Zomato owned quick commerce platform, Blinkit, known for its 10-minute grocery deliveries, is working on a new category of high-value items that will be delivered in 30 minutes, people aware of the developments told Moneycontrol. The move to have a separate use case, where deliveries will take slightly longer, comes at a time when the rapid delivery market is maturing and players in the space are diversifying into several new domains to improve profitability.
Blinkit is already preparing to set up “express dark stores” through which it will deliver products such as instant water heaters, air purifiers, jewellery and other high-value items in 30 minutes, which will be different from the standard 10 minute deliveries it currently does, the people cited above added.
Dark stores are the nerve centres of quick commerce. These are mini warehouses which are 3,000-4,000 square feet in size. Blinkit’s “express dark stores” however will be slightly larger at around 7,000 to 8,000 square feet in size which will help store larger products that are bigger in size and need more space.
“Work on this has already begun and Blinkit plans go live with the offering sometime mid of next financial year (FY26),” a person in the know told Moneycontrol. “The idea is to push up the company’s average order value (AOV) and compete more directly with the likes of Flipkart and Amazon,” the person added.
In most cases, especially for quick commerce companies, a higher AOV translates to a better profit profile. In the rapid delivery space, Blinkit already has one of the highest AOVs at Rs 614 compared to Swiggy Instamart and Zepto which have AOVs in the Rs 450-480 range.
While Blinkit – which competes with Swiggy Instamart, Zepto, Flipkart Minutes, Tata Big Basket and others – will be among the first major quick commerce players to set the ball rolling for 30-minute deliveries, the progression of rapid deliveries has been discussed earlier.
Tata’s BigBasket, a company that competes with Blinkit, is also toying with the idea of 30-minute deliveries. It is planning to partner with stores like Croma and Cliq, also businesses owned by Tata, to deliver expensive, high-value products in 30-minutes.
“Technically, I can deliver an AC or a refrigerator in 30 minutes. The businesses will come together at the back-end and customers can view products from multiple stores all at one place – it’s like a cluster of dark stores which will have different timelines depending on the products,” Menon said.
While 10-minute deliveries will stay and cater to their targeted users, 30-minute deliveries will help increase overall quick commerce penetration, as per industry experts.
Sahil Barua, co-founder and CEO of Delhivery, a logistics company, had also made a case for 2-4 hour deliveries, beyond the current 10-15 minute ones, because they are more profitable.
“We have to distinguish between sort of quick commerce and allow…to create a sort of…category here, which is rapid commerce, which is something like maybe four-hour delivery or two-hour delivery in the metros. The unit economics for that, which allow a certain amount of consolidation and a certain amount of route optimisation, are still positive,” Barua, who also sits on the board of IPO-bound Swiggy, said during the company’s earnings call in August.
One hour or 30 minute deliveries are not going to massively disrupt the broader swath of e-commerce if the products are low-value, as per Barua.
“I don't believe that the unit economics for sub-one-hour or sub-30-minute delivery for low-value products with no significant sort of value density and distances higher than three or four kilometres in an urban environment, like India, are going to work out,” he said.
Blinkit’s move to offer 30 minute deliveries comes at a time when quick commerce has gone from a good to have sector to a crucial one, as per analysts. Companies have evolved and gone beyond delivering basic groceries to iPhones, gold coins and other high-value items as an increasing number of people switch to rapid delivery platforms for their purchases.
In response, players have also increased their stock keeping units (SKUs) from a few hundreds initially to over 25,000 in key areas which widens assortment and taps a wider base of users.
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