Abstract

The case is about JioMart, an e-commerce venture of Reliance Retail Limited, the retail arm of leading business conglomerate in India, Reliance Industries Limited. JioMart, launched in December 2019, aimed to integrate digital and neighborhood physical retail stores to help customers get easy access to household essentials. The JioMart platform aimed to connect local grocers through an offline-to-online business model that would help consumers to place orders online and get groceries delivered from a store located nearby. Reliance started signing up small kirana stores (mom-and-pop stores) to empanel them. JioMart acted as the digital storefront, representing a blend of Reliance Retail’s distribution centers, Reliance Jio’s customer base, the neighborhood mom-and-pop stores, and other organized retail outlets owned by Reliance. Reliance partnered with Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service in April 2020 to pilot its online food and grocery channel JioMart. JioMart expected the partnership to lead to WhatsApp being used by small businesses to connect with customers. Later, the online grocery platform extended its services to 200 cities and towns across India. The soft launch of JioMart took Reliance one step closer to taking on e-commerce companies like Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm, Swiggy, and Zomato, which had already established themselves in the Indian e-commerce market. However, it remained to be seen whether Reliance Retail would be able to revolutionize the e-commerce industry with JioMart.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Understand O2O e-commerce
• Examine the retail industry in India and highlight the role of e-commerce players in Indian retail
• Understand the impact of Covid-19 on Indian retail and how it has changed the industry
• Analyze how e-commerce players can change the retailing scenario in a given situation

Keywords

Online grocery; E-commerce market; Neighborhood stores; Fast-moving consumer goods; Food and grocery market; Offline-to-online business; inventory-based e-commerce businesses; Consumption slowdown; Consumer spending; Supply chain issues; Unorganized grocery delivery