Jiomart: Reliance JioMart ramps up ops with credit, incentives

Bengaluru: At a time when the lockdown has made groceries one of the few major avenues of consumer spending, Reliance’s JioMart is ramping up operations, intensifying the grocery wars through its kirana commerce pilots with messaging application WhatsApp, which has over 400 million active users in India.

Since the rollout of ordering via WhatsApp, JioMart has doubled weekly credit limit and has allocated one executive each for kirana stores to manage orders and inventory, 90% of which is sourced through the Reliance Retail network. Multiple kirana stores in Navi Mumbai TOI spoke to said JioMart’s executives are now managing the store floor virtually through phone calls when it comes to inventory and order flow, which is gradually increasing at standalone store level.

Most deliveries are done by JioMart but in some cases, kiranas have done them on their own or customers have picked up packed items due to lockdown constraints. “The plan is they (JioMart) will take care of deliveries completely. This will be smoother, once the lockdown is lifted,” said Prakash (surname withheld), whose store has started getting orders through WhatsApp from JioMart. He said orders have doubled, from 5-10, since JioMart launched the WhatsApp service, albeit on a small scale.

Incentives are being offered to customers on bulk purchases, which are funded by JioMart. This gets credited back to the kiranas when they make their next bulk purchase. Reliance Retail’s private brands, such as Good Life, as well as loose grains, are being supplied to these kiranas, which are being offered discounts by JioMart on purchase of select staples in bulk.

This comes at a time when consumers are largely cutting back on discretionary spending but are stocking up on groceries and other essential items. Online grocers like Bigbasket and Grofers, besides horizontal e-commerce platforms like Amazon India and Flipkart, have been seeing a steady spike in new orders in the category since the lockdown began. With the government allowing offline standalone shops to open, JioMart could see more consumers trying it out. Emailed queries sent to Reliance did not elicit a response till the time going to press.

“Since the lockdown, they are checking my orders daily on the phone. my order volume has increased so our credit limit was recently doubled to Rs 60,000. Reliance’s people come, pick up and deliver. Then they settle the payments with us. The supplies are managed by them and they bring it to my store, which saves me logistics cost and time,” said Kiran Prajapati, who also runs a kirana store in Navi Mumbai. This translates to slightly better margins, even when buying products at the same cost. He has been on JioMart network since Diwali in October last year.

Kirana stores said JioMart has also installed point-of-sale (PoS) machines in these stores, taking a deposit of Rs 3,000-3,500. Kiranas said this would see a wider play to manage orders, payments in the JioMart ecosystem, once order volumes are higher with the economy opening up gradually.

Prajapati said he has to forward order requests to nearby stores when he can’t service them all. “My own customers also come to the shop to buy. So, I forward some to nearby stores and JioMart’s delivery team manages the rest,” he added. The fill-rate (number of products procured out of total items in an order) for Jio Mart is 80-90% currently, which would be enhanced as the supply chain gets better by May 18.