Delivery of instant gratification
Imagine this. Your son has forgotten his homework at home. You are dropping him to school and there is no time to turn back. You pull out your phone and click on Blinkit. In less than a half hour, printouts are hand delivered to you on location. Effort is superfluous beyond opening a widget.
Your wife tells you she heard the reviews of Gladiator II were super. You go to Zomato to book the tickets. Wait, isn’t Zomato for food orders? Not any more. Feeling lonely, or are too lazy to romance? Book a speed dating evening on BookMyShow. Meanwhile, you’ve heard of the kite flying in a 200-year-old haveli. It’s there on BookMyShow, too. Someone is coming over for dinner and the curtains look shabby—no time for dry-cleaning. Zepto will deliver new curtains of your choice on time at your doorstep. Amazon Fresh will deliver vegetables and groceries of your choice. So will Swiggy. Uber Eats deliver food home, giving Zomato competition.
In the age of instant gratification, where millennials and GenZ are too impatient to wait or don't feel like making the extra effort to go out to buy a pack of smokes or a Coke instead of Netflix and chilling, and GenAlpha wants a pizza (extra cheese please) without putting down the PS5 Pro, life waits at your fingertips. Have cell phone, will not travel. Just order.
Mental health experts say that the syndrome has caused a shift in the overall customer mindset. Deeksha Kalra, a clinical psychologist at Gurugram, Haryana’s Artemis Hospital points at the psychological trade-offs associated with quick commerce. “The process of grocery shopping, for example, once involved planning, adjusting to what was available, and money management. These activities taught us important emotional skills such as patience, resourcefulness and flexibility, which come useful in stress management. Today, instant availability has made us less tolerant of waiting, and less organised in managing our resources and time,” she warns.
The triumph of instant gratification is the ease with which desires are satisfied faster than you can rub Aladdin’s lamp. Take Lego lover Anisha Jennifer Sharma. On a hot August morning earlier this year, the 36-year-old corporate professional living in Delhi spotted Lego toy sets on the 10-minute grocery delivery platform, Blinkit. Sharma, who is also a hobbyist toy collector, was about to place an order for coffee—but ended up buying six sets of Lego kits.
Eventually, she ended up spending four times the amount she had intended to. Had she made the three-minute walk to the local grocery store right next to her apartment and buy the coffee that she wanted to buy, she would have saved the money. But hey, that’s the fun of shopping, and shopping in comfort. Sharma has no complaints. “It is an immense convenience to get anything you’ve run out at home be delivered to you in 10 minutes. Apps such as Blinkit feel like an extended departmental store, and I love that,” she chuckles.
Sharma’s is one of many, ever-growing instances where quick commerce is transforming retail therapy in urban and suburban India with smartphones. Says 32-year-old Bengaluru resident and home chef Aarzu Sadana, “At two in the morning, I had this sudden craving for gulab jamuns. I ordered the only available pre-mix in the vicinity through Dunzo, and it was with me in just around 20 minutes!” The 44-year-old Raghuram Kalleta from Hyderabad was visiting a friend, and wanted copies of photos they had shot during a trip.
“I simply ordered a pen drive on Blinkit, and it was there with me in 10 minutes, without needing any of us to break a sweat,” he says. Another friend story is more versatile. The 36-year-old Bengaluru-based corporate professional, Eric John, was getting ready to leave his friend’s place and turned to Uber. No cabs were available. His solution was: “I booked a parcel pick-up request on Dunzo from my then-location to my residence. Once the delivery agent arrived, I requested him to take me along in exchange for a tip. I Dunzo-ed myself across town, and it was a lifesaver,” he says, in what is probably one of the more innovative applications of quick ‘commerce’.
Each of these diverse instances represent services that were once either unavailable, or required a quick run to a local store which has specific closing times. A slew of venture capital-backed startups are here today to fulfill a rising demand for fast and curious. Some of these have been around for a while. There is Urban Company which will send you a plumber or carpenter at a time you like, or a massage or a haircut. Drinking water company Drink Prime will lease and install ROs at home; no need to buy one.
The push for adopting instant commerce began with the advent of e-commerce at the turn of the previous decade, when homegrown Flipkart started to replace physical bookstores with online deals. Soon, Amazon joined the party—by 2014, e-commerce was not only picking up pace, but raced full steam ahead.
This further accelerated after demonetisation in 2016 by pushing widespread adoption of online shopping, even for groceries and vegetables. The rise of digital payments through Google Pay, Paytm and other such apps gave money its Star Trek moment—“Beam me up Scottie!” E-commerce platforms today account for over 50 per cent of all smartphones sold in the country—meaning that more buyers prefer to buy their phones online, as opposed to going to a shop to check out an expensive purchase in the flesh. The benefit? Sheer convenience over the risk of getting a defective item.
