Quick commerce is grocery and household delivery promised in minutes rather than hours. It works because the goods are already close to you: companies run small, closed-to-the-public warehouses called dark stores inside neighbourhoods, each stocked with a few thousand fast-selling products and served by a pool of delivery riders. In India, the three largest players, Blinkit (owned by Eternal), Swiggy Instamart and Zepto, run well over 4,000 such stores between them. The model is expensive to build, and its economics depend on three things: how many orders each store handles, how large each basket is, and how much the platform earns from brands through advertising.
The model in one picture
A traditional e-commerce company ships from a few large warehouses, often far from the customer, and takes a day or more. A quick commerce company flips that: many small stores, each serving a small area, with stock replenished frequently from larger warehouses.
The core pieces are:
- Dark stores: small fulfilment centres that are not open to walk-in shoppers. Our explainer on what a dark store is covers how they differ from shops and warehouses.
- Mother warehouses: larger facilities that receive goods from brands and distributors and restock the dark stores. Eternal says Blinkit operates about 19 million sq ft of store and warehousing space across 300+ cities as of June 2026.
- A catchment area: each store serves the homes it can reach quickly. Neither Eternal nor Swiggy publishes a standard catchment radius in its shareholder letters; what they disclose is how much each store sells.
- A narrow, fast-moving assortment: stores stock what sells often. Both Eternal and Swiggy say they are widening assortment, including premium and non-grocery items, to raise basket sizes.
- A rider network: Blinkit had an average of 521,000 monthly active delivery partners in the April–June 2026 quarter, up from 243,000 a year earlier, according to its Q1FY27 disclosures.
How an order flows
- You open the app. It shows the catalogue and stock of the dark store that serves your location, not a national catalogue.
- You pay and confirm. The order is sent to that store.
- Staff pick and pack. Store workers collect the items from shelves laid out for picking rather than browsing, and pack them.
- A rider collects it. A delivery partner waiting at or near the store takes the bag.
- Last-mile delivery. The rider rides the short distance to your door.
- The store is restocked. Goods move from the larger warehouses to the store, a “middle mile” cost that Eternal lists separately in its contribution calculation.
Speed used to be the headline promise. In January 2026, after Union Labour Minister Mansukh Mandaviya met executives of Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy and Zomato over the safety of delivery workers, Blinkit said it would remove “10-minute delivery” from its brand messaging, Business Today reported. The stores are still designed to deliver fast; the companies stopped advertising a fixed time.
The main players
| Blinkit (Eternal) | Swiggy Instamart | Zepto | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Latest period | Apr–Jun 2026 (Q1FY27) | Apr–Jun 2026 (Q1FY27) | FY2025-26 |
| Dark stores | 2,443 | 1,171 in 131 cities | 1,139 in 66 cities (March 2026) |
| Orders in quarter | 331 million | 114.5 million | Not disclosed here |
| Order value | ₹17,132 crore NOV | ₹7,907 crore GOV; ₹5,817 crore NOV | Revenue ₹22,624 crore for the year |
| Profitability | Adjusted EBITDA profit of ₹102 crore | Adjusted EBITDA loss of ₹778 crore | Loss of ₹5,905 crore for the year |
| Business model | Mostly owns inventory | Marketplace, moving to inventory | Not covered here |
Sources: Eternal Q1FY27 shareholders’ letter, Swiggy Q1FY27 shareholders’ letter, and Zepto’s updated draft prospectus as reported by Forbes India. GOV (gross order value) is the value of orders before discounts; NOV (net order value) is after discounts. The two companies define and report these slightly differently, so the columns are a guide, not a like-for-like comparison.
Other companies, including large e-commerce firms, have entered the market, but these three publish the most detailed numbers. India’s government-backed open network, ONDC, offers a different route for smaller sellers to reach online buyers, though it does not run dark stores itself.
The unit economics
Quick commerce companies report profits in layers. The useful ones for understanding the model are:
- Average order value: what a typical basket is worth.
- Revenue per order or take rate: what the platform keeps from each order.
- Contribution margin: what is left after the costs of each order, such as running the store, delivery, packaging, payment gateway charges and discounts, but before head-office costs and marketing.
- Adjusted EBITDA: profit before interest, tax, depreciation and some accounting items, after all operating costs.
Basket size
Blinkit’s net average order value was ₹518 in April–June 2026, Eternal reported. Instamart’s average order value was ₹691 on a gross basis and ₹508 net of discounts, up 12.1% year on year, which Swiggy attributes to more non-grocery items and larger baskets.
What the platform keeps
Swiggy’s adjusted revenue per Instamart order rose to ₹108 in Q1FY27, from ₹83 in January–March 2025, it said. That income comes from commissions on goods sold by sellers, advertising from brands, delivery and other fees charged to customers, and services to merchants.
Blinkit’s revenue now includes the full value of goods it sells, because it owns most of its inventory. The comparable figure is gross profit: 27.5% of NOV in Q1FY27, up from 23.6% a year earlier. Inventory losses from expiry, damage and pilferage were about 1.8% of NOV, Eternal said, mostly from perishables such as fruit and vegetables.
Contribution and EBITDA
Blinkit’s contribution was ₹907 crore, or 5.3% of NOV, in Q1FY27, and its adjusted EBITDA turned to a ₹102 crore profit (0.6% of NOV), from a ₹162 crore loss a year earlier.
