Reliance Retail scales up Quick Commerce with 600+ dark stores pan-India

Reliance Retail has operationalised over 600 dark stores across India and plans to add more to improve its coverage of less than 30-minute deliveries across its extensive network.

Addressing an analyst query after quarterly results, Reliance Retail CFO Dinesh Taluja stated that e-commerce platform JioMart is better placed with an extensive physical store network and dark stores being set up in select locations.

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Reliance Retail investments

After operationalising 600-odd dark stores, Reliance Retail is investing in more to boost its play in quick hyper-local deliveries, in which JioMart registered a 42 per cent Q-o-Q growth and 200 per cent-plus Y-o-Y growth in average daily orders.

"JioMart continued to operate as the fastest-growing quick hyper-local commerce platform, with operations extending across 5,000 pin codes and serviced by over 3,000 stores in more than 1,000 cities," said an earnings statement of the parent entity, Reliance Industries.

JioMart is competing with quick commerce players such as Zomato-owned Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, and BigBasket, with its vast network and strategically located dark stores.

Reliance Retail had said in the March quarter that its hyper-local deliveries covered 4,000 pin codes across India.

“We are quickly scaling up our quick commerce offering pretty aggressively,” Taluja told analysts at the company’s quarterly earnings call. “Once confident of our model, we began communicating our proposition, speed, transparency, best pricing, and widest assortment, and it’s resonating well with customers.”

JioMart’s quick-commerce expansion indicates a major shift from its earlier grocery delivery model, which relied on next-day fulfilment.

As consumer expectations changed and competitors established 10- to 30-minute delivery benchmarks, Reliance re-engineered its logistics network to meet the new format.

“Consumers have evolved, and instant delivery has become the norm,” Taluja said. “We pivoted from scheduled deliveries to sub-30-minute fulfilment to match competition.”

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