In 2022, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy had said that 10-minute deliveries weren’t sustainable, and 30-45 minute deliveries was the right business model. Cut to two years later, and Flipkart has launched is quick commerce service.
Flipkart’s quick commerce service, Flipkart Minutes, is live in certain areas of Bengaluru. “Launching delivery in 10 minutes,” Flipkart Minutes says, and says it will deliver “grocery, home needs and more”. Flipkart says it is offering items at discounts of up to 50 percent, and also has tie-ups with banks and credit cards for offers.
Flipkart Minutes has a familiar interface that’s quite similar to those of rivals Blinkit and Zepto. It prominently displays the time in which it’ll be able to make the deliveries. Flipkart’s selection consists of fruits and vegetables, personal care items, and even mobiles and electronics.
While Flipkart has piloted Flipkart Minutes from Bengaluru, it has big plans for the service. The company plans to go all-out on Flipkart Minutes during the festive season, and plans to open 100 dark stores in the next few months. In comparison, Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart currently have over 500 dark stores each, and Zepto has around 350.
This is quite a turnaround from just over two years ago, when Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy had said that 10-minutes deliveries wasn’t the right business model, and had instead batted for 30-45 minute deliveries. “I don’t think that’s (15-minute delivery) the right long-term customer model,” he had said. “We would look at a more sustainable business which offers it in 30-45 minutes with good value and selection. That’s the way we look at the convenience business rather than force-fitting a consumer need which is actually not there in the market,” he had added.
And Flipkart had been taking steps in that direction. In 2020, Flipkart had launched a service named Flipkart Quick, which was a 90-minute delivery service for electronics and groceries. While Flipkart Quick had started off from Bengaluru, it had failed to gain sufficient traction. It had been reported in late 2022 that Flipkart Quick had scaled down its operations, and the company had ‘realigned’ its priorities.
It now appears that Flipkart is willing to take another stab at the quick commerce space through Flipkart Minutes. This move appears to have been motivated by the traction that Zepto and Blinkit have seen over recent months — both companies have been rapidly expanding operations, and the services are becoming popular in urban India. To make matters worse for Flipkart, these companies now no longer want to be restricted to just groceries, but are looking to sell all manner of items including electronics.
This could end up taking away a large chunk of Flipkart’s market share — while they haven’t quite proved they can do so at scale, if Blinkit and Zepto could start delivering mobile phones in 10 minutes, they could find lots of takers for their services. Flipkart, for its part, appears to be looking to preempt this eventuality with launching a quick commerce play of its own. To make matters more interesting, it’s including items like mobile phones in its quick-commerce play, which is something competitors don’t yet offer.
But it might not be straightforward for Flipkart to launch its own quick commerce service. Flipkart is now more than a decade old, and to change its DNA from regular commerce to quick commerce might not be trivial. Also, Flipkart’s newer ventures haven’t quite worked out in the past — it had tried launching Flipkart Nearby in 2015, Flipkart Supermart in 2017, and Flipkart Quick in 2020, all to deliver groceries, but ended up shuttering them all. Also, Flipkart now lags behind Amazon in affluent urban areas, so quick commerce customers might not quite have the connect with the brand that they once did. But Flipkart seems intent on entering the quick commerce space, and if it plays its cards right, could well end up mounting a challenge to the fast-growing incumbents in Zepto and Blinkit.