Flipkart’s 2025: Crossing The Quick Commerce Rubicon

Even if one splits Flipkart’s two-decade-long journey into two halves, it’s the second decade that stands out as truly transformative. The year 2017 — when Flipkart completed ten years — was a clear break, coming just months before the ecommerce giant was bought over by Walmart. 

The journey since 2018 has been one where Flipkart has time and again been tested, challenged to find new horizons and questioned about everything from how Indian it is to when it will finally deliver profits. 

So unsurprisingly, in the past 12 to 18 months, new questions and expectations have emerged. Those enmeshed in the Flipkart ecosystem such as sellers and consumers wonder if Flipkart will finally nail quick commerce. 

Some want to see an IPO, which many say will be the biggest from the Indian tech startup ecosystem. Yet others say what would really be groundbreaking would be profitability, especially at a revenue scale of more than INR 40,000 Cr (for the entire group as of FY25) and a private valuation of close to $36 Bn.

After 19 years of building one of India’s largest internet companies, Flipkart is again being asked to disrupt. When it began, the ecommerce giant wanted to change online shopping, but today, the game is all about quick commerce. 

With the sector valued at $6 Bn in 2025 and projected to balloon to $40 Bn by 2030, Flipkart can no longer stay on the sidelines when it comes to quick commerce. 

It began with a pilot of Flipkart Quik, which was subsequently rebranded to Flipkart Minutes. While operations formally began at the end of 2024, it was this year that the business became a central focus. Dark stores were expanded fivefold over last year, making one of the fastest infrastructure build-outs in the sector.

Flipkart’s aggression in building the quick commerce business stood out in 2025, even as there was pressure to deliver profits in the early parts of the year. Despite being slow to jump onto QC, both Flipkart and Amazon know they cannot afford to hold back. But while the likes of Zepto, Blinkit and Instamart rose to new heights, Flipkart Minutes seemed like a try-hard this year. 

Flipkart Minutes In 2025: Stepping On The Gas

Flipkart’s long experience in ecommerce gave it deep visibility into Indian consumption patterns. The company had seen early signals: the Indian shoppers were evolving from planned, weekly buying cycles to need-it-now behaviour. Groceries served as the initial trigger, but demand quickly shifted toward broader categories, personal care, essentials, electronics accessories, etc. — all delivered in 10 minutes. For Flipkart, a company already proficient in fulfilment and logistics, this shift was both a threat and an opportunity. The decision to commit to quick commerce was, therefore, not abrupt but driven by observable data and a market moving ahead of traditional ecommerce timelines.

After the pilot in Bengaluru, Flipkart Minutes expanded into Delhi NCR earlier this year. The company then made a key leadership decision: onboarding Dunzo cofounder and CEO Kabeer Biswas to steer the vertical. This was an important signal internally and for the market that Flipkart was not experimenting, it was institutionalising the business.  

Capital was never a constraint. In March, Flipkart’s Singapore holding entity infused INR 3,248 Cr into Flipkart Internet, its marketplace arm, strengthening Minutes’ operational runway. The company also ended a two-year hiring freeze by onboarding new employees, mostly to support the expanding quick commerce network.

By mid-year, Minutes had scaled to nearly 300 dark stores. At an internal town hall in April, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy announced plans to reach 800 dark stores by year-end underscoring Minutes’ centrality to Flipkart’s growth strategy. This ambition extended to core events: during the Big Billion Days, Flipkart’s most important sales period, the company led aggressively on Minutes to absorb demand spikes. 

The momentum continued in 2025. Flipkart Minutes eventually scaled to 500 dark stores by the year’s end, not the 800 originally projected by still the fastest dark store expansion attempted in the Indian quick commerce market. Alongside metros like Chennai, Hyderabad, and Jaipur, Flipkart expanded into tier II and III cities such as Mohali in Punjab and Rohtak in Haryana, a move designed not only to capture demand but also to plug supply-chain nodes across underserved regions. 

The pace of this expansion demonstrated that Flipkart viewed Minutes not as an experiment but as a long-term growth lever. In just under one year, the company had added enough stores to put up a fight against Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart and at least make them uncomfortable. But this is by no means enough. 

Miles Behind The Competition

Despite Flipkart’s strengths, capital, brand equity, warehousing infrastructure, and Ekart logistics engine, the competitive landscape is tightening rapidly. Quick commerce is no longer a category dominated by one or two insurgents. It is now a high-frequency, high burn, battleground shaped by players with deep operational expertise.

