Flipkart Minutes, the ten-minute delivery service run by Walmart's Indian subsidiary, is handling between 1.1 million and 1.2 million orders a day, up from about 390,000 to 400,000 last November, TechCrunch reports, citing people familiar with the matter.

The service launched in August 2024.

Where that puts it

Behind the leaders, but no longer far behind the third.

Blinkit runs 3.4 to 3.6 million orders a day and Zepto 2.4 to 2.6 million, on figures from Datum Intelligence. Swiggy Instamart is on roughly 1.4 million, which puts Flipkart within reach of third place.

Satish Meena, an adviser at Datum Intelligence, gave the assessment plainly: "Flipkart is already a serious player."

The dark store race

Quick commerce is not really a delivery business. It is a real estate business with couriers attached.

A ten-minute promise cannot be met from a warehouse on the edge of a city. It requires a dense grid of small stockrooms, known as dark stores, close enough to customers that the last leg takes minutes. Whoever has more of them, in the right places, wins, and everyone in the sector is building at once.

Flipkart had 600 dark stores in January and has between 1,020 and 1,050 now, adding roughly a hundred a month, with a target of 1,500 by the end of the year. Swiggy Instamart has more than 1,200 across over 130 cities. Amazon Now has announced plans for more than a thousand micro-fulfilment centres.

Flipkart's average delivery time has come down from about 13 minutes a year ago to about 11.

The number that matters most

One figure in the reporting is worth more than the order counts, and it belongs to a competitor. More than 45 percent of Swiggy Instamart's dark stores are said to have positive contribution margins.

Contribution margin is what is left from an order after the costs of fulfilling that specific order. A network where fewer than half the stores clear that bar is a network where the majority of sites still lose money on every delivery, and growth makes the losses larger rather than smaller. That is the state of the industry leader by that measure. No equivalent figure is given for Flipkart, and none for Blinkit or Zepto.

Which is the thing to hold in mind about the whole sector. Four well-funded companies are competing on speed and coverage in the same cities, at prices set by whoever is willing to lose the most, and the reporting we have contains no evidence that any of them makes money overall.

What is sourced and how

Almost all of these numbers are estimates rather than disclosures. The order volumes come from unnamed people familiar with the matter; the competitive figures come from Datum Intelligence, a research firm. None of the four companies is publicly reporting quick-commerce order counts, and we could not reach a second publication.