DMart Ready retreats to 11 cities as Indian retailers reset e-commerce growth
Avenue Supermarts has narrowed DMart Ready from 24 to 11 cities, prioritising profitable markets as online grocery losses rise. The broader reset spans store-online price alignment, quick-commerce discipline and higher digital-service complaints across major retailers.
What happened
Avenue Supermarts (DMart Ready) · Indian retailers are curbing unprofitable e-commerce expansion while continuing digital investment. DMart Ready exited eight
Key facts
- Trent consumer complaints rose 35% YoY to over 300,000 in FY26
- V-Mart complaints increased 14% to more than 130,000
- Titan complaints increased 9% to more than 130,000
- DMart Ready reduced its market footprint from 24 to 11 cities
- Croma found 70-80% of consumers research prices online before buying in stores
- E-commerce sales share rose only 1-2 percentage points over four to five years
- Avenue Supermarts approved up to ₹500 crore investment in online grocery
- DMart Ready net losses rose 24% YoY to ₹306 crore
Why this matters
The pullback creates opportunities to partner with or acquire localized last-mile, fulfilment and customer-service capabilities in profitable clusters rather than funding broad national e-grocery expansion.
What to watch
- Further DMart Ready city exits, dark-store closures or changes in delivery-radius policy.
- Quarterly disclosure of Avenue Supermarts' digital losses, fulfilment costs, order frequency or online contribution.
- Price-parity announcements or widening online-exclusive discounting by supermarket chains.
- Rising minimum-order values, delivery charges, platform fees or reduced free-delivery thresholds.
- Quick-commerce expansion into larger weekly grocery baskets, including fresh-food range additions and scheduled-delivery products.
- Consumer-complaint trends related to substitutions, missing items, delayed delivery and online-offline price mismatches.
- Concentrate digital fulfilment around high-density store clusters and shut loss-making city operations rather than preserving national coverage.
- Separate planned-basket economics from instant-delivery economics, with different assortment, service-level promises and delivery-fee structures.
- Use store inventory and click-and-collect to lower fulfilment costs before adding dark-store capacity.
- Tighten online-offline price governance while offsetting margin pressure through private labels, supplier funding and basket-building offers.
- Prioritise service recovery: accurate substitutions, delivery-slot reliability, refunds and customer-support visibility will become retention levers as price gaps narrow.