A decade ago, Amazon taught India’s shoppers to wait a day or two for a package. The market has since taught Amazon something harder to swallow: in the biggest cities, the standard is now ten minutes.
The company plans to answer with money. Amazon will invest $3 billion to expand its quick-commerce business in India by 2030, according to two people with direct knowledge of the plans, the company’s largest bet on a sector where local rivals moved first and moved faster. The plan calls for roughly $1 billion by the end of 2027 and another $2 billion by 2030, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the plan is confidential.
Amazon declined to comment on the figure. But the company did not hide its urgency. It said its quick-commerce arm has crossed $1 billion in annualized gross sales over the past three months, calling it the fastest-growing e-commerce business in Amazon India’s history.
The market the company is chasing barely existed a few years ago. Quick commerce, the delivery of groceries and household goods within minutes from small neighborhood warehouses, has grown from nothing into a $19 billion business in India and is expected to more than double to $41 billion by 2030, according to Datum Intelligence. It has changed how urban Indians buy everything from milk to iPhones.
The model the locals pioneered is built on density. Each dark store carries a few thousand fast-moving items, produce, dairy, packaged food, phone chargers, packed into a space no bigger than a corner shop within a few kilometers of its customers. Riders on two-wheelers make the last mile. The result is delivery measured in minutes, and a cost structure that works only at high volume in tightly packed cities.
Amazon arrived late. The category is dominated by local players, Blinkit, owned by Eternal; Swiggy’s Instamart; and Zepto, which is preparing an IPO, which together control 77 percent of the market and operate more than 4,500 stores. Walmart’s Flipkart has grabbed an 11 percent share with more than 1,000 stores. Amazon sits at about 6.2 percent.
The investment is aimed squarely at closing that gap. The centerpiece is a buildout of small warehouses that feed its Amazon Now service, the network from which rapid deliveries ship. The company is targeting roughly 1,300 such stores by April next year, up from about 750 today, one of the people said. “Expansion needs money,” the source added.
Amazon’s early attempts to answer were modest. Its Amazon Now service began as a limited pilot in a handful of cities, and for a long time the company treated rapid delivery as an experiment rather than a priority. The new investment is an acknowledgment that the experiment is over and the market has moved on without it.
The push comes with risks that have nothing to do with rivals. India’s government in January ordered delivery companies to stop advertising services as “10-minute” deliveries, a response to concerns about rider safety as couriers race through residential streets. Amazon also faces a pending antitrust case from 2024 in which the watchdog found it gave preference to select sellers, allegations the company denies.
The stakes are high because India is one of the few large markets where Amazon still sees room to grow its retail business from a small base. The company has spent years building data centers, cloud operations and its marketplace there, and it has described the country as a key growth market. Quick commerce is now the fastest-moving part of that market, and losing it to local competitors would mean losing the next generation of urban shoppers.
Analysts said the logic is simple: the customers who now expect a carton of milk in ten minutes are the same customers who will buy everything else online for years to come. Whoever owns that habit owns the market’s future. The race is being decided block by block, in dense neighborhoods where a warehouse the size of a small shop can serve a radius that a large fulfillment center never could. Amazon is betting that $3 billion can buy it the network it skipped.
Behind the headline number is a race for scale that has already reshaped the sector’s ownership. Blinkit and Zepto have raised billions of dollars and added stores at a pace that left slower entrants scrambling for the dense urban parcels where quick delivery actually works. Amazon’s plan is less a bet on a new idea than a late arrival with deep pockets trying to buy its way into a market that rewards whoever owns the most stores on the most street corners.
Whether the money is enough is the open question. Its rivals are spending as well, and the sector’s economics, thin margins, high wages for riders, relentless discounting, have not yet proven profitable for anyone at scale. But the contest matters beyond groceries. Quick commerce has become a beachhead from which the winning platforms push into electronics, apparel and other higher-margin categories, eroding the territory that once belonged to Amazon’s main marketplace. Every ten-minute delivery of a phone charger is a sale the company would once have counted as its own. Three billion dollars is the price Amazon has put on winning that fight back.
