Amazon announced that its ultra-fast delivery platform, Amazon Now, has achieved an annualised gross sales run rate of $1 billion in India over the past three months.
The company stated that orders on Amazon Now have doubled every quarter since its launch, making it the fastest-growing e-commerce segment in Amazon India’s history.
This milestone comes just before the festive season, at a time when the company is facing mounting competition from quick-commerce players such as Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart and Flipkart Minutes.
The company has expanded Amazon Now to four times as many cities in under 10 weeks, bringing delivery-within-minutes services to more than 60 cities and towns across India ahead of the festive season.
In addition to major metropolitan areas, this service is now available in smaller towns such as Padubidri and Dharwad in Karnataka, Tirupati and Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, Gurdaspur and Jalandhar in Punjab, Vellore in Tamil Nadu, Warangal in Telangana, and Berhampur in Odisha, among others.
These orders are delivered within minutes through a network of over 750 micro-fulfilment and urban fulfilment centres.
In a brief span, Amazon Now has surpassed $1 billion in annualized gross sales in India, becoming the fastest-growing e-commerce division in Amazon India’s history.
"We are humbled by the customer response, with orders doubling every quarter,” said Samir Kumar, country manager, Amazon India.
“We are on track to expand to 100 cities by Diwali, taking delivery-in-minutes from Gurdaspur and Hoshiarpur in the north to Vembayam and Alamcode in the south.
People familiar with the development said Amazon Now’s average order value is around Rs 540, with the company handling about 700,000 orders a day. They said Amazon Now has a 10 per cent market share by orders and 14 per cent by value.
A recent CLSA report states that Blinkit represented nearly 30 per cent of dark stores in the country’s top 10 cities and over 34 per cent nationwide, and held the highest number of stores in six of those cities, while Zepto led in three of the other four.
CLSA noted that with Blinkit operating in over 180 cities, the company is well placed to secure a disproportionately large share of the market as adoption extends beyond India’s major metropolitan areas.
According to CLSA’s tracking, quick-commerce services now operate in 477 cities nationwide, with the top 10 cities alone hosting 3,536 dark stores across the five platforms it follows: Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, Flipkart Minutes and BigBasket.
According to the report, within the top 10 cities, Flipkart Minutes has already overtaken Swiggy Instamart in both the number of dark stores and PIN code coverage. CLSA’s data shows that Flipkart Minutes operates 627 dark stores in these cities, compared with Swiggy Instamart’s 615, while BigBasket lags behind with 497.
