JioMarket is expected to have more than one million products at launch and a presence across 30,000 pin codes, one of the people mentioned above said.
“With this, Reliance is aiming to disrupt the ecommerce marketplace ecosystem in the same way Jio disrupted telecom or Jiomart disrupted egrocery,” said the communication sent to sellers.
The Mumbai-based conglomerate asked these vendors to fill a form to submit details for onboarding. Among others, it has also sought information on the top-selling Amazon stock keeping units (SKUs) from sellers who want to join the marketplace.
JioMart, the egrocery platform, is largely run through Reliance Retail as a seller and will continue to operate as is.
The internal work is completed and focus is now on starting with a good volume of quality sellers before aggressively roping in independent sellers so it can be launched soon, one of the people mentioned above said.
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“There are significant hirings underway for the business as well, besides onboarding sellers. They (Reliance) want to have a good network of sellers before the roll-out but internally they are looking at timelines of the end of the current month or early next month,” one of the people briefed on the matter said. “They want to have the marketplace operating at a decent scale by the time festive season sales kick in.”
Former Amazon executive Sandeep Varaganti is heading the marketplace business, who was previously chief of Prione Business Services – the erstwhile joint venture between Amazon and NR Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures, which housed Cloudtail – one of the largest sellers on Amazon India previously.
Cloudtail is not a seller on Amazon India any-more after the etailer bought a 100% stake in Prione. Current regulations for FDI in ecommerce do not allow an entity running an online marketplace and its group companies to own equity in any of the sellers on the platform, or to have control over their inventory.
Samir Ratanjankar, another former Amazon executive, is among the executives building JioMarket. RIL is also expected to tap into its logistics assets like Grab and Dun- zo for marketplace sellers, sources added
An email sent to a spokesperson for RIL did not elicit a response on Thursday evening.
JioMart is still largely known for its grocery business even though it has added other segments like fashion, electronics and others. JioMarket will aim to have a diverse set of products from various sectors.
A draft ecommerce policy released by the government last year proposed a “related-party clause” for the industry that could prevent ecommerce firms from selling on their own platforms. The clause had a wide definition which could include logistics operations.
ET reported last year that the
Tata group had opposed this proposal in a meeting with government officials, along with the likes of Walmart-owned Flipkart and Amazon India. The draft guidelines, however, are yet to be finalised.
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