Why quick commerce has become a battle no retailer can afford to lose

Quick commerce has moved beyond emergency groceries, forcing Amazon and other retailers to fight to become the first app consumers open whenever they need to buy something

Quick commerce has grown from an emergency grocery service into one of the country’s fastest-growing shopping channels. Amazon and Flipkart are expanding aggressively. Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart are scaling their networks. Reliance and Tata-backed BigBasket are pushing deeper into instant delivery. All of them are investing in a business where the path to sustainable profitability is still being tested. Yet staying out increasingly appears unavoidable and carries a greater strategic risk.

 

But why has quick commerce become the battle no major retailer can afford to lose?

Consumer behaviour has changed, and retailers have to follow

When quick commerce first emerged in India, it was there for the moments when you had forgotten to buy milk, ran out of an ingredient while cooking dinner, or wanted a packet of biscuits without leaving home. It solved an immediate need.

 

 

But that use case has expanded rapidly. Consumers are now turning to quick commerce for regular purchases, including personal care products, beauty items, electronics accessories, medicines, gifts, and pet supplies, and are coming back far more often.

 

The reasons are not difficult to see. More households have two working adults. Traffic makes even a short shopping trip time-consuming in large cities. Digital payments have removed friction from small online transactions. Smartphones have made shopping possible at any moment. Promotional offers have encouraged consumers to try the format. Together, these changes are moving some purchases away from the traditional weekly shopping trip and towards smaller, more frequent transactions.

 

According to Bain & Company’s 'How India Shops Online 2026' report, India’s quick commerce market reached $10 billion to $11 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025 after doubling annually since 2023. Quick commerce now accounts for 16 to 17 per cent of India’s e-retail gross merchandise value (GMV), a level of adoption that Bain says is significantly higher than in most other markets.

 

The consultancy expects the market to reach $65 billion to $70 billion by 2030 and account for 45 to 50 per cent of all incremental e-retail GMV added over the next five years.

 

Redseer Strategy Consultants estimated that quick commerce platforms recorded GMV of about ₹11,000 crore in January 2026 alone, almost double the year-earlier level. Daily order volumes reached about 7.8 million, up about 95 per cent year on year.

 

“In recent years, quick commerce has evolved from being merely a fulfilment channel to becoming a distinct consumption platform, supported by shifting consumer behaviour and a growing preference for need-based, instant-consumption and emergency purchases,” K Srikumar, senior vice-president and co-group head at Icra Limited, told Business Standard.

 

According to him, the growth reflects both a shift from traditional retail channels and the creation of incremental demand. The expansion into smaller cities is also taking the format beyond its original urban customer base.

 

Paresh Bhagat, chairman of Mangal Keshav Financial Services, stressed that while a large proportion of quick commerce GMV still includes household essentials, platforms are increasingly using the same network to deliver discretionary products. Zepto, for instance, offered more than 45,000 products, including electronics and apparel, by late 2025. Flipkart Minutes said in June that it had expanded into more than 250 categories.

 

Ravi Kapoor, partner and leader, retail and consumer sector at PwC India, told Business Standard that he does not expect quick commerce to eliminate conventional ecommerce. Different retail formats, he said, will coexist. But digital channels will play a much larger role in shaping purchase decisions.

The real battle is consumer attention

Ecommerce was built largely around planned purchases. A consumer decided to buy a phone, a pair of shoes, or a home appliance, searched for the product, compared options, and placed an order.

 

Quick commerce, on the other hand, inserts a platform into everyday life. Milk has run out. A phone charger has stopped working. Guests are arriving. A child needs stationery for school the next morning. The customer does not want to spend 20 minutes browsing. The customer wants the product now.

 

Also, a retailer that sells a washing machine may see the customer once in several years, while a platform that delivers milk, fruit, shampoo, batteries, and snacks can interact with the same customer several times a week. These repeated interactions, according to Bhagat, create opportunities to increase retention, recommend products, cross-sell categories, collect data on purchasing behaviour, and sell advertising space to brands.

 

“Quick commerce has therefore evolved from an experimental business into a customer acquisition business,” Bhagat said.

 

The advertising opportunity is particularly important. Bain estimates that e-retail advertising accounted for about a quarter of India’s digital advertising spend in 2025.

 

“The real value of quick commerce is not just faster grocery delivery. It is about becoming the first platform consumers think of whenever they need to make an everyday purchase,” Kapoor said. “That frequency strengthens customer relationships and creates opportunities across multiple categories.”

 

For large marketplaces, the risk is not simply losing a grocery sale, it is losing the habit of opening the app. Kapoor described this as a threat to the marketplace flywheel. Large ecommerce platforms traditionally use assortment, price, and service to attract consumers. More traffic brings more sellers. More sellers improve assortment. More activity creates advertising revenue and strengthens the platform.

 

“If I lose out on this consumption occasion, which is non-discretionary, convenience- and frequent-consumption-led, I may fundamentally be out of sight, out of mind from the mobile phone itself,” Kapoor said.

 

That helps explain why quick commerce has become what he called an “existential necessity” for large retail platforms.

 

“If they are absent from high-frequency consumption occasions, they risk losing consumer engagement, traffic and the ecosystem advantages that come with it,” he said.

 

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Srikumar said quick commerce companies are increasingly focused on deepening customer engagement and monetising changing consumer habits. Technology and personalisation are becoming more important to that strategy.

Why everyone is racing in now

According to the industry experts, the battle for the first shopping decision explains why competition has intensified so sharply.

 

Amazon’s late entry is itself a sign of how difficult quick commerce has become to ignore. Amazon Now is expanding to more than 300 cities, while its recent cashback campaign shows how aggressively it is trying to win customers.

 

Bhagat said the move was less about finding incremental growth and more about protecting Amazon’s existing customer base. “If consumers can receive the same product in 10 or 15 minutes instead of waiting two or three days, why would they choose the slower option?” he said. 

 

Flipkart Minutes has crossed 1,000 micro-fulfilment centres across more than 130 cities, while Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart continue to expand. Reliance is using its physical retail network to scale JioMart, which reached a daily quick commerce order run rate of 1.6 million by December 2025. Tata-backed BigBasket has also shifted towards quick delivery through BB Now.

 

These companies are coming from different businesses, but they are converging on the same consumer need.

 

The infrastructure race shows how high the stakes have become. Bain estimates that India will have more than 7,000 quick commerce micro-fulfilment centres across over 200 cities by 2025.

 

But as companies pour money into new stores, discounts, and customer acquisition, the question is how many large players the market can ultimately support.

 

“The only question is what the financial viability model is,” Kapoor said. “If there are now five big players in it with two super deep pockets and three first movers, how will the field eventually emerge in the next four or five years?”

 

Kapoor expects consolidation, arguing that execution will matter more than capital alone as the market matures. “Winning in quick commerce will require much more than capital. Execution, technology, customer loyalty, operational agility and the ability to build a broader ecosystem will all play an important role,” he said.

 

Quick commerce may not be sustainably profitable for every player, but it definitely has changed the rules of Indian retail. The contest now is about who owns the customer’s first shopping decision.