JioMart Online Grocery Vertical Notes 3X Growth In Merchant Base

Reliance Retail’s ecommerce platform JioMart has reported a 3X increase in its merchant base for the grocery delivery vertical in the fourth quarter of financial year 2021, as it expanded its services to 10 new cities, taking the overall presence to 33 cities. The company claims to be witnessing strong merchant traction from Tier 3 and beyond cities.

Over the last quarter, JioMart initiated an exclusive kirana onboarding process in 13 cities to get more merchants from these regions. The company has also noted a 3X increase in the order frequencies.

Launched in December 2019, JioMart started off as a groceries delivery platform and gradually expanded into other verticals to become a full-fledged ecommerce platform to compete with Amazon India and Walmart-owned Flipkart. The company launched its services in three regions in Mumbai and expanded its overall ecommerce operations to 200 cities in May 2020.

JioMart also enables customers to place their groceries orders through instant messaging app WhatsApp. Beyond this, JioMart also started testing subscription-based daily morning deliveries of milk, eggs and bread in select pin codes of Bengaluru and Chennai.

The company claims to have served 1 Mn customers as of January 26, 2021 across stores and JioMart. The company continues to scale up, with 3X growth in product assortment, 1.5X growth in order frequency and 20% growth in average basket value (ABV). The ecommerce platform also noted a 80% repeat order in Q4 FY2021.

“JioMart has been scaled up to become a truly horizontal platform with presence across Grocery, Fashion & Lifestyle, Digital and Pharma, and the ability to provide a customized catalogue for users. In addition, JioMart has all the technology functionalities that should enable it to become a diverse third-party platform,” the company said in its quarterly financial report.

In its annual financial performance report, the company has listed down new priorities for the upcoming quarters.

1. Step-up pace of new store opening
2. Accelerate digital commerce and expand new categories on JioMart
3. Grow new commerce merchant partnerships across businesses and geographies
4. Launch and scale own brands and new business, including the ones recently acquired by the company
5. Expand design centres, develop vendor ecosystem and fast track supply chain infrastructure augmentation

In the grocery delivery vertical, JioMart competes with platforms such as BigBasket, Milkbasket (speculated to be an acquisition target for Reliance Retail), Supr Daily and Grofers. According to the Inc42 Plus report, the online grocery market is expected to spike to $10.5 Bn or 1.2% of the overall retail market by 2023.

Grocery delivery currently accounts for just 0.2% of the retail market enabled by technology, affordability of smartphones, increasing internet penetration and the rising need for convenience in the urban and semi-urban markets, the sector has attracted hundreds of startups that have together raked in over $1.7 Bn from investors from 2011 till June 2020. The online grocery players saw an uptick in its revenue during the pandemic.