The idea of instant services has spread to every field you can imagine. Tata-owned online pharmacist 1mg home delivers medicines in select regions within an hour. Fresh meat and poultry upstarts do doorstep delivery across India within 15 minutes. Even local courier services are being replaced by parcel services of Uber, Porter, Borzo and WeFast. Such competition has forced legacy outstation courier providers such as DTDC to offer doorstep pickup within hours.
Even pet services are going digital.
Startups such as Sploot today offer at-home pet grooming services, while botany and plantation ventures such as Ugaoo sell exotic home plants directly to home.
The ‘instant delivery syndrome’ is creating wants over necessities. It promotes a bunch of low-value transactions of things not really needed: the more you see, the faster you get, is the golden mantra of the new retail revolution. Hence phone screens have become shop windows and sellers are happy with Google Pay; even the local paanwallah will send you the QR code. These transactions may not be of low value for too long, since most quick commerce startups are delving into categories such as jewellery and electronics to ramp-up their overall order values, while bringing more and more people under their umbrella.
How It All Began
In an investor note on quick commerce ventures published in February this year, Mumbai-based brokerage firm JM Financial explained why quick commerce is primed for success. It seems the impact of Covid-19 is still unfolding in more ways than ever.
“The pandemic accelerated the demand for online grocery not only in India, but globally. It also led to the evolution of consumer needs due to restrictions on movement and the consumer’s reluctance to venture out. As a result, consumer dependence for purchases that would typically be fulfilled by offline channels—such as unplanned purchases, indulgences or low shelf-life items—shifted towards platforms offering on-demand services,” the note said.
One such instance is 55-year-old Mumbai-based baker, Rhea Mitra-Dalal, who started using quick commerce services around the time when the pandemic started receding. “The most unexpected things that I’ve bought are safety pins, bindis, a keyboard and mouse, an external hard drive, and even earpods. I always happen to find all items I need available under one roof,” she says.
The report underlines the growth of quick commerce services. In late 2022, it was Zomato’s acquisition of Blinkit, which was previously owned by hyperlocal services platform Grofers, that set the wheels in motion. Initially skepticism was the leitmotif, Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal faced social media flak after promising 10-minute deliveries. Between then and now, 10-minute is the cutoff point with money back guarantees as the new normal. The instant gratification services revolution began with Swiggy launching its quick commerce vertical, Instamart, in mid-2020. The following year, Zepto, India’s most-funded startup, made its debut. Today, with net funding of over USD 1.5 billion, Zepto is one of India’s biggest unicorns.
Over the past two years, plenty of people have raised concerns regarding the working conditions of the delivery executives. They are under constant stress to reach the customer on time even if the traffic is killing. Swiggy hires around 4,000 delivery staff every day; imagine the attrition rate even in unemployment affected India. In a recent post gone viral, beauty and spa service provider Yes Madam sacked over a hundred employees after an internal ‘stress survey’. Employees who spoke up about were given the pink slip. As the news spread, food delivery app Magicpin put out an advertisement saying that they were ready to hire all the employees who had been fired. This earned Magicpin many admirers on SM with many promising to switch over to Magicpin.
Mitra-Dalal, an avid online shopper has included quick commerce as an integral aspect of retail therapy dosage. “If Amazon was addictive, Blinkit has taken it to another level. They have expanded their inventory, and the premium options are actually superb. I already see myself ordering less from Amazon Fresh thanks to Blinkit, and now, with all sorts of products being available for delivery within minutes, it’s the closest thing to instant shopping gratification; without stepping out of the house,” she says.
The home delivery wave has spread even to Indian suburbia; it is successful even in small town Kotdwara, Uttarakhand. “There is great opportunity here,” says Ropamala Dham who runs a posh residential school. Zomato has spread even to small towns like Palakkad in Kerala, whose resident Soorej Babu orders often from restaurants. “If my wife is too tired to cook after work, we just click on the cell phone screen.”
Resilience and Psyche of Shoppers
Push button purchases have caused a decisive mentality shift among shoppers. Delhi-based communications professional Monica Kamath, who was associated with the formative years of quick commerce with a leading hyperlocal startup in Bengaluru, says that from the initial years of the industry nearly a decade ago, the market has drastically changed.
“The frequency has a lot to do with the layout of cities. In South Indian cities, you will find residences, shops, stalls and kiosks all thrown in together. However, cities like Delhi, which have more structured planning, have a segregated approach, and hence you will find sectors with housing and markets in separate places. I rely on quick commerce a lot more in Delhi, whereas in Bengaluru, most often there is a kirana shop right outside the alley,” Kamath says.
