Amazon appears to be all set to throw its hat into the quick commerce ring.
Amazon is looking to launch its quick-commerce delivery service by late December or early next year, ET reports. The service is codenamed Tez, and will look to take on a growing band of companies and startups that are rapidly establishing their presence in the quick commerce space. Amazon had earlier planned to launch Tez in the first quarter of 2025, but appears to have accelerated its timelines given quick moves of competitors.
Amazon also appears to be hiring for its new launch. A job listing saw Amazon hiring for a “Software Development Engineer 2, Tez” role in Bengaluru. “We are from India Grocery and Grocery Essentials team,” the job posting said. “We are working on a grounds-up initiative for an upcoming and fast-growing e-commerce space in India,” the posting added.
Amazon is a global leader in e-commerce, but this is the first time the company is looking to launch a quick-commerce operation anywhere in the world. Amazon will have to adapt its time-tested playbooks for the launch — Amazon usually has large warehouses outside major cities where it receives goods from sellers, and then ships them to people’s homes. For quick-commerce, it’ll instead have to build dark stores in dense urban areas to make sure items can reach customers in around 15 minutes. Startups like Zepto didn’t come with the baggage of large warehouses and distributed delivery networks, and started off directly with dark stores. Amazon, on the other hand, will have to tweak its existing delivery models to be able to deliver items quickly.
But the rapid moves by startups and existing players in the quick-commerce space have made it incumbent upon Amazon to launch its own quick-commerce play. Zepto had pioneered the quick commerce model in India a few years ago, and it was quickly followed by Grofers, which rebranded to Blinkit, and Swiggy Instamart. Since then, Flipkart has launched its quick-commerce play named Flipkart Minutes, Big Basket has pivoted to being a quick-commerce first service, and the Tata group is set to launch NeuFlash. There have also been reports that Reliance is looking to enter the space with JioMart.
Amazon, ironically, is quite late in the quick-commerce race. But it might be in good company. Google too was late in launching a UPI app, which like Amazon’s initiative was also codenamed Tez. But with aggressive cashbacks, and the Google brand name to back it up, Google managed to outflank many competitors, and Google Tez (later named Google Pay) became the second biggest UPI app in India. These are still early days, and in spite of having been caught napping by quick-commerce players, Amazon would hope that it can pull off something similar with Amazon Tez.