Domestic Online Grocery Market to Expand to Over $18 bn by 2024

As the e-commerce battle intensifies in India, with Reliance Retail's JioMart being the latest major entrant with a massive potential to disrupt the space, the next big thing is the delivery of groceries online and the market size is estimated to grow eight times in the next five years in the country.

As companies from Reliance to BigBasket put their top dollar in serving daily grocery at your doorsteps, online grocery is going to be the next battleground for growth, expanding to over $18 billion by 2024.

The e-grocery market has grown 60 percent from the calendar year 2020 and is expected to grow 41-49 percent by the first half of CY21, according to the latest data provided by homegrown consulting firm RedSeer.

"We have observed that traditional brands which pivoted quickly to be digitally ready brands have seen 2x+ jump in sales compared to offline brands," said Anil Kumar, Founder and CEO of RedSeer.

Now, JioMart is set to take the pole position in online delivery of groceries.

India is witnessing a surge in demand for online grocery. The latest Reliance takeover of Future Group's retail business is a major consolidation of organised grocery retail. In terms of grocery retail, the revenue of Reliance Retail in FY20 was Rs 346 billion and that of Future Retail's annualised revenue for FY20 was Rs 100 billion.

Reliance Jio's new commerce platform JioMart and Whatsapp will be working closely to create growth opportunities for millions of Indian small merchants and kirana shops, Reliance Industries (RIL) Chairman Mukesh Ambani said recently.

In India, there are more than 15 million monthly WhatsApp Business app users, and more than 400 million overall users. Reliance aims to integrate JioMart in WhatsApp within the next six months.

The COVID-19 induced lockdowns and social distancing led to a surge in online orders for groceries, driven by utility as 80 percent of those who ordered online during lockdown did it for convenience as opposed to price and selection.