Indian consumers spent years growing accustomed to having groceries and everyday household goods delivered right to their doorsteps within minutes, transforming retail expectations across the country. Now, Walmart-owned Flipkart is rapidly closing the gap with those quick-commerce pioneers, while global rival Amazon mounts its own aggressive push into the booming instant-delivery sector.
Flipkart Minutes, which originally debuted in August 2024 as the e-commerce giant’s major foray into the quick-commerce space, is now processing an impressive 1.1 million to 1.2 million orders a day. This marks a massive surge from about 390,000 to 400,000 daily orders recorded in November, according to people familiar with the matter. This rapid acceleration puts the roughly two-year-old service within striking distance of Swiggy’s Instamart, which currently delivers about 1.4 million orders a day, according to a source close to its operations.
This narrowing gap is particularly notable because Flipkart entered the market relatively late. The upper echelons of India’s quick-commerce sector have long been dominated by established players like Instamart, Blinkit, and Zepto. Food-delivery giant Swiggy launched Instamart back in 2020, while Zepto arrived the following year during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, Blinkit traces its operational roots back to the online grocery platform Grofers, which was founded in 2013. Together, these three companies successfully established themselves as India’s top quick-commerce platforms, setting a high benchmark for speed, density, and local fulfillment.
Recent estimates from market research firm Datum Intelligence indicate that Blinkit continues to dominate the market by a wide margin, commanding around 3.4 million to 3.6 million daily orders. Zepto follows closely behind with about 2.4 million to 2.6 million daily transactions. Flipkart, through its Minutes service, is now swiftly narrowing the distance between itself and Instamart, which currently stands as the smallest of the three established market leaders by order volume.
Despite facing mounting pressure from new entrants, Instamart maintains substantial scale and deep market penetration across urban centers. Earlier this month, Swiggy reported that its quick-commerce service boasts more than 14 million monthly transacting users and operates over 1,200 dark stores spread across more than 130 cities throughout the country. Furthermore, the company has successfully improved its financial unit economics, narrowing Instamart’s contribution-margin losses as more than 45% of its dark-store network turns contribution-margin positive.
To fuel its own rapid growth, Flipkart has undertaken an aggressive and systematic expansion of its underlying delivery infrastructure. Minutes currently operates between 1,020 and 1,050 micro-fulfillment centers—essentially compact warehouses situated strategically in close proximity to residential neighborhoods specifically to handle lightning-fast deliveries. This represents a substantial increase from roughly 600 facilities in January and only about 340 a year prior, according to information provided to TechCrunch by an industry source. The company has maintained a brisk expansion pace, adding approximately 100 new micro-fulfillment facilities every month, with a stated corporate goal of operating 1,500 such dark stores by the end of 2026.
However, Flipkart’s competitive advantage extends far beyond merely acquiring physical real estate for micro-warehouses. According to Satish Meena, an adviser at Datum Intelligence, the company can seamlessly tap into an enormous pool of existing e-commerce consumers that it has already spent years and billions of dollars acquiring. This pre-existing customer base provides Minutes with an immediate, built-in audience for instant deliveries, bypassing the heavy initial customer-acquisition costs that startup competitors faced.
“Flipkart is already a serious player,” Meena said regarding the company’s market trajectory. “Once you open 1,000 dark stores and [are] doing a million orders per day, it’s serious enough.”
Beyond raw order volumes and facility counts, Minutes is also enjoying strong customer retention and increasing transaction frequency. Industry sources note that approximately 65% to 70% of the shoppers making purchases on the service each month are repeat buyers, reflecting sticky consumer habits. Additionally, the number of transactions per customer has increased by 50% to 60% compared to figures from the previous year.
Customers are currently spending an average of about 400 to 500 Indian rupees (approximately $4.20 to $5.20) per order. Essential household items such as fresh fruits and vegetables, daily staples, dairy products, and meat remain among the fastest-growing categories on the platform. In response to changing consumer preferences, Flipkart is also broadening its product catalog to include a wider selection of higher-end gourmet goods, featuring organic and artisanal items designed to capture a larger share of consumer wallet spend during these rapid transactions.
Even as the operational footprint of Minutes expands across multiple cities, the service has managed to improve its operational efficiency. Average delivery times have fallen to roughly 11 minutes, down from an average of 13 minutes a year ago, highlighting improvements in local logistics and route optimization.
A Battle for India’s Shoppers
Flipkart’s aggressive push into instant delivery unfolds against the backdrop of quick commerce assuming a central role in how Indian consumers buy goods online, even as broader discretionary consumption demand has occasionally shown signs of softness. In a recent analytical report, market analysts at Bernstein noted that while India’s broader consumption growth softened over the summer months, the structural shift toward quick commerce and e-commerce has persevered, with instant-delivery platforms registering healthy, continuous growth in their monthly active user bases.
In parallel with Flipkart’s maneuvers, global retail giant Amazon is striving to carve out a meaningful share of India’s fiercely competitive quick-commerce landscape. The Seattle-based multinational technology company has steadily expanded Amazon Now, its dedicated quick-commerce service, as part of a broader strategy to introduce the instant-delivery business model to its vast, pre-established e-commerce customer base across the nation.
During a visit to India, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy highlighted the rapid traction of the service. Company disclosures revealed that Amazon Now has become its fastest-growing business unit in India, with order volumes doubling every single quarter since its initial rollout. Amazon also outlined detailed plans to scale the service to more than 300 cities, establishing a robust domestic network of over 1,000 micro-fulfillment centers alongside larger regional facilities designed to expand the overall range of products that can be successfully delivered to households within minutes.
Representatives for Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy, Zepto, and Blinkit parent company Eternal did not respond to formal requests for comment regarding their ongoing expansion strategies and operational metrics.
According to Meena, the rapid expansion of quick-commerce infrastructure is increasingly a dual necessity—serving as both an offensive growth strategy and a defensive corporate maneuver for legacy e-commerce giants like Flipkart and Amazon. As urban consumers grow accustomed to receiving everyday purchases almost immediately, traditional e-commerce platforms run the very real risk of losing high-frequency transactions to nimble, specialist quick-commerce platforms if they fail to offer comparable delivery speeds.
“Can you go back to scheduled delivery now in grocery? No,” Meena emphasized. “You will not go back.”
