Reliance Industries shelves plan for separate ecommerce marketplace for third-party sellers

Reliance Industries has shelved its plan to have a separate ecommerce marketplace for third-party sellers and, instead, integrated thousands of independent sellers into its existing platform JioMart as the government has put the proposed ecommerce policy on the backburner, two senior executives have said.

The Mukesh Ambani-led company is now building JioMart as a full-fledged marketplace with presence across categories to take on market leaders Amazon and Flipkart, they said.

Reliance was building JioMarket as a separate platform for third-party sellers to comply with the draft ecommerce policy that proposed to prohibit marketplace operators from having related parties or associated enterprises as sellers on their platforms. JioMarket was expected to go live before this Diwali.


“JioMarket was conceived to comply with the proposed ecommerce policy norms,” said one of the executives aware of the plans. “However, since the policy is now in the backseat, Reliance wants to have a single platform – JioMart, which it will build to the scale of Amazon and Flipkart to compete against them… Having two platforms would have been difficult to scale up to compete against these big rivals,” he added.

As per media reports, the ecommerce policy has been put on hold due to differences of opinion among different ministries.

JioMart has already onboarded more than 15,000 third-party independent sellers and direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands that Reliance Retail had roped over the last 3-4 months for JioMarket, whereby total assortment on the platform has gone up 80 times as compared to last year's Diwali.

Till recently, Reliance Retail entities like Reliance Smart, Reliance Digital, Trends, and acquired entities were the only sellers on JioMart.

An email sent to Reliance Retail remained unanswered as of press time Tuesday.

JioMart has started a month-long festive sale, running discounts matching those of Amazon and Flipkart with some undertaken by the third-party sellers and D2C brands.

JioMart CEO Sandeep Varaganti had in a recent media statement said JioMart is onboarding sellers and local artisans to its ecommerce fold, and the platform has expanded the categories across segments and increased stock keeping units by more than 80 times compared a year earlier.

Reliance has roped in several talents from ecommerce players. For instance, Varaganti was earlier managing director of Prione Business Services, an erstwhile joint venture between Amazon and NR Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures, that housed Cloudtail – one of the largest sellers on Amazon India for several years. Prione was dissolved earlier this year.