How Quick Commerce Has Become More Than A Convenience Play

Quick commerce is no longer confined to its traditional strongholds of food, groceries and personal care. As Indian consumers become accustomed to near-instant deliveries, the model is increasingly expanding into both new verticals and broader horizontal categories, said Archana Jahagirdar, the founder and managing partner at Rukam Capital.

Unlike broad horizontal platforms that stock everything from groceries to gadgets, vertical quick commerce brands in India focus on depth and specialised inventory in niche categories like pharma, health, and beauty.

Jahagirdar was speaking at the seventh edition of Inc42’s D2C & Retail Summit in Gurugram. She was joined by Manu Chandra, the founder and managing partner of Sauce.vc; Arjun Vaidya, the cofounder and managing partner, V3 Ventures, and Kannan Sitaram, cofounder and partner at Fireside Ventures, in a discussion moderated by Aditya Singh, the cofounder of All In Capital.

“The Indian consumer in the last four years has tasted blood,” said Chandra of Sauce.vc, pointing to how expectations around delivery have changed rapidly. Consumers who once considered three-day delivery from ecommerce platforms a major convenience now expect products to reach them almost instantly. That behavioural shift is moving beyond impulse purchases. Apparel, innerwear, traditional wear and other products consumed at home are increasingly finding a place on quick-commerce platforms.

This expansion is also creating a new route to market for emerging brands. Unlike traditional distribution, where established companies could use their scale and channel relationships to control access, quick commerce allows younger brands to compete on product quality, brand strength and fulfilment.

The panel also pushed back on the idea that heavy dependence on quick commerce is necessarily a weakness for consumer brands. One investor argued that, unlike traditional and modern trade, where brands can struggle with inventory visibility and receivables that stretch to 150-180 days, quick commerce can offer clearer inventory visibility and payments within roughly 15 days. For scaled brands, this can potentially create a negative working-capital cycle.

For investors, however, the question is shifting from whether a brand should be on quick commerce to whether its growth on the channel is economically sustainable. The panel members concluded that investors are increasingly looking at customer love for a brand rather than growth driven purely by discounts, alongside profitability and whether margins improve as the business scales.

The discussion also highlighted the changing economics of customer acquisition. D2C channels were once viewed as the preferred route because they gave brands ownership of the customer. If acquiring and retaining customers through their own websites continues to be expensive, investors are increasingly open to marketplace-led growth, where brands can achieve stronger unit economics.

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