India’s fast-growing quick commerce market is getting a new deeply-pocketed entrant: Walmart-owned Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce firm.
Flipkart has started to roll out Flipkart Minutes, its quick commerce service, in parts of Bengaluru. The new service offers customers the ability to have a wide-range of items, from grocery to smartphones, delivered to them within 10 to 15 minutes. The e-commerce firm is offering customers free delivery on orders priced at Rs 100, or $1.20.
Flipkart is the latest entrant to the instant commerce market, which is quickly making inroads in India even as the model has failed in many other markets. Quick commerce players, which rely on hundreds of small warehouses or “dark stores” strategically located near residential and business areas for rapid deliveries, have expanded to numerous categories in recent months, including fashion and electronics, increasingly entering Amazon’s and Flipkart’s traditional territory.
Flipkart didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. TechCrunch reported in March that Flipkart was working on a quick commerce offering.
This move comes at a time when the quick commerce sector in India is showing remarkable resilience and growth. The convenience of 10-minute grocery deliveries has struck a chord with urban Indian consumers, leading to encouraging signs for companies like Zomato-owned Blinkit, StepStone-backed Zepto, and SoftBank-backed Swiggy Instamart.
Analysts and investors love the space, too. Goldman Sachs estimates that Blinkit, the leading quick commerce player in India, is already worth more than its parent firm’s eponymous food delivery operations. Zomato’s stock hit all-time high to as much as $30 billion in market cap last week after the firm, which acquired Blinkit for less than $600 million in 2022, reported a quarterly profit of about $30 million.
Flipkart leads the e-commerce market in India, but Amazon has stronger grip on urban Indian customers. The Bengaluru-based startup sees quick commerce as a way to win some of Amazon’s top India customers, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Amazon, for its part, has shown little interest in entering the quick commerce space in India, instead focusing on same-day delivery for Prime members and questioning the quality of products from “fast” delivery services in its marketing campaigns. The world’s largest e-commerce firm is separately in talks to acquire a stake in Swiggy, which has confidentially filed for an initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter.
A recent TechCrunch analysis found that many of Amazon India’s bestselling items were available on quick commerce platforms, meaning that the company stands to lose some business and traffic to quick commerce companies.
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