Flipkart recently forayed into quick commerce with its 10-minute delivery platform Minutes. As of now, the service has gone live in HSR, Bellandur and a few other areas of Bengaluru.
To further bolster the service and build on its quick commerce strategy, exchange4media has learnt that the e-tailer giant is in active talks with a range of D2C brands across sectors. The list includes brands such as NU Republic, Sirona and Yu Foods.
Ujjwal Sarin, Founder, NU Republic, shared that the agreements with Flipkart are done and they are just waiting for the onboarding process to start.
Founders of several D2C companies shared with e4m that Flipkart has approached them to list their SKUs on Minutes. There, however, seems to be an operational lag, wherein several brands are still in the queue to go live or even get onboarded. One of the founders, who had a meeting with Flipkart’s team about Minutes, shared that while the talks were almost closed between them, it has been close to two months now that the legalities have not been fulfilled.
“We are originally from Gurgaon, but were in Bangalore for a few months. We were told that Flipkart is launching quick commerce and wanted to seal a contract. But we are still waiting for the legalities to be sorted so that we can move towards onboarding,” the founder said.
exchange4media has reached out to Flipkart but is yet to hear back.
However, apart from a few of these setbacks, most D2C brands’ onboarding is seeming to materialise smoothly. Bharat Bhalla, Co-founder of Yu Foods said, “Flipkart is one of the major platforms that we sell on - Flipkart Marketplace as well as Flipkart Grocery. Because our products are doing well on these two platforms, they have approached us to list our SKUs on their quick commerce app called Minutes.”
As far as expectations are concerned, Bhalla mentioned that it is too early to know exactly how things are going to turn out. “I think it really depends on the number of dark stores and the overall penetration of dark stores. There are a number of metrics that one will have to track before getting into projections. But having said that, I think the first three months will be more like a trial and test to really understand how the products are moving,” he added.
Ekta Arora, Associate Vice President e-commerce at Swiss Beauty said, “We plan to go live with Flipkart q-comm, but this will take time. They have approached us on this.”
Femine hygiene brand Sirona’s Co-founder Deep Bajaj also shared that the conversations are happening. “We have been onboarded and are right now waiting for products to go live,” Bajaj said. He feels that once the products go live, the move is set to bring in a significant disruption considering there needs to be more awareness about quick commerce among people.
Bajaj added, “Blinkit has made a little upwardly mobile people aware about quick commerce, then Zepto pulled in the students. With Flipkart, the remaining people come into the picture.” He pointed out that Flipkart is at a rather advantageous position by virtue of being a horizontal player. “There are a lot of product portfolios that the likes of Zepto and Blinkit do not have, which Flipkart would already have in its warehouse,” Bajaj said.
As of now the brands have not been told anything about advertising offerings that the platform is set to have. The information is expected to be out once products go live full-fledged, founders mentioned.
