Why Amazon seems so calm about being awfully late to quick commerce

**Rachel Varghese** (0:00)
A Blinkit executive was walking through Gulaba Market in South Mumbai when he stopped. In front of him, right in the heart of that jam-packed neighborhood was an Amazon Now duck store, about 2,000 to 3,000 square feet big. He explained that in order to cover an important pocket of South Mumbai, Amazon had opened a store in a spot that even the expansion head of Blinkit could only dream of. Now, if you're from Mumbai, you know exactly how crowded it is and how expensive real estate is. And you probably also know exactly what this place looks like. If you're not, here's a quick overview. You see, this is a densely populated area that sits between landmarks like the Kala Ghota Art District and the BSC or the Bombay Stock Exchange. It's also an affluent part of town, full of exactly the kind of urban professionals that quick commerce apps love. Once, even Blinkit had tried to set up a dark store here. And as you may have guessed, it didn't quite work out that well.
As the executive explained to my colleague, The Ken reporter Noha, dark stores need some serious parking space. For a player like Blinkit, that means enough space for at least 50 to 60 bikes at once.
Meanwhile, Amazon's Colaba store went ahead with a spot with parking space for just 7 or 8 bikes. The executive remarked that this shows exactly how aggressive the quick commerce space is. Now, since Amazon pirated its quick commerce service called Amazon Now in September 2025, the company has been moving quite quickly. It was already 2 years behind Flipkart's quick commerce foray and well behind market leader Blinkit and cash burning Zepto. But the fast movement is working in its favour. Andy Jassy, the CEO, said in the company's March quarter earnings call that orders are growing 25% month on month. Plus, the company is already clocking 450,000 to 500,000 quick commerce orders a day across around 500 dark stores. To put that in context, Blinkit does around 3 million orders a day from over 2,200 micro warehouses. But, Amazon has something its rivals don't. Prime. This paid subscription program that offers users access to free shipping, entertainment and more reached 150 million active users in India in 2025 In fact, Prime members already shopped 5 times more frequently than non-members.
And since the company decided to bundle Amazon now with Prime, Jassy claims members' shopping frequency has tripled. Now, this could very well be a last ditch effort from a company that is very late to the quick commerce party and is well aware of it. Still, for Amazon, the stakes can't possibly be higher than this.
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I am your host, Rachel Varghese and every day of the week, my co-host, Snigdha Sharma and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday, the 15th of June.
At Amazon's global town hall in December, Amit Agarwal, a senior vice president, showed his overseas counterparts a video. A manager present at the town hall told NOHA that the video explained how the back-end process of quick commerce works in India, and also announced that the service was going international. Amazon Now is currently being tested in the US, UK, Mexico, and the UAE with plans to expand further into Europe. The Amazon manager also said that the key to making quick commerce work in India is order density. Without it, you can't be profitable, and actually delivery times suffer as well. For example, Zepto's median delivery time of under nine minutes is only possible in its densest urban clusters. In the sparser areas, that duration actually climbs to 15 to 20 minutes. Even Blinkit has been meeting its 10-minute delivery promise only in select high-density markets. In other places, it's actually shifted to a proximity-based model, where delivery time is a product of dark store density.
But to be fair, the definition of quick commerce has also changed a little. The Amazon manager pointed out that the timelines have now moved from 10 minutes to about 20 minutes or so. And that's actually because of a very recent development. This January, the Labor Ministry gathered representatives from Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy in a closed-door meeting. All three companies were asked to stop promoting the 10-minute service. The point was to ensure the safety of the drivers and others on the road. Soon, time-based delivery promises disappeared from the platform. In fact, Blinkit actually changed its tagline from 10,000-plus products delivered in 10 minutes to 30,000-plus products delivered at your doorstep. And that's also why Amazon Now didn't exactly chase the 10-minute promise when it launched. It started off with a 30-minute delivery window and doesn't plan on changing it. And Amazon Now manager told Nuhua that the current focus is on improving coverage. If the company happens to be able to deliver a portion of those orders faster, then that's a plus, not a necessity.