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What is quick commerce?
The supply chain disruption due to Covid-19 pandemic 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.
Called interchangeably with ‘on-demand delivery’, it tends to focus on the micro to smaller quantities of goods ranging from groceries, stationeries to over-the-counter medicines. The sellers have now shifted their focus from traditional warehouses located on the outskirts to micro-warehouses located near the point of delivery. The ventures aim at restricting stocks to a focussed set of under 2,000 high-demand items.
Quick commerce does not seek to emulate a BigBazaar or Walmart store. It just wants to be the biggest kirana store in an urban colony via the dark store model. These are situated near apartment complexes and hold the requisite SKUs. A dark store typically caters to a radius of 2 km and the likes of Dunzo, Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit and Zepto currently have 20-30 such micro-fulfilment centres in the top 10 cities where their 10-20-minute delivery services are operational.
Q-commerce vs e-commerce
‘E-commerce’ refers to the online purchase, or sale, of a good or service, which can take 3-4 or longer days to deliver, whereas Q-commerce aims to deliver in a 30 minute-1 hour span.
What are the benefits of Quick Commerce?
- Speed: Compared to a conventional retail outlet, q-commerce companies are able to get goods to customers in a fraction of the time.
- Guaranteed availability of products: It isn’t just quicker delivery on offer, but items are more likely to be available, due to investment in AI and technologies that monitor demand and adjust inventory in real-time.
- 24-hour operation: Dark stores can operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year - they are not limited to set daily opening hours like brick and mortar retailers are.
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. Although a couple of quarters late to the party, Indian start-ups like Flipkart, Ola, Blinkit, BigBasket and Zepto joined the bandwagon in the past few months.