What is quick commerce?

Quick Commerce: Softbank backed Grofers rebranded itself “Blinkit” on 13 December 2021. The move is in line with the quick commerce or q-commerce business model. With this, the company aims at delivering the order to the customers much faster than it does currently.

“We learnt a lot as Grofers, and all our learnings, our team, and our infrastructure is being repurposed to pivot to something with staggering product-market fit — quick commerce. Today, we are surging ahead as a new company, and we have a new mission statement — “instant commerce indistinguishable from magic”. And we will no longer be doing this as Grofers — we will be doing it as Blinkit,” CEO Albinder Dhindsa said in a blog post.

According to CEO Albinder Dhindsa, Grofers is aiming to hit an annual gross merchandise value (GMV) run rate of $1 billion by March 2022 compared with the current GMV run rate of $600 million on its platform with 4 million orders a month, growing at a 2X every month.

The online grocery store which processes over a million orders every week across 12 cities in the country lost significant market share to Bigbasket over the years. Consequently, it decided to change its business model from the conventional grocer model to the quick commerce business model. 

What is the Quick Commerce Business Model?

Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the supply chain disruption led to the emergence of a q-commerce-- a unique business model where the delivery of goods and services is done within 10-30 minutes of ordering. 

Quick commerce is used interchangeably with ‘on-demand delivery’ and ‘e-grocery’ and tends to focus on the micro to smaller quantities of fewer goods ranging from groceries, stationeries, personal hygiene products, to over-the-counter medicines.  

The online sellers have now shifted their focus from traditional well-stocked, large warehouses located on the outskirts of cities and towns to micro-warehouses located near the point of delivery. Furthermore, these ventures aim at restricting stocks to a focussed set of under 2,000 high-demand items. 

Quick Commerce Companies in India: The key players in the quick commerce model include Mumbai-based Zepto, food-tech platform Swiggy’s Instamart, and Dunzo Daily. By January 2022, Swiggy’s Instamart will deliver within 15 minutes via a network of dark stores located close to the bulk of its customers. 

It can be concluded that quick commerce is the future of commerce and online sellers will shift from the traditional business model to the q-commerce business model in the coming years. 

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