Blinkit is coming for Amazon’s shelf
80,000 SKUs, gourmet formats, owned inventory; Eternal’s quick commerce arm is evolving from a convenience service into the infrastructure for online retail
- Jul 24, 2026,
- Updated Jul 24, 2026 12:41 PM IST
Two crore and fifty lakh rupees.
That is the cost of building a Blinkit store, including its share of the warehousing behind it, more than double what it was a year ago, and the strongest number in Eternal’s Q1 FY27 shareholders’ letter.
“Quick commerce is not asset-light, unlike our other businesses,” the company says in the letter. It has invested roughly Rs 3,000 crore over four years to build 19 million square feet of stores and warehousing across more than 300 cities. “This is the most critical building block of our business,” the letter adds, “and also our biggest differentiator.”
As a result of this push, Blinkit has consolidated its position as Eternal’s largest consumer business, accounting for 76% of the consolidated adjusted revenue in the June quarter. The quick-commerce business reported adjusted revenue of Rs 15,664 crore (up 552% year-on-year), compared with Rs 3,537 crore for the food delivery business (up 33% y-o-y), as Eternal’s overall revenue crossed the Rs 20,000 crore mark for the first time.
But the two models are not comparable on that basis. Food delivery is a commission-based business, while the quick commerce business owns its inventory and books the full value of goods sold. Net order value, therefore, is a better comparison. Even on that measure, Blinkit recorded Rs 17,132 crore in the June quarter (up 86% y-o-y), against Rs 10,769 crore for food delivery (up 20% y-o-y).
The other interesting thing to note here is that average order value hasn’t changed much. For the June quarter, Blinkit recorded an average net order value of Rs 518, compared with Rs 521 a year earlier, which means that the 86% increase in net order value has come almost entirely from more customers ordering more often.
Those numbers alone make for a strong earnings story. But read the shareholders’ letters over the last five to six quarters and a much more comprehensive image begins to appear. It is not just that the food delivery business is past its prime. It is not even that the quick commerce business is bigger than food delivery. Or that more Indians now shop on Blinkit each month than order food on Zomato. Quarter after quarter, management’s attention has moved farther from restaurant orders and towards dark stores, warehouse capacity, inventory ownership, and so on.
Eternal today is more Blinkit than anything else, and the evolution of the quick commerce business will decide the future of Eternal, and possibly of Indian e-commerce. “Blinkit has become an extremely relevant player. So much so that we don’t talk about the food vertical when we talk about Eternal,” says Ankur Bisen, senior partner at management consulting firm The Knowledge Company. “The Indian e-commerce space can't be imagined without Blinkit in it, standalone or as a strategic piece in a larger empire.”
Blinkit’s evolution over the past five-six quarters is the story of a company moving beyond the pursuit of growth and into the business of building retail infrastructure. The number of stores has grown from 1,544 in June 2025 to 2,443 in June 2026. The company has also revised the capital required per store from Rs 1 crore to Rs 2.5 crore, and the sales expected from that store from Rs 7 lakh a day to Rs 11 lakh over the same period.
The expansion is a result of the change in the company’s business model. In July 2025, Blinkit ran about 3% of its net order value on its own inventory and told shareholders it would move to owning stock over the following two or three quarters. Today, around 90% of its net order value runs on its own stock. Owning the shelf changed its composition as assortment widened from groceries into beauty, electronics and home goods. Ergo, bigger stores and higher setup costs. The company is also betting on premiumisation through the launch of gourmet stores in select locations in the top eight cities. Last quarter, the company said it was offering close to 80,000 SKUs in Delhi-NCR, roughly 50,000 in the next seven cities, and 20,000 beyond them. It is no longer just a grocery delivery business.
“The dark store-led growth is almost over,” says Satish Meena, founder of research platform Datum Intelligence. “Focus is on increasing the size of dark stores, premiumisation and adding more categories and SKUs.”
It has also changed the competitive landscape.
Swiggy, for example, has stopped pursuing growth at any cost and has shifted its focus towards improving margins and increasing throughput from its existing network. Instamart added seven dark stores in the March quarter, against 316 in the same quarter a year earlier, taking its network to 1,143 stores. The management argued that the business was operating at only about 40% utilisation and could support significantly higher volumes without a proportionate increase in capital expenditure. The company is yet to declare its June quarter results, which might present a clearer picture.
BigBasket, despite the backing of the Tata group, has struggled to emerge as a meaningful challenger in quick commerce. Zepto remains the only pure-play quick-commerce company attempting to match Blinkit’s pace, but at a considerable cost. The company reported a net loss of Rs 5,905 crore on revenue of Rs 22,623 crore in FY26 as it continued to invest aggressively ahead of its planned IPO. Meena says Zepto “needs to work a lot on the customer and brand side.”
“The overall opportunity in quick commerce is limited, meaning Blinkit’s growth is happening directly at the cost of the other players,” says Bisen. “The market simply does not have the depth to absorb so many standalone players.”
Flipkart and Amazon, both late entrants to the quick commerce race, are speeding up expansion to defend their broader e-commerce franchises.
