Amazon To Soon Venture Into Quick Commerce Segment With Launch Of 15-Minute Deliveries In Bengaluru
India is the first market globally for Seattle, US-based Amazon to introduce a 15-minute delivery service.
Amazon and Flipkart have always gone head to head to maintain their authority in the market. Flipkart ventured into quick commerce sometime back with the launch of Minutes, and now Amazon has made its way to the same with the launch of 15-minute delivery. The service will kick off later this month in Bengaluru.
Senior vice president for India and emerging markets at Amazon, Amit Agarwal, "Our goal remains the same, which is that we want to offer the largest selection of products to the largest customer base at the fastest speeds...we do recognise that our urban customer base is keen on getting a small selection of products, mostly everyday essentials, delivered faster,” reported ET.
India is the debut market for Amazon’s 15-minute delivery service, marking a global first for the Seattle-based company. While Agarwal refrained from revealing the service's official name, he mentioned that it will initially provide 1,000–2,000 products for rapid delivery in Bengaluru, with plans to expand to other cities. According to previous reports by ET, the service is internally referred to as "Tez." With this launch, Amazon becomes the second major e-commerce platform to enter India's quick-commerce space, following Flipkart's introduction of "Minutes."
Tough Competition For Amazon
The quick-commerce segment is led by Zomato-owned Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, and Lightspeed-backed Zepto, with other competitors including BigBasket's BB Now and Reliance Retail's JioMart.
In addition to these, specialised platforms such as beauty retailer Nykaa and fashion e-commerce marketplace Myntra have introduced their own rapid delivery services, branded Nykaa Now and M-Now, respectively. While established quick-commerce players have reported their services drawing customers away from broader e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Agarwal minimised the significance of this trend.
Agarwal said, “I don’t have a way to understand how our growth would have been different, but grocery is one of our fastest growing categories…from our perspective, we’re committed to offering the largest selection at the fastest speed. There is a physics to how much you can deploy closer to customers…but here we’re talking about the consumption of a few thousand products. It would be stretching the facts on how things are changing. I appreciate that the customers are enjoying faster deliveries of a few thousand products, but they already come to us and get hundreds of thousands of products delivered in a few hours.”
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