Reliance’s hyperlocal commerce platform JioMart now gets more than half its orders from India’s Tier II and III cities. The platform, which launched in May 2020, has seen an accelerated rollout in the pandemic to help people ‘shop from home’.
Interestingly, at launch JioMart was more focused on metros and Tier I cities. However, with digital commerce gaining traction across the country, JioMart’s audience demographic also went through a shift.
From grocery and essentials, the platform expanded to selling apparels and electronics as well. JioMart Kirana partnerships also expanded, reaching over 33 cities by the end of March 2021, Reliance stated in its FY20-21 annual report.
At a media event in December, Jio Platforms CEO Kiran Thomas had revealed that JioMart was averaging over half a million orders per day. Much of this growth was being driven by WhatsApp, which connected merchants and customers.
“Customers are transacting seamlessly on JioMart and the conversational nature of the service enabled by WhatsApp has made people adapt to it intuitively,” Thomas said.
JioMart also fulfils Reliance Digital and Reliance Trends orders, with the latter’s assortment shipped to over 3,000 pin codes across the country. “New Commerce partnerships have over a million merchants across consumption baskets,” RIL shared.
Reliance wrote in its annual report,
“Reliance Retail’s New Commerce initiative, JioMart, continues to grow in scale with more traffic, active users and orders. Rapid scale-up of JioMart compensated for curtailed store operations and lower footfalls. The hyperlocal JioMart digital commerce platform rose to the occasion to service customers across 200 cities, bringing them essentials at their doorsteps to meet the need of the hour.”
“To support JioMart hyperlocal solution, two vital applications – UROVO and GRAB – were implemented. Within a month, 7,500 associates were trained on the UROVO application, and 5,000 delivery partners underwent the GRAB training through digital tools like JioMeet/Microsoft Teams,” RIL added.
Besides grocery and essentials, JioMart also fulfilled the delivery of medicines in some areas. “Our consumer businesses, Reliance Jio and Reliance Retail [division under which JioMart is housed], have proved to be digital and physical lifelines of the nation in these challenging times,” Reliance said.
