Who is Winning the Quick Commerce Game in India?

There’s a moment, just after eleven, when the entire idea of civilisation seems to rest on whether coriander can arrive before the dal finishes boiling. In most countries, that moment wouldn’t matter. In India, it built an industry.

The same idea that burned through billions in Europe and the US is somehow thriving here. In the West, quick commerce looked like a gimmick. In India, it feels like a utility.

Why does the same model drown in London but surf in Lucknow?

1. Friction, Not Speed

Outsiders assume India’s love for 10-minute delivery is about speed. It isn’t. It’s about friction—a hundred tiny inconveniences that pile up in daily life. Small kitchens, smaller fridges. Shops that open late or shut randomly. A two-kilometre errand that eats your afternoon like a goat in a vegetable patch.

Quick commerce didn’t invent a new habit. It just removed the noise from an old one. It made impulse buying feel like a solved problem.

This matters because once people experience frictionless fulfillment, they rarely go back. We never returned to travel agents once we booked flights online. We won’t return to calling the kirana once we can swipe.

2. The Physics of Density

Quick commerce runs on city math. A dark store in Mumbai serves 70,000 households in a three-kilometre radius. In Chicago, that number is maybe 7,000.

That difference makes or breaks the business. Riders travel less, orders cluster tightly, and delivery costs sink. In India, a mature dark store fulfills 1,400 orders a day at around ₹22 each—a cost the basket can absorb, even if the coriander itself is free.

This wasn’t about importing a model. It was about compressing something Indians already did: buying in small quantities, often, from nearby. Quick commerce didn’t change our behaviour. It just digitised it—and gave it a tracking link.

3. Kiranas: Not Dead, Just Disappearing

Every time a new platform scales, someone says it's killing the kirana.

But kiranas don’t die. They disappear into the system.

Some become partner nodes in Zepto’s network. Others join ONDC. A few start delivering via WhatsApp. The signboard fades, but the space remains—powered by APIs instead of a shopkeeper with a permanent scowl.

The fear is real. PwC found that while 60% of kiranas fear losing business, only 34% actually saw a revenue dip. In Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns, quick commerce doesn’t even make economic sense yet. There, kiranas still rule like local monarchs.

But here’s the danger: it’s not revenue loss that hurts most. It’s the loss of mental shelf space. Once a customer forgets your number, they don’t stop buying. They just stop buying from *you*.

If kiranas try to compete on speed, they’ll lose. But if they focus on trust, credit, and real relationships—things apps can’t copy—they might matter more than ever.

4. Zepto's Education

Zepto didn’t begin as a delivery empire. It started as Kiranakart—an app to empower local stores. It failed fast. Orders were missed. Stores were shut. Inventory was chaotic.

Three months in, they made a brutal decision: control everything. Run the stores. Manage the inventory. Guarantee the output.

It worked. Volumes rose. Losses shrank. And ironically, they started hiring former kirana owners to run these new-age stores.

They weren’t saving small retail. They were absorbing it. And they did it with the calm intensity of someone who knows they’re building India’s next utility.

5. The Math Behind the Magic

Quick commerce only looks wasteful if you don’t understand where the money hides.

• Average order values have grown from ₹350 to over ₹600.

• Ads now contribute 3–4% of GMV. Quiet banners. High intent.

• Store throughput is double that of the most efficient supermarkets.

• Blinkit’s last report showed revenue per order at ₹115, with costs at ₹98. That’s a positive contribution margin—once unthinkable, now unavoidable.

When a city matures, its dark stores flip from cash burn to cash spin in 18 months. That’s faster than most supermarket leases pay back. And no one tweets angrily about those.

6. The Infrastructure You Don’t See

Quick commerce looks like a grocery business. It isn’t. It’s a logistics network, threaded under cities like a second layer of wiring.

Once built, it can carry anything: medicines, hardware tools, legal papers. Maybe one-day-old puppies.

The first real competition won’t be another grocery app. It’ll be a hospital or bank that realises this mesh can serve them too.

Groceries are just the training wheels. The big game is owning instant distribution.

7. The Illusion of Waste

All young systems look wasteful. Mobile towers did. Fibre optics did. So did early e-commerce.

Q-commerce feels excessive until it doesn’t. Until it becomes the channel through which cities move essentials with zero thought. Until the mesh is the default.

What feels like luxury today will feel like baseline tomorrow. (Remember when two-day shipping felt like a miracle?)

8. India’s Perfect Fit

Every part of India’s economy makes this model work:

• Small fridges, frequent buying.

• Cheap labour, dense populations.

• High digital adoption, low legacy infrastructure.

We didn’t invent Q-commerce to copy Silicon Valley. We stumbled into it because it fit our life better than theirs.

This is India’s model now. And the world might soon follow us.

9. The Attention Shift

These apps aren’t just delivery platforms. They’re becoming content feeds.

Open Zepto, and you’re nudged into curated collections, festive hampers, seasonal highlights. Scroll a bit and you forget what you came to buy. (Was it bread? Or bath salts?)

That’s not an accident. That’s media.

When you spend time in the app without intending to, that’s the moment they win.

First came orders. Now comes discovery.

Ads will soon out-earn groceries. And the platform that controls the user’s scroll will control the brands’ wallet.