Reliance Industries have started withdrawing shoes, clothes, and other lifestyle products of their own brands and the global brands that they have the rights to sell from rival e-tail platforms like Flipkart and Amazon. Mukesh Ambani, back in July 2018, had hinted towards a plan of bringing out their own B2C e-tail platform. Reliance’s decision to withdraw its products should be enough proof of the fact that their own big e-tail platform is soon going on floors.
RIL, without doubt, has the rights of the maximum number of global brands under their hood in India. With over 4 dozen brands, Steve Madden, Diesel, Emporio Armani, Jimmy Choo, Canali, Burberry and Kate Spade are some of the top brands that RIL has the rights to sell in India. However, until now, Reliance had been selling products of these brands and their in-house brands on platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Jabong, Tata Cliq and a few others. Reliance now has pulled out their products from all platforms except Ajio, which is Reliance’s own online portal.
RIL has asked Reliance Trends and Reliance Brands (the subsidiary that holds the rights for all these brands) to stop taking any more orders and will only sell the goods that already exist in the third-party marketplaces until they are exhausted. They probably made this decision to improve the exclusivity factor in their products by providing them through their own e-tail platform in a matter of a few months. Reliance Brands generated revenue of ₹336.41 Crores during the FY 2018 and now are looking to make it even bigger with the e-tail platform.
Reliance is not just looking to build a B2C platform but also a B2B platform where millions of distributors and suppliers can make deals with each other along with small traders or small-time Kirana stores. RIL is banking on integrating the data from Reliance Jio Infocomm and the retail stores of Reliance to come up with a reliable and hybrid online-to-offline platform very soon.
Ever since the government has amended the regulations of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in e-commerce platforms in December last year, Reliance’s e-tail platform is seeing more promise than ever. With Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart now not able to sell directly or control the inventory, they would not get desired profits through their businesses. This is where Reliance’s e-tail platform can score big with no such restrictions on Indian firms. It will have the right to control the quality of the product and hence have a say in the pricing, thereby raking in more profits. They can also control the speed of delivery, another feature that makes an e-commerce portal successful. All in all, it is looking quite good for the Mukesh Ambani owned conglomerate to come up with their own e-tail platform.
