Flipkart closes gap with India's quick-commerce leaders

Flipkart Minutes, the quick-commerce arm of Walmart-owned Flipkart, is now delivering 1.1 million to 1.2 million orders a day, up from about 390,000 to 400,000 in November, according to people familiar with the matter. That puts the two-year-old service, which debuted in August 2024, close to Swiggy’s Instamart, which is delivering about 1.4 million orders a day, a person familiar with its operations said.

The gap is notable because Flipkart is a relative latecomer to a market long dominated by Instamart, Blinkit, and Zepto. Swiggy launched Instamart in 2020 and Zepto arrived the following year, both during the pandemic, while Blinkit traces its roots to online grocery platform Grofers, founded in 2013. Blinkit still leads the market with around 3.4 million to 3.6 million daily orders, followed by Zepto at about 2.4 million to 2.6 million, according to recent estimates from market-research firm Datum Intelligence.

Flipkart has fueled its rise with an aggressive buildout of delivery infrastructure. Minutes now operates about 1,020 to 1,050 micro-fulfillment centers — small warehouses located close to customers — up from 600 in January and about 340 a year ago, with the company adding around 100 such facilities a month and aiming for 1,500 by the end of 2026. “Flipkart is already a serious player,” said Satish Meena, an adviser at Datum Intelligence. “Once you open more than 1,000 dark stores and [are] doing a million orders per day, it’s serious enough.”

Flipkart’s advantage also comes from tapping the enormous e-commerce customer base it has spent years and billions of dollars acquiring, Meena said. About 65% to 70% of monthly Minutes customers are repeat buyers, transactions per customer have increased 50% to 60% from a year earlier, and customers are spending about ₹400 to ₹500 (about $4.20–$5.20) per order on average, with average delivery time falling to about 11 minutes from 13 minutes a year ago. Instamart still has substantial scale of its own: Swiggy said this month the service has more than 14 million monthly transacting users across over 1,200 dark stores in more than 130 cities, with more than 45% of those stores now contribution-margin positive. Amazon is chasing the same opportunity with Amazon Now, which the company said became its fastest-growing business in India during CEO Andy Jassy’s June visit, with orders doubling every quarter since launch; Amazon plans to expand the service to more than 300 cities with over 1,000 micro-fulfillment centers.

Why it matters

Quick commerce is becoming central to how Indians shop online even as broader consumer demand softens, Bernstein analysts said, and the buildout is increasingly defensive as well as offensive: once shoppers get used to near-instant delivery, e-commerce giants risk losing those transactions to specialist rivals that can match the speed.