In today’s Finshots, we unpack why Reliance is going all in on quick commerce and why this business is more complex than just building scale.

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The Story

Every time Reliance enters a new industry, the playbook looks familiar. It enters late, spends aggressively, undercuts competitors, builds scale and captures the market. It did that with telecom, retail, broadband. And now, it wants to do it with groceries too.

Over the past few months, Reliance has started revamping its quick commerce model. It’s embedding dark store setups into its retail outlets. It covers over 4,000 pin codes. It’s waiving delivery fees — even on small orders. And it’s aiming to deliver groceries and essentials in under 30 minutes.

And it’s not hard to see why.

Quick commerce — the promise of delivering daily items in 10–30 minutes — is growing fast. Estimates suggest that the market is set to expand by nearly 75–100% year-on-year. And platforms like Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart have trained urban Indians to expect snacks, milk and even birthday candles at their doorsteps almost instantly.

So for Reliance, this is both an opportunity and a threat. If customers get hooked on ultra-fast delivery, they might stop walking into Reliance Retail’s stores altogether. And with the company preparing for an IPO, that’s not a risk it can afford to ignore.

Also, its core businesses are facing challenges. Oil and petrochemical margins have weakened thanks to global volatility. And Jio, after years of rapid expansion, is looking to nudge up tariffs to boost revenue.

And on the other hand, its retail arm is doing well. Reliance Retail has seen a 2.4x increase in the number of orders for its quick commerce and hyper-local delivery services in the last quarter. So quick commerce offers a tempting way out — a high-growth, high-frequency category that can give the topline a much-needed jolt. And that’s why it’s doubling down on this space.

But here’s the thing. Quick commerce isn’t just quick ecommerce. It’s a completely different business with its own logic and that’s where the challenge for Reliance begins.

Think about it. Traditional ecommerce works on a “hub and spoke” model. You store a wide assortment of goods in central warehouses. Orders come in. You batch them. You deliver in a day or two. The more scale you add, the cheaper things get. But quick commerce flips that model. You need dense local networks. Then every new delivery zone requires its own mini-warehouse (a dark store). And you need pickers and riders working in real time — packing orders in under 2 minutes, navigating city traffic and hitting a sub-30-minute delivery promise.

So while ecommerce is about centralisation and batching, quick commerce is about fragmentation and velocity.

Now think about how Reliance operates.

Its stores are large-format. Some are multi-level. Aisles are built for leisurely browsing, not sprinting pickers. And most store teams are used to managing footfall — not coordinating online orders that need to be picked, packed and dispatched in minutes.

That’s a different muscle. And that’s why players like Blinkit and Zepto built that muscle from scratch. Blinkit redesigned its zones to reduce travel time and improve density. Zepto limited expansion to areas with high repeat demand. Swiggy Instamart leveraged its existing delivery fleet to plug idle time.

Reliance, on the other hand, is retrofitting into its existing stores through JioMart. It’s building quick-commerce zones within smart stores as well as rolling out standalone dark stores.

But even then, there’s still a long way to go.

Because in quick commerce, margins don’t expand with volume the way they do in traditional commerce. If anything, costs grow with complexity. And that’s why quick commerce demands something counterintuitive: focus. That’s what the existing players like Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart have. Reliance, by comparison, is a conglomerate handling mega projects like refineries, telecom towers, multi-city retail chains. Its advantage is scale and integration.

And this isn’t just theory. Reliance tried to shortcut this curve once before — by investing $200 million in Dunzo back in 2022, one of India’s earliest instant delivery startups. But the partnership fizzled. Dunzo reportedly struggled to raise follow-on capital. Its operations got tangled. And earlier this year, Reliance wrote off the entire investment.

So why does Reliance still want to do this in-house?

For starters, distribution. Over 1 million kirana outlets across India already stock Reliance’s FMCG brands like Campa Cola and Independence (its consumer packaged goods label). That gives it backend leverage. Its telecom network, Jio, offers a captive user base. And its digital stack — payments, loyalty and app integration — means it controls every layer of the transaction.

Reliance, to its credit, isn’t promising 10-minute deliveries. It’s sticking to a 30-minute window. That allows for route flexibility, better batching and slightly looser fulfillment pressure. 

Plus, the real test isn’t whether Reliance can deliver one order fast. It’s whether it can do lakhs of them a day, across multiple cities, without burning through cash or breaking operations. Because here’s another first principle of quick commerce: density matters. You can only make money when multiple people within a few kilometers are ordering frequently enough to justify the delivery cost. And that’s what it is currently focusing on — to aggressively expand its dark stores reach.

Reliance has a footprint in thousands of cities. But demand isn’t evenly spread. Smaller towns might not yet have the frequency to justify a 30-minute delivery infrastructure. So the temptation to scale fast just because it can, could backfire.

And it’s not just an Indian problem either.

Internationally, companies like Getir and GoPuff faced similar issues. Getir, once valued at $12 billion, had to exit many of its international markets like the UK and the US after over-expanding and under-delivering. GoPuff had to slash jobs and rethink operations. Capital alone didn’t help but execution did.

So yeah, execution is where this business gets real.

Because quick commerce is a logistics problem dressed up in a convenience wrapper. The average order value is about ₹500. Delivery costs eat up a chunk of that. Add warehousing, spoilage, rider incentives and app discounts — and you’re often looking at not so great unit economics. And that’s why most platforms push private labels, impose small basket surcharges and focus on order stacking.

Can Reliance make this math work?

Maybe. Its integration across telecom, retail and FMCG gives it bundling power. A JioMart order could come with recharge cashback. A Campa Cola pack might be cheaper on JioMart than anywhere else. And that ecosystem play could be powerful.

But the backend still has to deliver. Because this isn’t just about selling groceries. It’s about defending its retail business and keeping millions of customers inside its system in an increasingly competitive market. And we’ll have to wait and watch if it can shift gears fast enough.

Until then…

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