Instamart’s contribution margin was minus 0.2% of GOV for the quarter, after reaching break-even in May 2026, and its adjusted EBITDA loss was ₹778 crore. Swiggy says more than 45% of its stores were contribution-positive. It expects to reach adjusted EBITDA break-even at about ₹60,000 crore of annualised NOV with a contribution margin of 5–6%, or about ₹30 per order. It lists where the extra money should come from: about ₹10 per order from better margins and product mix, ₹10 from advertising, ₹5 from densification and automation, and ₹5 from higher store utilisation, which it put at around 40%.
Store productivity and capital
A dark store is a fixed cost, so throughput is everything. Instamart stores handled about 1,089 orders a day on average in Q1FY27. Blinkit’s average store sold about ₹8.27 lakh of NOV a day.
Eternal says quick commerce “is not asset-light”. Blinkit has spent about ₹3,000 crore of capital expenditure over four years on its network, and its net working capital was ₹2,545 crore at the end of June 2026, driven by owning inventory. Its steady-state assumptions, published in July 2026, are capex of about ₹2.5 crore per store including warehousing, NOV of ₹11 lakh per store per day, and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 6% of NOV. The company calls these assumptions that “will evolve”.
Advertising
Brands pay quick commerce platforms to advertise to shoppers inside the app, and both Eternal and Swiggy count this ad income in quick commerce revenue. Zepto’s advertising revenue grew from ₹49 crore in FY2023-24 to ₹1,636 crore in FY2025-26, according to its updated draft prospectus as reported by Outlook Business. The same report puts Zepto’s FY2025-26 adjusted EBITDA loss at ₹5,041.5 crore.
Customers also pay delivery, handling and other fees, which Eternal and Swiggy include in their order-value definitions. On the cost side, every order carries payment gateway charges, a fee explained in our guide to MDR.
Marketplace or inventory: the FDI rule
Who owns the stock in a dark store is a regulatory question, not just a business one. Under India’s foreign direct investment policy, Press Note 2 (2018) permits 100% FDI in the marketplace model of e-commerce but does not permit FDI in the inventory-based model, where the e-commerce company owns the goods and sells them directly to consumers. A marketplace also may not control a seller’s inventory, and a seller in which the marketplace has equity may not sell on its platform.
For companies with large foreign shareholdings, this meant running dark stores on a marketplace basis, with goods owned by third-party sellers. The way out is to become an “Indian owned and controlled company” (IOCC), whose investment is not treated as foreign.
- Eternal capped foreign shareholding at 49.5% and reported actual foreign ownership of about 43% as of June 2025. It then began moving Blinkit to owning inventory, which it said would give it more control over margins and assortment.
- Swiggy said its domestic ownership crossed 50% on 1 July 2026, and its board approved a 49.5% foreign ownership cap on 23 July 2026. Shareholders approved it at the 18 August 2026 AGM, Inc42 reported. Swiggy expects the move to inventory to add about 0.8 percentage points to contribution margin and to take two to four quarters.
The pushback: distributors, kiranas and the CCI
Quick commerce sells the same packaged goods that neighbourhood kirana stores and their distributors handle, which has created a direct conflict.
The All India Consumer Products Distributors Federation (AICPDF) complained to the Competition Commission of India (CCI) against Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart in 2025, alleging deep discounting and preferential supply arrangements. In documents seen by Business Standard, the federation claimed Blinkit had 40–45% of the market, Zepto 25–30% and Instamart 20–25%, and alleged discounts of 35–50%, location- and device-based pricing, and deals that gave dark stores priority stock over traditional trade. It also argued that dark stores amount to inventory-based e-commerce by another name.
The CCI was conducting a preliminary inquiry and had sought more evidence, including proof of below-cost selling and of exclusive agreements, Business Standard reported in June 2025. These are allegations; no finding has been reported.
Food safety is the other pressure point. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has asked e-commerce and quick commerce food businesses to deliver products with at least 30% of shelf life or 45 days before expiry remaining, the same Business Standard report noted. Our dark store explainer covers a licence suspension at one Zepto facility in Mumbai.
What to watch
Three questions will decide whether the model holds:
- Can stores fill up? Swiggy says its network is about 40% utilised. Profit depends on more orders per store, not more stores.
- Will advertising keep growing? Both Swiggy’s plan and Zepto’s numbers lean heavily on brand ad spending.
- How will regulators respond? The CCI inquiry, food safety enforcement and rules on gig workers could all change costs.
The point: Quick commerce is a logistics business disguised as a shopping app: it pays to keep stock minutes from your door, and earns that back only when each store handles enough orders, baskets grow and brands pay for visibility. The companies’ own filings show it can work, with Blinkit now profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis, but also how much capital and scale it takes, and why distributors and regulators are watching closely.
Sources
- Q1FY27 shareholders’ letter and results, Eternal Ltd, 22 July 2026
- Shareholders’ letter, Q1FY26, Eternal Ltd, 21 July 2025
- Q1 FY2027 Shareholders’ letter, Swiggy Ltd, July 2026
- Press Note No. 2 (2018 Series): Review of the policy on FDI in e-commerce, DPIIT, Ministry of Commerce & Industry
- Inside Zepto’s IPO papers, Forbes India, June 2026
- IPO-bound Zepto doubles revenue in FY26 but losses reach ₹5,905 crore, Outlook Business, 10 June 2026
- In a first, CCI probes allegations against quick-commerce companies, Business Standard, 17 June 2025
- Complaint against qcom players: distributors submit additional info to CCI, Business Standard, 11 August 2025
- After Centre’s intervention, Blinkit to remove ’10-minute delivery’ branding, Business Today, 13 January 2026
- Swiggy shareholders vote to cap foreign ownership at 49.5%, Inc42, 18 August 2026