Quick Commerce: E-tail's Great Disruptor

New players like Zepto along with biggies such as Blinkit, Swiggy and Dunzo are ramping up operations with micro warehouses and under 30-minute deliveries. Will their gamble work?

- Asmita Dey

THIRTY-YEAR-OLD Urvashi Sharma, a New Delhi based public relations professional, is a regular customer of Swiggy Instamart. She signed up for the platform to fulfil her daily grocery requirements. “Amidst a chaotic work life, one hardly gets time to plan or go outside for groceries. Quick commerce services such as Instamart are a boon for us,” says Sharma. Bengaluru-based Atree Kundu echoes a similar view. Thirty one-year-old Kundu, who works with a well known multinational corporation, subscribes to Dunzo Daily to stock up on kitchen essentials. “Often while cooking, I run out of certain supplies. I immediately place an order on Dunzo Daily, they deliver in 17 minutes,” she says.

Quick commerce (also Q-commerce) or the delivery of everyday essentials (typically groceries) in 10-30 minutes is already prevalent in major global markets. US-based Gopuff, set up in 2013, delivers groceries in 30 minutes and is valued at $15 billion. A clutch of new entrants such as Berlin-based Gorillas and U.K.’s Zapp are already quite popular in their areas of operations, and are now looking to corner a bigger slice of the Q-commerce market. The trend is fast catching up in India as well; the local quick commerce segment is a veritable mix of new players such as Zepto, which is building its business to specifically service instant deliveries, and established ones like Blinkit (formerly Grofers) that have completely rejigged their branding and positioning and are taking aggressive bets on the category.

Why Q-commerce?