JD Mart – Justdial Launching A Dedicated B2B Marketplace: What to Expect

A 24-year-old, local discovery platform, Justdial is all set to put forward a new and big bet. The company is well prepared to emerge with its B2B (Business to Business) marketplace, namely JD Mart. This is expected to be a direct competition to the oldest eCommerce platform of the country, IndiaMart, which was conducting its unchallenging journey, all alone, for 24 years.

Even the launch of Walmart and Alibaba in India was not found to be more challenging for IndiaMart, as JD Mart may be. To boost the excitement among shareholders of Just Dial, Global investment bank UBS increased the target price for the stock from 640 to 800. In Early trade, Just Dial’s shares popped-up by over 3%.

JD Mart – Getting Fueled Up by Existing Strength of Justdial

The excitement is not new to JD Mart as the company is already rooted strongly in the market and holds a loyal user base, already.

A report by USB reveals that Justdial will hold the caliber to leverage its existing 140 million users along with 100,000 paid B2B subscribers to sell on JD Mart.

Current Status of Just Dial (Before JD Mart)

Well, IndiaMart clutches an opportunity, but in India, as eCommerce is new, the analysts are excited, already.

While IndiaMART is the leader with 150,000 paid subscribers (2.5% of listings) and $90 million in revenue in FY20, this is a fraction of the number of MSMEs in India. Given the room for growth, we think two or more B2B platforms can co-exist,

said the UBS report.

To capture the place, Just Dial is extracting big money. As the company is all set for the launch of the new platform, Justdial has kept aside $15 million for branding, marketing, and hiring. This amount equals the money that the brand has invested in promotion and advertising, in the last two years.

The USB report said,

We think Justdial has developed a superior platform on the backdrop of an interactive user interface along with robust depth and breadth of B2B product offerings JD’s core strength is its large sales force (9,000), which should aid in monetizing the new platform.

Currently, a leader of the B2B online marketplace in India is IndiaMart. As revealed by Dinesh Agarwal, the company holds over 6 million sellers and 107 million buyers (over 150,000 subscribers). The growing popularity of IndiaMart has made analysts compare IndiaMart and Alibaba, a Chinese giant, which still needs to go long to earn fame in the Indian market. IndiaMart has over 68 million products listing all across 1000,000 categories. Agarwal also told a business news website,

If you can’t find something on IndiaMart, you won’t find it on the internet.

Moreover, his belief also makes the brand unique as compared to various other B2B eCommerce competitors, namely Flipkart wholesale, Alibaba, ExportersOIndia.com, TradeIndia, and Amazon.

Well, JD Mart will soon appear with the same payment model as IndiaMart: a ‘freemium’ model, in which the subscription is free, but the leads charge an amount, and ahead, for premium users, a charged subscription model is there.