Amazon launched Amazon Now across India’s metros last year. Last month, it announced more than 100 Urban Fulfilment Centres in five cities, larger-format facilities carrying four times the selection currently available on Amazon Now, adding apparel, electronics, jewellery, luggage and furniture. They sit on top of more than 1,000 micro-fulfilment centres across 100 cities.
“Amazon’s rollout is still not the smoothest from the customer experience point of view,” says Meena. “But once they stabilise it, it will pose a challenge to Blinkit.” Blinkit, he says, remains the benchmark on customer experience. Flipkart’s Minutes, launched in August 2024, crossed 1,000 micro-fulfilment centres across 130 cities in June. It is targeting 1,500 by the end of the year and is expanding mainly in tier-2 and tier-3 cities rather than contesting the metros.
For much of its existence, Blinkit has been measured against Zepto and Instamart, competing on store density, order value, delivery times, and market share. They remain its closest rivals. But the more Blinkit expands its assortment, the more it competes in the larger e-commerce category, and the closer it gets to Amazon’s shelf.
Eventually, the two categories—e-commerce and quick commerce—will converge.
“It is inevitable. Only on the promise of quick commerce selling need-based categories, you can’t compete with Amazon,” says Bisen. “For Amazon, to penetrate and grow its base from where it is today, it will have to imbibe the quick commerce trend that consumers in urban India have adopted. So, the two have to meet.”
To be sure, Blinkit is still some distance away from that scale. “Blinkit’s run rate is around $7.5-8 billion, while Amazon’s is around $25-26 billion, and Flipkart’s around $30 billion,” says Meena. That gap is both the opportunity and the problem.
Blinkit made Rs 102 crore in adjusted EBITDA in the June quarter on net order value of Rs 17,132 crore. That is a margin of 0.6%, against the 6% Eternal says the business should deliver at steady state. And the arithmetic on capital per store is not settled yet. It has a long way to go.
Amazon spent years building one of India’s largest online marketplaces by expanding selection and gradually reducing delivery times. Blinkit has taken the opposite route. Both are now spending on the same asset: inventory held close to where people live.
“Going forward, e-commerce has to be looked at as the sum of all these parts residing under one umbrella,” says Bisen. “It is a sign of a maturing ecosystem, rather than a hyper-competitive space where each category or delivery speed needs to be evaluated separately.”
For years, quick commerce was viewed as a niche within online retail—a convenience service for groceries and forgotten essentials. The race is no longer about who can deliver groceries the fastest. It is about who builds the default infrastructure for everyday shopping in India.
Pradip K. Saha is the author of The Learning Trap: How Byju’s Took Indian Edtech for a Ride.
Two crore and fifty lakh rupees.
That is the cost of building a Blinkit store, including its share of the warehousing behind it, more than double what it was a year ago, and the strongest number in Eternal’s Q1 FY27 shareholders’ letter.
“Quick commerce is not asset-light, unlike our other businesses,” the company says in the letter. It has invested roughly Rs 3,000 crore over four years to build 19 million square feet of stores and warehousing across more than 300 cities. “This is the most critical building block of our business,” the letter adds, “and also our biggest differentiator.”
As a result of this push, Blinkit has consolidated its position as Eternal’s largest consumer business, accounting for 76% of the consolidated adjusted revenue in the June quarter. The quick-commerce business reported adjusted revenue of Rs 15,664 crore (up 552% year-on-year), compared with Rs 3,537 crore for the food delivery business (up 33% y-o-y), as Eternal’s overall revenue crossed the Rs 20,000 crore mark for the first time.
But the two models are not comparable on that basis. Food delivery is a commission-based business, while the quick commerce business owns its inventory and books the full value of goods sold. Net order value, therefore, is a better comparison. Even on that measure, Blinkit recorded Rs 17,132 crore in the June quarter (up 86% y-o-y), against Rs 10,769 crore for food delivery (up 20% y-o-y).
The other interesting thing to note here is that average order value hasn’t changed much. For the June quarter, Blinkit recorded an average net order value of Rs 518, compared with Rs 521 a year earlier, which means that the 86% increase in net order value has come almost entirely from more customers ordering more often.
Those numbers alone make for a strong earnings story. But read the shareholders’ letters over the last five to six quarters and a much more comprehensive image begins to appear. It is not just that the food delivery business is past its prime. It is not even that the quick commerce business is bigger than food delivery. Or that more Indians now shop on Blinkit each month than order food on Zomato. Quarter after quarter, management’s attention has moved farther from restaurant orders and towards dark stores, warehouse capacity, inventory ownership, and so on.
Eternal today is more Blinkit than anything else, and the evolution of the quick commerce business will decide the future of Eternal, and possibly of Indian e-commerce. “Blinkit has become an extremely relevant player. So much so that we don’t talk about the food vertical when we talk about Eternal,” says Ankur Bisen, senior partner at management consulting firm The Knowledge Company. “The Indian e-commerce space can't be imagined without Blinkit in it, standalone or as a strategic piece in a larger empire.”
