Quick-commerce firms including Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart have been treading on e-commerce’s turf by expanding their offerings to include products that were traditionally sold on e-commerce platforms, but e-commerce firms are looking to give them a taste of their own medicine.
Flipkart is set to open 100 dark stores for its Flipkart Minutes service, which will be the company’s quick commerce play. Through Flipkart Minutes, Flipkart will deliver groceries, fruits, vegetables and electronics. Flipkart has been testing out Flipkart Minutes with its employees through a store near its headquarters, and the service is visible in a few other pincodes at the moment as well. Flipkart Minutes will soon be launched in more than a dozen cities, and will deliver orders in 10-15 minutes.
Flipkart plans to go all-out on Flipkart Minutes during the festive season, and 100 dark stores will make it a prominent contender in the quick commerce space. In comparison, Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart currently have over 500 dark stores, and Zepto has around 350. This capacity has been built over at least a couple of years, but with 100 dark stores of its own in a few weeks, Flipkart could take the challenge right to these quick-commerce focused firms.
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.
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.