Online grocery is a growing trend in the eCommerce industry. Many consumers are buying food from their homes, or just picking up their favorite items from the grocery store. Online grocery has many advantages over conventional retail stores like AmazonFresh and Flipkart.
When something comes to the Indian business world, Mr. Mukesh Ambani—the chairman of Reliance Industries and India’s richest businessman—can not be ignored. He has a presence in several key areas of the Indian economy, including refining, oil, and gas, petrochemicals, telecom, retail, and media. To date, Reliance’s oil refining sector has remained its crown jewel.
ABOUT JIOMART
JioMart is an online grocery shop that delivers 50,000+ grocery items at reduced prices to your home via an expedited delivery system. It operates on an on-demand basis. Instead of employing warehouses, the firm would work with local shops. These retailers will source groceries and deliver them to clients.
Mumbai-headquartered Reliance has not announced JioMart’s launch at a time it is selling $7 billion in new shares.
JioMart will use an online-to-offline business strategy, connecting with local shops and delivering items to clients by acquiring them from the nearest store in the customer’s neighborhood.
In addition to higher sales and profits, these merchants will have point-of-sale (PoS) terminals, integrated billing solutions, and GST compliance. It will also improve their inventory planning and supply management skills.
JIOMART AND WHATSAPP
Initial integration with WhatsApp has been launched by Jiomart.
“…and the response from WhatsApp and JioMart customers is encouraging, along with lots of valuable feedback. Our joint teams are actively developing the full new commerce solution linking merchants and consumers, and we plan to progressively launch these over the next few quarters,” RIL Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani told shareholders.
Because of this agreement, JioMart customers will be able to place orders via WhatsApp and Facebook, and payments will be done using the ‘WhatsApp Pay’ function (currently in pilot).
JioMart services will be offered on WhatsApp beginning April 25, 2020, in Navi Mumbai, Thane, and Kalyan. JioMart is presently only available in these three cities. However, cash is presently the sole way of payment available.
BUSINESS MODEL
JioMart, RIL’s online-to-offline marketplace, is now available to local retailers. The Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd pioneered this business strategy. A user looks for a product or service online but purchases it offline using the O2O model.
It interacts with local businesses and procures things for clients from the nearest store in the customer’s neighborhood. The consumer will place the order using his or her official WhatsApp number. Following approval, the user will be sent a bill that must be paid in cash. The client will be notified when the order is ready to be picked up from the shop.