The increasing use of instant gratification platforms is proliferating. For at-home services, ventures such as Urban Company offer on-demand cleaning, painting and maintenance services. The trend started more than a decade ago, when life began on cell phones. The first industry on the road was cab services. From planning in advance, fixing up with tour operators or depending on the local taxi stand, Uber and Olacabs have changed the travel business.
You can book an airport cab on MakeMyTrip or reserve a hotel room without paying in advance. Vivek Kumar, a 38-year-old driver on contract with Delhi’s electric vehicle startup Blusmart says that business is rising steadily. “Our company today has 9,000 cabs, and over 54,000 registered drivers. Each day, there is a steady stream of bookings for cabs and at times, there are not enough drivers to cope with the demand,” Kumar says.
The shopper mindset is changing with the times. Thirty-two-year-old Noida, Uttar Pradesh-based communications professional Shouvik Das, a Blinkit regular, says, “I ordered a foot massager for my wife on her birthday. Until last year, choosing her birthday gift meant taking hours off from work, visiting the nearby mall, and spending hours trawling the stores to find something meaningful. This year, all it took was 10 minutes,” he adds. Kalra, however, says that such actions, in the long run, could be alarming in terms of the overall psychological impact.
“Delayed gratification is a critical emotional skill that helps regulate impulses and build resilience. By making everything instantly accessible, we risk undermining the development of this skill in both adults and children. While the benefits of quick commerce are undeniable, we need to balance this convenience with mindful practices that encourage patience and planning,” she reveals.
To Greater Varieties
None of this, however, is stopping India’s quick commerce companies from planning rapid expansion. Over the past one year, Blinkit has introduced the delivery of passport photos within 15 minutes. On Zepto, regular groceries are paired with the company’s own ‘Zepto Cafe’, which serves cold coffee and snacks. Swiggy’s Instamart has set-up dedicated categories for organic produce, office supplies etc.
The Tata group’s BigBasket, which plays in the quick commerce industry through BBNow, offers items such as luxury perfumes with quick turnaround times. GoMechanic will do fast doorstep pick-up and delivery of vehicles for service and maintenance, handle insurance, and give guarantees for their services.
E-com companies are innovating to interest. Zomato’s Blinkit, in September, hosted a sale of Apple’s latest iPhone 16 lineup on its platform, promising 10-minute iPhone deliveries in eligible markets. In November, it also hosted a sale of Sony’s PlayStation 5 gaming console. Each of the platforms mentioned above are also venturing into selling stuff as diverse as gold coins and electrical fittings. Not one to be left behind, e-commerce behemoth Amazon India is also reported to be entering the industry soon with a service named Tez.
Changing Habits
The success of quick commerce startups is at the expense of the age-old neighbourhood grocery stores. Using online payment portals and a streamlined delivery process, quick commerce ventures are taking over the local grocery delivery industry, one item at a time. The initial premise of quick commerce ventures appeared to be of significant benefit for local kirana stores. During the phases of rapid expansion two years ago, quick commerce platforms started tying up with local grocery stores as supplier partners. In turn, this benefitted local businesses.
One such venture is Chandni Chowk, Delhi’s Allied Fruits and Vegetables, whose third-generation heir today runs a groceries store in Noida. Sagar Chola, the proprietor of the business, says that in the initial days, Blinkit, Instamart and Zepto had struck partnerships with local grocery stores as sellers. “This was a momentary boom as many retail outlets were able to sell in bulk,” Chola recalls.
However, such partnerships lasted only for the first two to three months, following which each quick commerce player set-up their own local warehouses—often referred to as ‘dark stores’. These ‘dark stores’—called so because no customer can walk into it to buy groceries in retail—serve as the local spokes of the quick commerce juggernaut.
A wholesale spices vendor in Delhi’s Sadar Bazar area who supplies for three quick commerce platforms says that the speed trend has created an “unprecedented amount of demand”. “Most local shopkeepers typically order items in quantities of 10 kg or so from wholesale distributors. With quick commerce, distributor vendors have seen quantities shoot up to hundreds of kilos—making it highly lucrative,” he says.
Despite the bulk quantities, these warehouses have a quick turnaround time for inventories and stocks. Simply put, the success of the business model depends on items not having to remain in stock for long. A short inventory period means less time and money spent on stocking and maintaining items, and in time, bigger margins that local groceries mostly fail to achieve. Companies are employing Artificial Intelligence algorithms to predict consumption patterns and preemptively stock their warehouses with goods.
