Reliance enters online retail business with reliancemoneymall.com

Anil Ambani’s Reliance ADAG has entered online retail business. This is the second new business they have entered  in less than 2 weeks. The last business was the steel plant construction business. When I said there is no business in which Reliance did not participate except aviation, I was wrong. I missed the online retail business. While elder brother Mukesh is taking care of offline retail (Reliance Fresh, Reliance footprint, Reliance Jewels etc…) business, Anil took one step ahead. He embraced Internet. Given the bright prospects, I don’t blame him.

Internet users as per Mint stand at 60 million in India. While there are various projections about the total number of Internet users in India ranging from 20 million to 60 million, every one will agree that the users are set to double in 5 years time. Reliance is targeting this potentially long tail of online retail space. It wants 20% of the 20000 crore a year business.

Reliancemoneymall was done with the help of Microsoft. The website is poorly designed. Leaving the looks and moving on to the content, I was disappointed one more time. What this website offers is a basket of products without satisfying any one person or a niche. It is selling Gold coins, Vivah DVD and a 250 rupee SMS pack at the same place. Now, none of these things interest me. So I looked for some mobiles. Moneymall had only  4 GSM mobiles listed there and none of them are interesting. They do sell books but they are for market analysis.

May be, I am being opinionated but I did not find any value in this website. I would rather shop at more specialized sites like Indiaplaza.in, Cafegadgets, Flipkart, ebay,  Pustak, Infibeam etc.. . This particular website is targeting web savvy Indians. I think web savvy Indians know what they are looking for and can make intelligent choices. I am sure Reliancemoneymall will not be one of them. Unless the whole thing is revamped.

Reliance might be using the same tactics it used for Reliance Communications. It had severely undercut the prices, and targeted rural market. It even provided cheap hand-sets and other stuff to keep the ball rolling. Online retail is a entirely different place and a different strategy is needed. If I don’t like the site or the product I will immediately shift my allegiance to some other offering which is only a search away.

Am I missing something here or you feel the same way too.

Check out the website and let us know what you think about it.

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Author: Sriram Vadlamani

Sriram Vadlamni is a IT professional and an avid blogger. He blogs about India business at Indianomics.com and you can follow him on twitter @indianomics (Email: sriram.vadlamani@gmail.com)

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Tagged as: online-retail, online-shopping, reliance, reliancemoneymall