Blinkit’s evolution over the past five-six quarters is the story of a company moving beyond the pursuit of growth and into the business of building retail infrastructure. The number of stores has grown from 1,544 in June 2025 to 2,443 in June 2026. The company has also revised the capital required per store from Rs 1 crore to Rs 2.5 crore, and the sales expected from that store from Rs 7 lakh a day to Rs 11 lakh over the same period.
The expansion is a result of the change in the company’s business model. In July 2025, Blinkit ran about 3% of its net order value on its own inventory and told shareholders it would move to owning stock over the following two or three quarters. Today, around 90% of its net order value runs on its own stock. Owning the shelf changed its composition as assortment widened from groceries into beauty, electronics and home goods. Ergo, bigger stores and higher setup costs. The company is also betting on premiumisation through the launch of gourmet stores in select locations in the top eight cities. Last quarter, the company said it was offering close to 80,000 SKUs in Delhi-NCR, roughly 50,000 in the next seven cities, and 20,000 beyond them. It is no longer just a grocery delivery business.
“The dark store-led growth is almost over,” says Satish Meena, founder of research platform Datum Intelligence. “Focus is on increasing the size of dark stores, premiumisation and adding more categories and SKUs.”
It has also changed the competitive landscape.
Swiggy, for example, has stopped pursuing growth at any cost and has shifted its focus towards improving margins and increasing throughput from its existing network. Instamart added seven dark stores in the March quarter, against 316 in the same quarter a year earlier, taking its network to 1,143 stores. The management argued that the business was operating at only about 40% utilisation and could support significantly higher volumes without a proportionate increase in capital expenditure. The company is yet to declare its June quarter results, which might present a clearer picture.
BigBasket, despite the backing of the Tata group, has struggled to emerge as a meaningful challenger in quick commerce. Zepto remains the only pure-play quick-commerce company attempting to match Blinkit’s pace, but at a considerable cost. The company reported a net loss of Rs 5,905 crore on revenue of Rs 22,623 crore in FY26 as it continued to invest aggressively ahead of its planned IPO. Meena says Zepto “needs to work a lot on the customer and brand side.”
“The overall opportunity in quick commerce is limited, meaning Blinkit’s growth is happening directly at the cost of the other players,” says Bisen. “The market simply does not have the depth to absorb so many standalone players.”
Flipkart and Amazon, both late entrants to the quick commerce race, are speeding up expansion to defend their broader e-commerce franchises.
Amazon launched Amazon Now across India’s metros last year. Last month, it announced more than 100 Urban Fulfilment Centres in five cities, larger-format facilities carrying four times the selection currently available on Amazon Now, adding apparel, electronics, jewellery, luggage and furniture. They sit on top of more than 1,000 micro-fulfilment centres across 100 cities.
“Amazon’s rollout is still not the smoothest from the customer experience point of view,” says Meena. “But once they stabilise it, it will pose a challenge to Blinkit.” Blinkit, he says, remains the benchmark on customer experience. Flipkart’s Minutes, launched in August 2024, crossed 1,000 micro-fulfilment centres across 130 cities in June. It is targeting 1,500 by the end of the year and is expanding mainly in tier-2 and tier-3 cities rather than contesting the metros.
For much of its existence, Blinkit has been measured against Zepto and Instamart, competing on store density, order value, delivery times, and market share. They remain its closest rivals. But the more Blinkit expands its assortment, the more it competes in the larger e-commerce category, and the closer it gets to Amazon’s shelf.
Eventually, the two categories—e-commerce and quick commerce—will converge.
“It is inevitable. Only on the promise of quick commerce selling need-based categories, you can’t compete with Amazon,” says Bisen. “For Amazon, to penetrate and grow its base from where it is today, it will have to imbibe the quick commerce trend that consumers in urban India have adopted. So, the two have to meet.”
To be sure, Blinkit is still some distance away from that scale. “Blinkit’s run rate is around $7.5-8 billion, while Amazon’s is around $25-26 billion, and Flipkart’s around $30 billion,” says Meena. That gap is both the opportunity and the problem.
Blinkit made Rs 102 crore in adjusted EBITDA in the June quarter on net order value of Rs 17,132 crore. That is a margin of 0.6%, against the 6% Eternal says the business should deliver at steady state. And the arithmetic on capital per store is not settled yet. It has a long way to go.
Amazon spent years building one of India’s largest online marketplaces by expanding selection and gradually reducing delivery times. Blinkit has taken the opposite route. Both are now spending on the same asset: inventory held close to where people live.
“Going forward, e-commerce has to be looked at as the sum of all these parts residing under one umbrella,” says Bisen. “It is a sign of a maturing ecosystem, rather than a hyper-competitive space where each category or delivery speed needs to be evaluated separately.”
For years, quick commerce was viewed as a niche within online retail—a convenience service for groceries and forgotten essentials. The race is no longer about who can deliver groceries the fastest. It is about who builds the default infrastructure for everyday shopping in India.
Pradip K. Saha is the author of The Learning Trap: How Byju’s Took Indian Edtech for a Ride.