Turnaround time is key. For most orders, consumers report response times of under 10 minutes. As 36-year-old Aniket Kumar, a delivery executive currently working on a contractual basis with Blinkit, says, the devil lies in the speed of service. “The general memo is to be present right at a warehouse, at any given time. There are rare instances where an order is not packed, invoiced and assigned to a delivery executive within the first three minutes of it being placed on the app,” Kumar says.
Delivery executives, customers and local shopkeepers say that over the past two years, this tech-driven efficiency has helped quick commerce startups take over the grocery economy in large parts. “Most of the apartment complexes in Noida today use our services, and it’s obvious why—if you can get your groceries delivered home without standing in a queue, or even needing to move, why wouldn’t you? Most of the households that we deliver to are also young customers within 40 years of age, who do everything through apps on their mobile phones. It’s a natural fit,” says 39-year-old Devnath Yadav, a delivery executive with Instamart.
A Price to Pay
Is quick online delivery killing neighbourhood shops? Maybe. Local grocers are getting their act together by offering home service, but can’t compete with the sheer scale and volume of the delivery giants; not enough staff. Blinkit or Zepto will deliver even blow dryers in 13 minutes because the brand you want is on the app.
A 39-year-old corporate professional, Prasid Dutta moved to Hyderabad last year for a new job and couldn’t handle the language. He says, “I bought a frying pan the day I moved to the new city. I didn’t have to go looking for a local supplies store; I was tired from travelling all day. I didn’t have to struggle with the language barrier. I got what I needed without having to wait for my belongings to arrive.”
Allied’s Chola, whose family has been in Delhi's groceries business for nearly six decades now, says that there are a “lot of losses” that local businesses have faced as a result of quick commerce platforms. “If I sell 2.5 kg of a particular fruit in a day, Blinkit’s or Instamart’s volumes in comparison are at 100 kg. As a local business, I cannot compete with a mass business. The gig workers have benefitted from them massively, since there’s a lot of business.
In the next five years, I believe almost all grocery sales will go online,” Chola says. Shahrukh Khan, store manager at NCR-based multi-brand retail chain Shreeji Foods, concurs. “The scale of our business has declined by 15-20 per cent in terms of volume of what we used to sell. Plus, queuing and crowds have decreased significantly too, since for most items, customers choose the convenient way of ordering online,” Khan says. The discounts and cash back options make it more attractive.
Quick commerce platforms are creating a social habit. While the trend is largely urban at the moment, in the long run, tier-II markets and beyond are the next battlegrounds; a tough challenge since community bonds are stronger. The buy quick habit will certainly get wider in cities. Karan Taurani, senior vice-president and research analyst at Mumbai-based brokerage firm Elara Capital, says, “Customers are happy with lead times being low. There is an immense growth potential for quick commerce, at an annualised rate of 50-60 per cent, in the next three to four years. Today, quick commerce accounts for 3.5-4 per cent of India’s overall ecommerce economy; by the next three to four years, this can rise to 8.5-10 per cent.”
Taurani further foresees more companies in the field in the next three to four years. “In this highly competitive market more players will focus on leveraging demand. Grocery stores are struggling with their margins declining, and business volumes down. In the near future, it is unlikely that these shops will be able to keep up with competition from venture capital-backed, tech-enabled quick commerce platforms,” he says. The variety they bring to the table can’t be matched.
The key to the success is uniformity, wherein no personal communication is necessary in grocery deliveries, there is no problem with payments, and the packaging is consistent and even innovative to stand out against rivals. “This uniformity is difficult for local grocery sellers to achieve. This is why quick commerce firms do not partner with local businesses and have set up their own supply chains. Some dark stores are being franchised to vendor partners to work for a single platform,” Taurani adds.
To survive, both Chola and Khan today do home deliveries to clients living within a close radius of their shops. “We’re available on WhatsApp. Simply drop a message, and we fulfill the orders within an hour. We can’t guarantee 10-minute deliveries and a fancy app interface, but we do promise fresh produce each day, and offer the added joy of striking personal relationships with our customers,” Chola says. Khan adds that most of his customers are not only local residents, but people whom he knows at least by face. “Many people out on evening walks pick up what they need on their way back home. A habit retained, or a casual conversation struck while out on an evening stroll is what matters. We are, after all, social as people,” he says.
However, most believe that the social aspect of grocery shopping may not be compelling enough to stop the onslaught of speed purchasing. While millennials still talk to strangers, generations born afterward and raised in the social media age since childhood are comfortable with not needing to relate. For Boomers, their own neighbours and friends owned and operated grocery stores. Today, urban living having shifted heavily towards gated townships and residences, the old idea of a mohalla hardly exists in cities. Convenience is the new app of desire. And it is a fingers game.