We Want to be the World's Largest Marketplace

Sandeep Varaganti, Chief Executive Officer of JioMart on the platform's evolution, focus areas and aspirations.

- Shiv Joshi

Online shopping platform JioMart, is a pandemic baby. Reliance Retail Limited. (RRL), India's largest retailer by revenue, launched the platform in 2020 in more than 200 cities and towns, to help consumers meet their daily needs during the lockdown-when access to essentials was a struggle.

Since then, JioMart has come a long way in terms of offerings, convenience and reach. In February 2023, JioMart was present in 350 cities and towns of India through its app and website.

Today, it offers products from multiple categories, including groceries, fashion and lifestyle, consumer electronics, home and kitchen goods, general merchandise, handloom and handicrafts.

In addition to other sellers, brands from the Reliance stableTrends, Hamleys, and Urban Ladder are live on JioMart, which is seeing a sustained uptick in nongrocery category contribution. To offer a wide variety, the platform collaborates with a variety of sellers including Kirana stores, known as the JioMart Smart Kirana partners. RRL claims that collaborating with JioMart results in a 25 percent increase in the average annual income of its Kirana partners. With over 25,000 artisans, weavers, and micro-entrepreneurs on its seller network, the platform seeks to provide support to modernise their processes, improve productivity, and help them grow their businesses.

The company continues to add partners and reported a quarter-on-quarter expansion of 56 percent in its seller base in the fourth quarter of financial year (FY) 2023.

In 2022, the platform integrated with the social messaging app, WhatsApp to offer convenience to its customers-RRL reported a 9X growth of JioMart customers on WhatsApp since its integration.

JioMart is an important part of Reliance's digital commerce and new commerce business, which contributed 18 percent to the company's total sales in the first quarter of FY 2023-2024.