. JioMart will be an omni-channel extension,” added the executive.
He went on add that Reliance already sells most items through its stores at competitive prices, highlighting that in several cases the prices are one of the best thanks to the scale of operations and lower cost of sourcing.
“The economies of scale will further go up with JioMart. But nothing will be sold below cost price unlike what some rivals continue to do,” he emphasised.
In 2020, Reliance Retail launched its e-commerce service JioMart with online grocery products but started including newer categories last year.
In JioMart, the grocery was 70 per cent of the business even a few months back, but now it is 50 per cent, and the contribution of non-grocery its will further go up, the daily quoted one of the executives as saying.
Separately, Reliance Retail has signed a distribution pact with more than 50 traditional, regional sweets makers from across India to distribute, mass produce and develop traditional Indian sweets with extended shelf life.