Blinkit, now owned by Eternal, controls nearly 50% of the market and already operates around 2,000 dark stores. It targets aggressive store density expansion by 2027, reinforcing its first-mover advantage. Swiggy Instamart and Zepto, each gearing forward 1,100 dark stores, have also broadened their catalogue depth, adding long-tail SKUs to expand average order values. 

Their discount-driven propositions, Instamart’s MaxxSaver and Zepto’s SuperSaver, are designed to push basket sizes upward, a critical metric for achieving contribution-margin break-even in quick commerce.

Brand recall represents another challenge. While Flipkart is a ubiquitous ecommerce name, consumer association with 10-minute delivery still tilts toward Blinkit, Zepto, and Instamart. Overcoming a decade-long perception of “3-5 day delivery” will require sustained marketing investment, brand repositioning at this scale is expensive and time consuming. 

Competition is widening as well. JioMart has announced plans to add 400 dark stores as it deepens its own quick commerce ambitions, leveraging Reliance’s unmatched retail infrastructure. Amazon Now is ending the year with over 300 micro-fulfilment centres across key metros and is scaling steadily. Bigbasket, with its fresh INR 200 Cr in debt capital, is trying to strengthen its quick commerce arm – BB Now. 

The result is a sector where infrastructure density, SKU assortment, and price competitiveness are escalating simultaneously, and where Flipkart, despite its scale, is still a relatively new entrant. 

Besides, Flipkart Minutes just saw the exit of Kabeer Biswas, who was replaced by Kunal Gupta, senior vice president of Flipkart to oversee the operations. Despite finding itself with no recourse but to jump into quick commerce, Flipkart seems to be struggling with the energy and pace needed to truly make big gains in market share. 

One does wonder how this might change in 2026 — will we see Flipkart make a bigger marketing play for Minutes? 

Will Scaling Flipkart Minutes Defer IPO Plans

Rapid expansion of dark stores comes at a cost. Flipkart is ending the year with 500 dark stores, short of the 800-store target. Internally, Minutes has now committed to doubling the network and hitting 1,000 dark stores by March 31, 2026, a pace that implies significantly higher cash burn.

Marketing costs will climb sharply as Flipkart works to rewire consumer perception from traditional ecommerce timelines to near-instant fulfilment. Discounts are already being used aggressively to accelerate user adoption, putting further strain on profitability.

Though Walmart’s backing ensures that Flipkart will not run out of capital, an elevated burn rate is difficult to reconcile with IPO readiness. 

According to an ET report, Flipkart slowed its Minutes expansion earlier this year to halve its monthly burn from $40 Mn, a move directly linked to preparing for a listing in the coming quarters. The message was clear: without discipline in quick commerce, the parent company’s financial profile may appear too volatile for public markets.

Flipkart Internet and EKart have both shown improvement in FY25, lower losses and modest revenue growth. Yet the experience of Instamart, Zepto, and Blinkit illustrates a hard truth: achieving scale in quick commerce requires prolonged cash burn before margin stability emerges. 

Flipkart is entering a segment where unit economics improve only after dense coverage, high frequency, and carefully calibrated assortment, none of which can be achieved cheaply. Interestingly, Walmart-backed PhonePe’s move to file its IPO papers while simultaneously shutting down its hyperlocal service Pincode underscores just how cash-intensive this category remains. 

Meanwhile, Flipkart’s IPO momentum is building. The company recently secured Singapore Court approval for its reverse flip, a critical structural step before filing. It has also appointed former Meta executive Dan Neary, a move widely being read as one to bolster the leadership ahead of a public listing. 

Walmart’s leadership has reiterated that Flipkart will go public “when the time is right,” though without specifying timelines.

The bar for IPO success has also risen. Meesho, significantly younger than Flipkart, delivered a strong listing backed by improved financials and leaner cost structure. Its performance will inevitably serve as a comparison point for investors evaluating Flipkart’s readiness. But the fact that Meesho has swerved quick commerce is interesting. 

For Flipkart, the pressure is now twofold: scale a rapidly growing, burn heavy business while maintaining the financial discipline expected of a public market candidate. There’s no turning back from quick commerce now.

Edited By Nikhil Subramaniam