Quick Commerce Is Rewriting Impulse: What Brands Need to Rethink

What this blog covers

Somewhere tonight, a shopper will think of something they need and have it in hand before the thought fully forms. That short wait, the one that used to be a trip, a list, a weekend, has quietly become the new shape of demand. For brands built around the considered purchase, the question is no longer whether to be on quick commerce. It is whether they understand what the ten-minute habit is doing to the way people decide.

The nine o’clock craving

Picture the sofa at nine in the evening. A show is halfway through, someone remembers the coffee ran out that morning, and instead of writing it on a list for Saturday, they pick up a phone. By the time the kettle would have boiled, a rider is already on the way. The craving and the fulfilment now sit inside the same small window of attention, and that window is where a great deal of buying has quietly moved.

For years, wanting something and getting it were separated by friction, a drive, a queue, a delivery slot two days out. That gap did quiet work for brands. It gave people time to reconsider, to remember the name they meant to buy, to be swayed by a shelf or a review. The gap was where marketing lived. What quick commerce has done, more than speed anything up, is close that gap almost entirely. When the distance between the thought and the doorbell shrinks to a short wait, the reconsideration never happens, and the buying decision gets made in a state much closer to reflex than to research.

What we mean by Quick Commerce

Quick commerce, often shortened to q-commerce, is the delivery of a limited, carefully chosen range of everyday products from small local warehouses, usually within ten to thirty minutes of an order. Those warehouses, known as dark stores, sit inside neighbourhoods rather than on the edge of cities, and they carry a fraction of what a full marketplace lists. The model is not a faster version of e-commerce. It is a different behaviour altogether, built around immediacy, small baskets and frequent repeat orders rather than the planned, larger purchases that scheduled delivery was designed to serve.

The weekly shop taught brands the wrong reflexes

Most brand playbooks in India were written for the weekly shop and the considered marketplace journey. Both reward the same things: a shopper who plans, who searches deliberately, who compares options across a wide aisle and arrives with intent already formed. A brand that wins there is one that shows up strongly at the moment of research, with detailed pages, strong reviews and a name the shopper set out to find.

Quick commerce rewards almost none of that. There is little planning, little comparison, and very little patience. The Bain & Company How India Shops Online 2025 report puts the shift in plain terms: quick commerce now accounts for more than two-thirds of all e-grocery orders in India, and the channel is projected to grow at over forty per cent a year through the end of the decade. Demand of that scale, moving at that speed, does not wait for a brand to make its considered case. It rewards the brand that is already present, already stocked and already the obvious answer in the second the craving lands. We have written more on how that faster window behaves in our look at quick commerce and the ten to thirty minute delivery economy.

The reflexes that served the weekly shop, deep pages, patient persuasion, the slow build of consideration, do not translate cleanly into a world where the decision is over before persuasion can begin. This is not a failure of those brands. It is that the ground shifted under a set of habits that were sensible for the era they were built in.

When the shelf becomes an algorithm

Walk into a supermarket and the shelf is a physical thing you can influence, end caps, eye level, the negotiated placement that puts a product where a hand will reach. On quick commerce, that shelf disappears into an app. What a shopper sees when they type “coffee” is a short, ranked list assembled in real time from what the nearby dark store holds, how quickly each product tends to sell, and how well its listing matches the search. The shelf still exists. It has simply become an ordering logic rather than a piece of furniture, and it refreshes for every shopper, in every location, on every search.

That change matters because the old levers of visibility lose their grip. A brand cannot buy the end cap in a system where the end cap is recalculated for each person. What earns a place near the top is a combination of being reliably in stock at that particular store, selling quickly enough to signal demand, and carrying a listing the algorithm can read and trust. Presence stops being a one-time negotiation and becomes something a brand maintains, order by order, store by store.

Impulse has left the grocery aisle

The tidy assumption about quick commerce is that it handles the small emergencies, milk, bread, a forgotten ingredient, and stops there. That assumption is ageing quickly. The same Bain analysis notes that fifteen to twenty per cent of quick commerce order value now comes from categories well beyond grocery, general merchandise, electronics, mobile phones and apparel among them. The ten-minute habit, once it forms around coffee and cleaning supplies, does not stay in its lane. It spreads to the phone charger, the birthday gift bought an hour before the party, the pair of earphones remembered on the way out.

For a brand, that spread is the part worth sitting with. Categories that always assumed a considered journey, where a shopper researches, compares and plans, are finding themselves bought on impulse, in the same reflexive window as a carton of juice. A shopper who would once have spent a week choosing a small appliance now, in some moments, simply wants it before dinner. The behaviour is not replacing the considered purchase everywhere. It is opening a second door into the category, and the same discipline that wins across Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra has to be relearned for a door that opens in seconds.

Planning for a ten-second decision

If the decision now happens in roughly the time it takes to read a search result, the work moves earlier and lower. Earlier, because the brand has to be the answer a shopper already trusts before they open the app, which is a matter of memory and reputation built long before the craving. And lower, into the unglamorous mechanics of the listing itself, a title that matches how people actually search, a pack size that suits a small immediate basket rather than a monthly stock-up, a price that reads as sensible in a glance, and above all, being in stock in that neighbourhood at that hour.

None of this is the language of a considered campaign, and that is rather the point. The considered campaign still matters for the shopper who plans. But a growing share of demand is being decided in a window too short for persuasion, where the brand either is the easy answer or it is not there at all. Planning for that means treating availability, findability and the readiness of the listing as brand work, not back-office housekeeping, because in the ten-second decision, those things are the marketing.

What this looks like in a festive rush

You can see the shape of this in a festive window as unforgiving as they come. Rakshabandhan compresses a season’s worth of those quick, reflexive purchases into a few days, and working with Gits Food Products through it, a short sale, perishable stock, thin margins, and newly launched products carrying little ad history against established names with deeper portfolios, the task was to become the easy answer fast, without letting festive costs erode profit.

On Zepto, the new launches and the classic range grew together to roughly five times their usual run-rate, return on ad spend rose 53%, cost per acquisition fell 25%, and the brand outgrew its category’s GMV by about 25%. The campaign later took a Silver at the e4M Performance Marketing Awards 2025. What earned it was the discipline behind the spend rather than its size, being present and findable in the exact windows the buying happened, and adjusting as the festival moved. We shared the full story on LinkedIn.

The question underneath the convenience

It is tempting to read all of this as a speed story, as though quick commerce simply made shopping faster and the job is to keep up. The more interesting shift is quieter. When the gap between wanting and having closes, people stop rehearsing their choices. They reach for whatever the moment makes easy, and over enough moments, easy becomes loyal. The brand that keeps showing up in that narrow window is not just winning a sale. It is being written into a habit that forms below the level of deliberate choice.

So the question for a brand is not really how fast it can deliver, because that is the platform’s job, not the brand’s. The question is whether it has earned the kind of familiarity that survives a decision made in seconds, without a shelf to browse or a moment to reconsider. That is a harder thing to build than a campaign, and a more durable thing to own. Worth asking, before the next festive rush arrives: in the ten seconds a shopper gives the category, is the brand already the answer, or still waiting to be found?

Closing

The brands adapting to this are the ones treating the ten-minute shelf as somewhere their reputation is made, not merely somewhere their products appear. That is the work Lyxel&Flamingo does alongside brand teams, reading how demand is actually forming on quick commerce and building the presence that meets it. If you are rethinking what your brand looks like in that narrow window of decision, our marketplace team would be glad to walk through it with you, and bring the questions worth answering first.