Quick commerce began as a way to solve urgent, last-minute purchases. It has now become a mainstream buying habit — one that brings consumers back multiple times a week and compresses decision-making into minutes. Between 2023 and 2025, the category scaled rapidly.
The 10-minute delivery market, estimated at around $6 Bn today, is projected to expand to $35–$40 Bn by 2030. Over the same period, gross order value rose from $3.1 Bn in 2023 to $7.4 Bn in 2025, signalling just how quickly the format has moved from novelty to routine.
The ‘let me try this once’ attitude of the Indian consumer has evolved into a default behaviour, with at least 42% people living in Tier I cities opting for 10-minute deliveries for their everyday household needs. When an app grabs the user’s attention with such stickiness, it stops being just a logistical tool and starts being an attention surface that attracts marketers.
What makes quick commerce distinct from its parent, ecommerce or powerful social media? It is the predictability of returns. Users return to the apps multiple times a week. This has unfolded a plethora of opportunities for marketers to explore. Traditional advertising, such as ecommerce or social media, does not offer such repeat engagement. The value of every pixel changes on a quick commerce screen. No wonder social media is losing its shine with returns on ad spends ebbing out.
“On social media, the default user mode is entertainment, leading to high ad fatigue and sub-1% CTRs. A user, in contrast, opens a quick commerce app to complete a specific task or fix a last-minute need. Because the context is inherently transactional, the platforms can place sponsored tiles, bundles, and in-cart prompts right next to an active basket,” said Umair Mohammad, who founded Nitro Commerce as an AI-based marketing services startup.
This granular data dramatically raises the relevance and captures high-intent users who are ready to buy. When a brand shows up next to an active search query or in a live cart, it becomes relevant, and this intent-led visibility becomes a high-value, non-endemic ad property.
Non-endemic ads are those placed by brands in retail environments where they don’t sell their products directly, but leverage the retail customer data to target the audience, based on shared interests or demographics.
Quick commerce platforms hold rich first-party signals, including basket size, category mix, order timing, and locality that perfectly map the demand for non-endemic categories like financial products, mobility, and OTT.
With this data, advertisers can accurately measure if a campaign moved physical volumes in specific pin-codes or store radii, and easily correlate that data with offline signals like physical store visits or auto test drives.
The real power of quick commerce as a visibility channel lies in two structural advantages: high-frequency usage and deterministic first-party data. Unlike ecommerce, where a user might transact once a month, quick commerce operates on compressed, repeat cycles. Users place multiple orders a month, and each order generates hard, concrete signals, such as which category, what time of day, what basket size, and which neighbourhood.
That repetition offers brands steady and predictable exposure. Every one of those sessions is logged, tied to a real address, and backed by an actual transaction. As third-party cookies fade, this becomes far more valuable. Going beyond who’s buying, quick commerce platforms know what they are buying regularly, when they are buying it, where they live, and so on.
The wider industry has begun recognising this shift, as quick commerce media networks are on course to average a 21% growth between 2023 and 2027. Retail media, which claims a major slice of the digital ad pie, too, sees the sharpest spike coming from quick commerce. Advertisement spends on the quick commerce big three – Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart – jumped from ₹1,325 Cr to ₹4,000 Cr in 2025, surging 202% in one year, with projections to reach ₹6,000 Cr by 2026, implying another 50% growth.
These figures reflect that brands are not treating quick commerce as an add-on channel but as a revenue engine that sits close to the point of sale. And, according to Mohammad, the share of voice (SoV) becomes critical for brands at this juncture.
“In Q-commerce, purchasing decisions are compressed into a few seconds on the top search results and first rows. Brands that repeatedly dominate these high-impact slots capture mindspace and category share. Therefore, your share of those prime impressions tracks much closer to the actual share of the market than CPC does in this compressed environment,” he said.
But there are some limitations too. When brands that have nothing to do with groceries start advertising on a quick commerce platform, things can go wrong, too.
These ads get heavier than standard product listings, which can slow the app down. Second, any intrusive ad can break the seamless experience of quick commerce platforms, which is one of their key moats, and third, the ad can simply feel out-of-place, which can adversely affect a user’s trust in the platform.
“Anything that slows the user down on a platform which they use to complete tasks in minutes risks lower engagement and high drop-off,” Mohammad pointed out. He also shared how brands can tackle it. “Platforms can solve this by tightening contextual rules, serving BFSI ads only on high-value baskets, or telecom ads on heavy digital-consumption signals, and integrating them into native, low-friction placements like post-purchase confirmation screens or slim, non-intrusive tiles.”
As quick commerce adds another facet beyond utility – the media layer – execution has come up as a major issue. Platforms sit on high-intent traffic, but unlocking value from it without hurting user experience requires superior infrastructure. This is where an intelligent layer like Zodiac by Nitro becomes critical.
Zodiac functions as an AI copilot for brands navigating quick commerce, bringing agentic capabilities that help teams continuously optimise their performance across platforms. It stitches together sales, inventory and advertising signals into unified shopper and SKU-level profiles, allowing brands to identify performance patterns across dark stores and quick commerce platforms without relying on fragmented dashboards or manual reporting.
Using Nitro’s solutions, these profiles can then be activated across the quick commerce network, from stock decisions and purchase orders to ad targeting on Blinkit, Zepto, and Instamart, closing the loop between data and revenue in real time.
“Nitro has four layers working as one. The four layers – Identity resolution, intent-led media, agentic engagement, and real-time retention – are all connected. So, the moment a user browses, drops off, or comes back for a second purchase, Nitro knows what to do next,” Mohammad said.
Instead of static campaigns, platforms can run intent-led flows that move users closer to conversion while staying native to the shopping journey by using Nitro.
“Building an end-to-end ad-tech stack from scratch – identity graphs, audience managers, billing, reporting, and compliance, is incredibly slow, capex-heavy, and distracts from core roadmap items like logistics and assortment. Nitro provides these primitives as ready-to-use modules,” Mohammad told Inc42.
But this opportunity comes with a caveat. If monetisation overwhelms experience, the very habit that powers this channel can erode.
The next phase of growth will not be defined by how many ad platforms can squeeze in, but by how intelligently they balance relevance, speed and trust. Those who get that equation right will not just move groceries faster. They will move budgets, market share and long-term brand equity in the process.
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