JioMart has half a million merchants: Akash Ambani

Reliance Industries (RIL) backed online grocery venture, JioMart, currently has half-a-million retailers or kirana owners on its platform, said Akash Ambani, Director of Jio Platforms Limited at Meta’s (formerly Facebook Inc) Fuel For India event.

The company is also set to launch prepaid recharge for its mobile services on WhatsApp Pay which works on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) which is currently available to 40 million users in India. 

Isha Ambani and Akash Ambani, directors at Jio Platforms, said that the company was leveraging WhatsApp as a channel to solve for stock assortment for small retailers, and as an ordering channel for customers. 

“We continue to be so excited about our partnership with Meta, and in collaboration with the WhatsApp team, we intend to build out native features that will not only help users shop seamlessly on WhatsApp but will also help retailers increase stock assortments, improve margins, and get them closer to perhaps a larger base of customers, like never before. They will be able to get new orders in addition to keeping their relationships with their regular user base intact,” Akash Ambani told Marne Levine, Chief Business Officer at Meta, during the event. 

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Calling WhatsApp ordering interface a conversational platform for users, the Ambanis said that JioMart users can also opt to subscribe for regularly ordered products.

“All a customer needs to do is to just order away on JioMart. Bread, butter, vegetables, beverages, everything that you need in your household that day or that week…Look up a product, set up a subscription for a regular buy if that’s what you want, or get personalized recommendations based on your past purchase history, it’s all there,” said Isha Ambani.

Facebook invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms, which houses RIL’s telecom business with over 400 million subscribers as well as its portfolio of digital businesses across ecommerce, grocery delivery, smart devices, cloud and edge computing, big data, and others. Overall, Jio Platforms had raised Rs 1,52,056 crore from multiple private equity, institutional and strategic investors for a cumulative stake of 32.96 percent in 2020. 

Apart from JioMart, Tata Digital is another conglomerate looking to house its digital businesses under a common vertical. Other incumbents in the ecommerce space including Amazon and Flipkart have been trying to build a business-to-business (B2B) interface to tap into the kirana and small merchant base, apart from a customer-facing online grocery delivery service.