Every consumer brand in India is being asked the same question by its board right now: what's our quick-commerce strategy? And most of them are answering it by building a P&L, discovering the P&L doesn't work, and concluding that the channel doesn't work.
I think that's the wrong conclusion from the right data. The numbers really are bad if you measure them the way you'd measure a marketplace. The problem is that measurement, not the channel.
Why the P&L looks broken
Run the arithmetic honestly on a ten-minute delivery platform and you get commission in the high teens or worse, plus ad spend to be visible at all, plus the fact that basket sizes are small because people are buying one or two things they need now. Stack those against a typical FMCG gross margin and there is very little left. Frequently nothing.
So the deck gets written, the CFO reads the contribution line, and the channel gets classified as unprofitable. Sometimes it gets shut off.
Here's what that analysis leaves out: it counts the cost of appearing in front of a customer, and none of the value of having appeared.
What you're actually buying
Think about where quick commerce sits in someone's day. They open the app because they need something in the next fifteen minutes. They are not browsing, they are not comparing, and critically — they are in the category, at the exact moment of need, with intent to buy right now.
That is the most valuable audience position in consumer marketing. Brands pay enormous sums to television and to Meta to reach people who are merely likely to be in that state at some point.
When I've reframed this for clients, the useful comparison isn't "quick commerce versus marketplace." It's "quick commerce versus the awareness budget."
| Measured as a sales channel | Measured as an awareness channel | |
|---|---|---|
| Question asked | What did it return per rupee? | What did it cost to reach a buyer in-category? |
| Compared against | Amazon, your own D2C site | Meta, display, television |
| Typical verdict | Marginal to negative | Cheap, and the audience is better |
Same spend. Same results. Opposite conclusion, purely from what you set as the denominator.
I'm not arguing you should ignore the losses
This is where this argument usually turns into wishful thinking, so let me be careful.
Reclassifying a channel as awareness does not make its losses disappear. It changes which budget they come out of and what you hold it accountable for. If you move quick commerce into the awareness line, you must then hold it to awareness standards — cost per person reached in-category, category penetration, repeat rate, whether search volume for your brand moves. Those are real metrics with real targets and a channel can fail them.
What you must not do is move it to the awareness budget and then stop measuring it at all. That's not a strategy, that's an excuse, and I've watched it go that way more than once.
Reclassifying a channel is only honest if you also change what it is accountable for. Otherwise you have just moved a loss somewhere nobody looks.
The thing nobody budgets for
One more piece, and it's the one that surprises brands most: on these platforms, your advertising is capped by your distribution.
In one account I looked at, the brand was live in sixteen warehouses. A comparable competitor was in twenty-eight. In the South, it was four against eleven.
Advertising in a city where you have no dark-store presence does nothing at all. Not "less" — nothing. The customer sees the ad, taps, and the product is unavailable in their area. You paid for that tap.
Which means the highest-return lever in quick commerce is frequently not in the ad account. It's a conversation with your supply chain team about warehouse coverage. That's an unglamorous finding to put in a marketing deck, and it's usually the true one.
How I'd approach it if I were starting
- Decide which budget it comes from before you launch. Not after the first quarter's numbers make you uncomfortable. This one decision determines whether the channel survives its own learning period.
- Check your warehouse coverage against a competitor's before spending anything. If you're materially behind, fix that first — every rupee of advertising is multiplied or wasted by this number.
- Set awareness-shaped targets. Cost per in-category reach, new-buyer share, whether branded search rises in cities where you're live. Write them down before you start so nobody moves the goalposts later.
- Expect the contribution line to be thin, and say so upfront. The failure mode here is a founder promised marketplace economics and delivered awareness economics. Set that expectation on day one and the channel gets a fair hearing.
Where I might be wrong
The honest counter-argument: awareness value is genuinely hard to measure, and "it's building the brand" is the oldest way in marketing to defend spend that isn't working. If you can't show branded search rising, or category penetration moving, or repeat purchase improving in the cities where you're live, then you don't have an awareness channel. You have a loss with a story attached.
So take the reframe, and take the obligation that comes with it. Both, or neither.