Quick commerce is the delivery of groceries and household items within about ten minutes, from small warehouses called dark stores near the customer's home. It is often shortened to q-commerce. A quick commerce app is the app through which you place these orders.
How can an order arrive in ten minutes? The store is very close, and the items are ready on a shelf. A dark store serves only the homes within about 2 to 3 km. It stocks a few thousand items, chosen for that neighbourhood. No customer walks in, so the shelves are arranged for fast picking, not for browsing. The ten minutes are divided roughly like this: about two minutes to pick and pack the order, and about seven minutes for the ride.
For instance, a mother in Ahmedabad finds at 6:45 a.m. that there is no milk for her son's breakfast and only one diaper left. She orders 1 litre of milk, a pack of diapers and a loaf of bread, worth ₹1,020. The dark store is 1.8 km away. At 6:46, a picker in the store receives the order on a handheld scanner. A warehouse management system shows him the shelves in walking order: the dairy chiller, then the diaper rack, then the bread shelf. The bag is packed by 6:48. A rider who is waiting at the store leaves at 6:49 and rings her bell at 6:55, nine minutes after she ordered.
The milk was there because the app predicted it. Demand forecasting predicts the sales of every item in every dark store, hour by hour. Say this store usually sells about 90 litres of milk between 6 and 9 a.m. on a weekday. Then the night's restocking, from a larger warehouse in the city, must bring at least that much. If the forecast is too low, items run out and orders are lost. If it is too high, milk and bread expire and are thrown away. Larger warehouses that restock the stores are part of e-commerce fulfilment.
Prices change often. The app watches what rival apps charge for the same items through competitor price monitoring, sometimes several times a day. Delivery and handling fees may go up in the rain or late at night, when many people order and few riders are free. This is dynamic pricing. Route optimisation software assigns each order to a rider.
How is this different from an online marketplace? A marketplace offers lakhs of products from large warehouses far away, and delivers them in a day or more. Quick commerce offers a few thousand products from a store nearby, and delivers them in minutes. Some large retailers now pack app orders in their own shops instead of dark stores. This is called omnichannel retail.