Delhivery To Launch Dark Stores For Ecommerce Players

Delhivery plans to launch a network of multi-tenant dark stores for “rapid in city delivery” for ecommerce companies.

During a post-earnings call, Delhivery founder and CEO Sahil Barua said the logistics unicorn will also provide ecommerce companies with delivery services that will shorten the delivery cycle to 2-4 hours.

“… the intention is…to launch a network of shared dark store warehousing, which will be     available to ecommerce companies to use on a multi-tenant basis, and then to provide a rapid local delivery…,” Barua said.  

He said that 30-minute or one-hour deliveries are unlikely to disrupt the broader ecommerce space. Only a few “narrow categories”, and within that a set of narrow stock keeping units, would require this service. Delhivery aims to set up dark stores for such categories.

He added that multiple ecommerce companies and D2C brands can use these dark stores to share the costs.

“It’s essentially the process of creating micro fulfilment for most direct-to-consumer brands…,” he added. 

Earlier this year, it was reported that the startup was looking to branch out beyond serving ecommerce orders to meet the soaring demand in the quick commerce space as players like Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy and Instamart are driving the shift.

However, Barua said that the quick commerce space doesn’t quite work out for logistics players in terms of unit economics. Further, he believes that quick commerce’s share in online transactions beyond grocery-related purchases is still pretty low in terms of category penetration and geographical presence. 

This was in contrast to Blinkit CEO Albinder Dhindsa’s statement on the ecommerce vs quick commerce debate. In Zomato’s shareholders’ letter, Dhindsa said that Blinkit has been seeing a shift of non-grocery users from ecommerce players.

Barua said that the unit economics margins are considerably lower for products favoured by quick commerce users compared to ecommerce platforms. “I don’t believe that the unit economics for sub one hour or sub 30-minute delivery for low value products with no significant value density and distances higher than three or four kilometres in an urban environment like India are going to work out,” Barua said.

It is pertinent to note that another logistics major, Shiprocket, also recently echoed the same sentiment and said the startup was not focusing on quick commerce but rapid deliveries for offline stores. It rolled out same-city rapid delivery service earlier this week. 

Meanwhile, Delhivery returned to the black in the first quarter of FY25, posting a net profit of INR 54.3 Cr as against a loss of INR 69 Cr in the previous quarter. Operating revenue grew 5% to INR 2,172 Cr in Q1 FY25 from INR 2,076 Cr in Q4 FY24.