DMart Ready doubled online sales to Rs 1,667 crore in FY22 — and doubled the loss too

DMart Ready is the online grocery arm of Avenue Supermarts, operator of the DMart chain (284 stores) and India's biggest retailer by market capitalisation

That India's king of no-frills offline retail could win online with its own hybrid model — delivery centres near its small stores plus pickup — not dark stores

Avenue Supermarts invested about Rs 492.76 crore in the online subsidiary

Avenue E-Commerce, set up about six years before FY22, ran DMart Ready initially as a Mumbai-only operation: Rs 791 crore of sales and a net loss of Rs 81 crore in FY21.

In FY22 the online business more than doubled, with sales of Rs 1,667 crore — but Avenue E-Commerce's net loss widened to Rs 142 crore. Service coverage expanded to over 500 pin codes across nine cities, and the parent also began testing DMart miniMAX, a small-format grocery store with one location each in Mumbai and Hyderabad.

Online grocery in India remained a subsidised channel: even doubling sales, DMart Ready's losses widened, mirroring the discount-heavy economics of the whole category.

The hybrid model trades delivery speed for capital efficiency — using existing DMart real estate instead of dark stores in a market where newer players were burning huge sums on customer acquisition.

Offline incumbents, as Agility Ventures' Dhianu Das noted, had underinvested in technology and were now playing catch-up against heavily funded newer players.

An offline champion going online should pick the fulfilment model its existing network already supports — then accept that doubling revenue online still doubles the subsidy.

As of July 2022, DMart Ready kept expanding — nine cities, 500-plus pin codes, growth outpacing the slowing e-commerce channel overall — with losses widening alongside sales and the parent still committed to its own fulfilment architecture rather than imitating quick commerce.