Flipkart's Q-Commerce Vertical Minutes To Out Run Rivals In Non-Metros: Drools' Shashank Sinha

Flipkart's Q-Commerce Vertical Minute To Out Run Rivals In Non-Metros: Drools' Shashank Sinha

SUMMARY

The pet food brand’s CEO predicts that Flipkart's Minutes can outdo other quick commerce players in smaller towns and cities

Sinha confirmed that the brand has onboarded Flipkart’s quick commerce arm even though its services are currently restricted to parts of Bengaluru

Even as Drools wants to capture the full potential of the quick commerce wave, its CEO confirmed that the company conducts 60% of its operations through the offline medium

Speaking during a session on “D2C Brands’ Playbook To Marketplace Success” at Inc42’s D2C Summit, pet food brand Drools’ CEO Shashank Sinha made a prediction that Flipkart’s quick commerce offering, Flipkart’s Minutes, has the potential to outdo other quick commerce players in smaller towns and cities.

It is on the back of this hunch that the D2C brand has been quick to list on the platform. Pertinent to mention that Flipkart’s quick commerce service is currently only live in Bengaluru.

Even as Drools wants to capture the full potential of the quick commerce wave, its CEO confirmed that the company conducts 60% of its operations through the offline medium.

He added that the company currently operates close to 43,000 stores across the country and has tie ups with 600 distributors.

Meanwhile, highlighting how critical the non-metro market is for D2C players, Libas’ founder and CEO Sidhant Keshwani said that the share of Tier II and III cities in online businesses has doubled to 50% in the last 5-6 years.

It is this opportunity that giants like Flipkart want to cash in on. Notably, Flipkart has been focussed on expanding its reach in non-metro cities for some time now.

Earlier this year, the company rolled out the same-day delivery services for multiple products across 20 Indian cities, including Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, Chennai, Delhi, Guwahati, Hyderabad and Indore among others.

Vital to highlight here that popular players like Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart have yet to penetrate deeper into the aforementioned markets. Since the metro city market sees limited modern retail revenue share, these players target top 10 Indian cities, including Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata.

Earlier, Zepto’s cofounder and CEO Aadit Palicha said that India’s top 40 cities provide enough headroom for Zepto and the ilk to grow.