Swiggy Instamart Vs Zepto: Much Ado About Market Share

“Those who tell the stories rule society,” Greek philosopher Plato said centuries ago. The line still holds true in the 21st century, especially for corporations that can shape and control narratives.

Yesterdqay, Swiggy pushed back against a report claiming that Instamart was losing market share to Zepto, after the publication cited an internal HSBC memo. 

The HSBC note suggested shifts in the quick commerce leaderboard, but Swiggy said Redseer had confirmed it shared no data with either HSBC or the publication, calling the reported numbers “baseless” and “misleading.”

This is not the first time it has happened, and neither will it be the last time. In the past couple of years, Zepto and Swiggy have claimed the second position in the ever-intense quick commerce market in India.

For Zepto, it was HSBC this time, Motiwal Oswal in November last year. While for Swiggy Instamart, Axis Capital and Bernstein have remained positive, when it comes to market share maths. 

However, one must ask, what is the criteria behind these market share reports? What decides that one company is performing better than its rival, especially when one of these companies is privately listed and not much is known about them yet. 

Reading Between The Lines 

Very few people outside of market research firms and their paying clients understand how such reports are created. Indeed, many such reports are paid for by companies, as one analyst told us. 

Others said market share estimates in Indian quick commerce are not scientific measurements, they’re approximations built from incomplete and often biased fragments of data. 

Analysts lack access to internal order volumes, GMV, SKU-level data, or city-level splits unless a company chooses to disclose them. 

None of the major players—Zepto, Blinkit, or Swiggy Instamart—publish the granular data needed to calculate market share the way one can in industries with audited shipments or category-level volumes.

That opacity forces analysts to construct “best possible” estimates from whatever slivers they can reach.

What Goes Into Market Reports

A market share report usually pulls together a bunch of imperfect signals. Surveys are one piece: analysts ask people which app they use, how often they order, and what their baskets look like. 

But the results swing wildly depending on whom you ask—a Bengaluru or Hyderabad sample will naturally favour Zepto, while Delhi-NCR will make Blinkit look bigger. If the sample doesn’t reflect the real mix of metros and Tier-1/2 cities, the survey ends up telling you more about the respondents than the market.

Supplier conversations add another layer. Vendors, distributors, and dark-store partners can hint at which platform is moving more volume in certain categories. But they only see their own slice of the chain. 

For example, we were told by market research analysts that a supplier plugged into Blinkit’s Gurugram cluster might be convinced Blinkit is the leader; someone serving Zepto’s Bengaluru network might believe the opposite. With supply chains this fragmented, the feedback for research firms is useful, but almost never the full picture.

In other cases, channel checks—talking to riders, fleet operators, or dark-store managers—give a sense of real-time order pressure, but these signals are noisy too and any data that emerges from them is unreliable. 

Rider counts and store load can change with weather, incentives, festivals, or just a bad week of hiring, so what you capture might be a temporary spike rather than a real trend.

“Each source carries its own blind spots,” a partner at a top consulting firm that has produced similar reports for Indian and Southeast Asian ecommerce markets said. 

The partner added that surveys miss geographies, suppliers see only their patch, channel checks capture snapshots, app-traffic data rarely matches revenue, and private-company opacity forces analysts to backfill blanks with multipliers and inferred throughput.

Unless you “penetrate the company and hack their brain,” 100% confidence is impossible. 

A Game Of Narratives

As per those we spoke to, analysts tweak the narrative until the inputs stop contradicting each other; when surveys, suppliers, and app-traffic trends roughly align, the estimates are deemed stable enough to publish. “But what gets published is still a reconciled story, not empirical truth,” the market research analyst quoted above added.

Notably, this entire process is extremely easy to distort, even without malicious intent.

For instance, if a survey disproportionately samples Bengaluru, Zepto instantly looks like the country’s rising leader. If the analyst leans more heavily on Delhi NCR supplier checks, Blinkit goes to the top.  

“A single enthusiastic supplier, servicing a high-volume cluster, can shift perceived rankings by several percentage points,” said another analyst, who covers the quick commerce sector, but is not authorised to speak to the media. 

Even a two-point difference in survey responses can be framed as a “decisive leadership change” in a brokerage note, despite being statistically meaningless. 

As we indicated above, companies often fund a market research report, to present themselves as market leaders. This has a lot to do with their own vested interests with investors 

And the incentives only deepen the problem. In a sector where valuations, funding rounds, and public market sentiment all hinge on perceived momentum, narratives matter almost as much as numbers. 

“With each platform leading in different cities, income cohorts, order categories, and price bands, the very idea of a single national market share number is technically unsound,” our source added. 

What gets reported is not a measurement, it is a stitched-together narrative shaped by who is looking, where they are looking, and what they choose to weigh more heavily.

The Pattern Repeats

This tug-of-war over market share claims is not unique to quick commerce. Similar clashes have played out across Indian ecommerce for years, with companies routinely questioning the accuracy, sample quality, and intent behind third-party research.

In 2017, Amazon publicly criticised Redseer’s Etailing Leadership Index after the firm placed Flipkart marginally ahead on “most trusted brand” rankings. 

Amazon called the report “poorly informed and speculative,” arguing that the sample sizes were irrelevant and the inputs did not reflect what the company saw on the ground. Flipkart kept the top slot in that report, but the fight highlighted how little consensus existed even then about measurement standards.

The dispute resurfaced in 2022 during the festive-season sale cycle. Redseer said the Flipkart Group led the market with around 62% of GMV, while Meesho had overtaken Amazon on order volume. 

Amazon again dismissed the findings as “speculative” and lacking transparency, saying the methodology was neither detailed nor shared. Redseer stood by its analysis, calling it independent research based on years of tracking the sector.

And in the years since then, such reports have often been disputed by companies that come out worse compared to the competition. So essentially, market share games are all about a narrative; rarely about what’s actually the reality on the ground. 

Edited by Nikhil Subramaniam