GUEST COLUMN | From convenience to compulsion: how India’s quick commerce consumer is rewriting the retail playbook

BENGALURU: Madhu Sudhan is the co-founder of Punt Partners and the creator of ShelfRadar.ai, an AI-powered decision engine built for quick commerce brands. With experience spanning entrepreneurship, marketing, technology, consumer insights and investment, he brings a deep understanding of India’s evolving business and consumer landscape. In this article, Sudhan shares his views on how quick commerce has moved beyond convenience to become an everyday consumer expectation, and explores what this behavioural shift means for brands, retail, advertising and broadcasters.

Four years ago, a ten-minute grocery delivery was a novelty worth tweeting about. Today, it is the baseline expectation of an entire generation of Indian shoppers and the numbers show just how dramatically consumer preferences have shifted.

Quick commerce scaled to an estimated $10–11 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025, doubling annually over the past two years, according to Bain & Company’s latest “How India Shops Online” report. The sector now processes close to eight million orders a day, and projections peg it at $65–70 billion by 2030, accounting for nearly half of all incremental e-retail growth in the country.

The patience economy is dead

The most fundamental shift is psychological. The Indian consumer who once happily waited three days for an e-commerce parcel now finds the wait unacceptable for anything from a phone charger to a lipstick. Session behaviour tells the story: quick commerce shoppers spend under five minutes per visit and convert to purchase at roughly eight times the rate of traditional e-retail. This is not browsing; it is need-fulfilment on demand. Shopping has moved from a planned weekly activity to an impulse woven into daily life.

The shelf has swallowed the funnel

For thirty years the journey ran one way: a brand built awareness on television, earned a place in the shopper’s mind, and waited weeks for that memory to convert at a store. Quick commerce has collapsed that entire arc into the two seconds a listing sits on a screen. The shelf is no longer where demand is captured, it is where demand is created. A consumer with no brand in mind and no patience discovers, decides and buys in one unbroken motion, and whoever holds that moment wins a customer who was never theirs to begin with. This rewires the economics of marketing itself: spend on upstream awareness is being quietly devalued, because the decision has migrated to the point of availability. An out-of-stock, in this world, is not a missed sale. It is paying to hand a ready-to-buy customer to a competitor and quick commerce ensures they rarely switch back.

Beyond the grocery basket

While essentials still account for 85–90 per cent of quick commerce GMV, the growth engine has moved elsewhere. Electronics, beauty, fashion and general merchandise are now growing faster than grocery on leading platforms. Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart have added apparel, personal care, pharma and even small appliances to their dark stores. The message from consumers is unambiguous: if it can arrive in ten minutes, why should any purchase take longer? For FMCG and consumer brands, quick commerce has evolved from a marginal channel into a primary route to market- one where discovery, trial and repeat purchase happen at unprecedented speed.

Small towns, big appetite

The stereotype of quick commerce as a metro indulgence is fading. Tier-2 and smaller cities contributed roughly half of incremental e-retail orders in 2025, even though online shopper penetration remains at only 25–30 per cent of internet users signalling substantial headroom. Gen Z is the accelerant, making up 40–45 per cent of India’s online shoppers and nearly half of new orders. These are consumers who have never known retail without instant gratification.

What it means for brands and broadcasters

For marketers, the implications are profound. Festive events still drive acquisition; about one in four new online shoppers arrives during festive sales but retention now depends on availability and speed rather than discounting alone. Media plans are following the consumer: quick commerce platforms are emerging as high-intent advertising real estate, with retail media budgets shifting towards them.

The Indian consumer has, as one investor memorably put it, “tasted blood.” Speed is no longer a differentiator; it is the price of entry. Brands that treat quick commerce as an experiment rather than a core channel risk discovering that their consumer has already moved on in ten minutes or less.

As quick commerce continues to reshape how India discovers and buys products, the shift is likely to have implications far beyond retail. For brands, marketers and media businesses alike, understanding this new consumer behaviour will be central to staying relevant in a marketplace where convenience has rapidly become an expectation.

Note: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Indian Television dot com.