Flipkart Minutes quick commerce is no longer a footnote in India’s instant-delivery war. The Walmart-owned service is now processing 1.1 million to 1.2 million orders a day, up from roughly 390,000 to 400,000 in November, according to people familiar with the matter, putting it within striking distance of Swiggy’s Instamart, which handles about 1.4 million daily orders.
That’s a three-year head start being compressed at speed. Instamart launched in 2020, Zepto the year after, both capitalising on pandemic-era demand. Flipkart Minutes only debuted in August 2024.
Flipkart Minutes Quick Commerce vs the Field
The established pecking order remains intact, for now. Blinkit dominates with around 3.4 million to 3.6 million daily orders, followed by Zepto at 2.4 million to 2.6 million, per estimates from market research firm Datum Intelligence. But Flipkart is rapidly closing the gap on the smallest of the three leaders.
Instamart’s own filings put some flesh on what ‘smallest’ actually means. Swiggy’s Q2 FY26 shareholder letter (covering the quarter ended September 2025) reports 17.2 million average monthly transacting users, up from 14.7 million a year earlier, and an average order value of INR 697, compared with INR 499 in Q2 FY25. Those are numbers a late entrant would kill for as a baseline.
Instamart’s dark-store picture is also evolving. Swiggy’s Q4 FY25 shareholder letter recorded 1,021 active dark stores at the end of that quarter, generating 1,190 orders per store per day, and described that period as the peak of Instamart’s adjusted EBITDA losses, at INR 840 crore for the quarter. The direction of travel, then, is toward profitability, even as Flipkart accelerates its attack.
Blinkit is not standing still either. According to Eternal’s Q4 FY25 results, Blinkit added 294 stores in that quarter alone, bringing its total to 1,301 dark stores, while quarterly revenue surged 122% year-on-year to INR 1,709 crore. Visible Alpha consensus estimates, as reported by S&P Global Market Intelligence, suggest quick commerce will account for roughly 69% of Eternal’s revenue in fiscal 2026, up from 24% in fiscal 2025. The incumbents are scaling hard precisely because they can see who is chasing them.
Dark Stores, Repeat Buyers, and a Shrinking Delivery Window
Flipkart’s expansion engine is running fast. Minutes now operates around 1,020 to 1,050 micro-fulfilment centres, up from about 600 in January and roughly 340 a year ago, with approximately 100 new facilities being added every month. The target is 1,500 by the end of 2026.
The infrastructure push is translating into behaviour change. Some 65% to 70% of monthly customers are repeat buyers, and transactions per customer have increased 50% to 60% year-on-year, according to sources familiar with the matter. Average spend sits at ₹400 to ₹500 (approximately $4.20 to $5.20) per order, with fruits, vegetables, dairy, and meat among the fastest-growing categories. Flipkart is also broadening into gourmet, organic, and artisanal products as it looks to nudge basket sizes upward.
Mean delivery time has fallen to about 11 minutes, down from 13 minutes a year ago. That is where the category psychology matters: Satish Meena, an adviser at Datum Intelligence, told TechCrunch that grocery customers simply do not revert to scheduled delivery once they have experienced near-instant fulfilment. ‘Can you go back to scheduled delivery now in grocery? No,’ Meena said. ‘You will not go back.’
Flipkart’s structural edge, Meena argued, lies in its existing customer base, built over years and billions of dollars of acquisition spend. Minutes inherits that audience. ‘Flipkart is already a serious player,’ Meena said. ‘Once you open 1,000 dark stores and [are] doing a million orders per day, it’s serious enough.’
Amazon is running a parallel play. Amazon Now, which launched in early 2025 in select areas of Bengaluru and has since expanded to nine countries including the UAE, Mexico, and the UK, is targeting more than 300 Indian cities and a network of over 1,000 micro-fulfilment centres, backed by a Rs 2,800 crore investment, according to Devdiscourse. The service recorded 25% month-on-month order growth in India. During CEO Andy Jassy’s visit, Amazon committed to a cumulative investment of over $88 billion in India from 2010 to 2030, including a $35 billion tranche announced in 2025 and an additional $13 billion for AI and cloud infrastructure, as reported by Amazon’s newsroom. During that visit, Jassy also toured an Amazon Now micro-fulfilment centre in Mumbai, as The Hindu reported.
Meena framed both Flipkart and Amazon’s moves as defensive as much as offensive: as quick-commerce habits solidify, the e-commerce giants risk surrendering grocery and daily essentials permanently to specialists if they cannot match the speed.
The test for Flipkart Minutes is whether it can sustain the growth curve once the dark-store network stops expanding at 100 units a month. At 1,500 centres it will need order density, not just coverage, to justify the build-out. The repeat-buyer numbers suggest the demand is there. Whether the unit economics follow will determine if Minutes is a credible rival to Blinkit or simply a very well-funded third place.
