Brands spanning food, wellness, and personal care say they are now allocating up to half of their digital ad spends to quick-commerce apps such as Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, and Zepto, as sales velocity and return on ad spends improve sharply.
Protein powder and supplements maker Wellbeing Nutrition, backed by FMCG major Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL), now spends 55% of its marketing budget on quick commerce, versus 30% six months ago, its founder Avnish Chhabria told Mint.
“We’re tactically increasing spends on quick commerce as performance has improved meaningfully and the economics are more favourable,” Chhabria said. Wellbeing Nutrition’s monthly sales have grown fivefold to ₹5 crore since July 2025, compared with the preceding six months.
Plum Goodness, a personal care brand backed by Unilever Ventures, routinely calibrates its spending patterns to channels that show better purchase results, and quick commerce has been outperforming traditional e-commerce channels in the past few months, according to its founder Shankar Prasad.
“There’s a quiet but intense battle for visibility among wellness and personal care brands on quick-commerce platforms, which has naturally pushed up our marketing spends in recent months,” Prasad said. While he did not disclose absolute spending figures, Prasad said quick-commerce ad spends as a percentage of sales have risen sharply, as revenues from these platforms have grown multi-fold.
Larger consumer goods firms are following suit. Parachute and Saffola parent Marico said in its response to Mint’s queries that it has seen significant contribution from quick commerce in recent quarters, driven by changing consumer behaviour, and metro-led use cases. The channel contributed 3% to Marico’s India business in fiscal year 2025 (FY25).
“The channel provides faster feedback loops, shorter trend cycles and exposure to niche, premium, and occasion-led ideas. This has encouraged us to move toward more agile innovations, build stronger pipelines aligned to emerging trends, and create formats suited specifically for this channel,” a Marico spokesperson added. The company declined to comment on revenue specifics.
Real juice maker Dabur India is looking to increase its advertising expenditure across general and modern trade channels, including quick commerce, in the coming quarters, its chief executive officer Mohit Malhotra said during the September-quarter earnings call. “We will continuously make an endeavour to increase the overall advertising and promotion expenditure going forward by investing in brand and distribution,” he had said then.
According to the firm’s December-quarter business update filed with the exchanges, sales from e-commerce platforms, including quick commerce, are expected to grow in double digits.
The trend highlights the growing role of advertising as a revenue driver for quick commerce players, at a time when analysts expect the segment’s ad market to expand significantly over the next two years. The most common ad formats include sponsored product listings, featured banners, and in-app prompts during peak hours.
Quick-commerce ad spend today has surged almost 40% to nearly $700 million, compared to about $500 million in the preceding six months, Siddharth Jhawar, country manager at ad-tech company Moloco, estimated. In fact, the spend has nearly doubled in the past three years.
“We can expect the share of quick-commerce ad spends to double in the next 2-3 years, as quick commerce will keep taking a bigger share of e-commerce,” Jhawar said.
Retail media, or ads sold by retailers on their own platforms, generated nearly ₹25,000 crore in ad revenue in 2025, making it the fastest-growing advertising channel, according to a December report by advertising agency WPP.
Quick-commerce players Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart are scaling ad revenue at growth rates exceeding 100% year-on-year, albeit from smaller bases, as competition for user attention and order frequency intensifies, the report added.
Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, Zepto, and BigBasket did not respond to Mint’s queries.
Better conversions
Brands say that one of the biggest drivers of this shift in advertising budgets is the higher conversion rates, or actual purchases, seen on quick-commerce platforms compared with traditional e-commerce and other digital channels.
“With consumers typically arriving on these apps with high purchase intent and limited time to browse, advertisements are translating into quicker decisions and immediate sales,” Moloco’s Jhawar said.
Wellbeing Nutrition’s Chhabria noted that conversions—or the rate at which advertisements translate into actual purchases—is at least 10-15% higher than other horizontal online commerce platforms. “Quick commerce is currently driving far better conversions at a cheaper cost per acquisition (CPA) rate, hence appearing to be a better return on investment.”
As a result, quick commerce is increasingly being seen not just as a fulfilment channel, but as a high-efficiency marketing medium, particularly for repeat purchases and new product launches, said Plum’s Prasad.
Cost per acquisition refers to the amount a business spends on advertising to acquire one paying customer or completed sale.
Quick commerce also offers more nuanced and locality-specific data, often helpful for ad targeting and positioning, said Anil Kumar, chief executive of market research firm Redseer. “Companies are looking at spending a lot on understanding data and positioning well to make sure they don’t lose the quick-commerce wave.”
But challenges remain. Quick commerce continues to be smaller than the likes of marketplaces Amazon India and Flipkart, with a limited assortment suited for fast-moving goods, resulting in a spending ceiling for brands.
“Since quick commerce has a limited audience compared to larger platforms, there’s currently a ceiling on how much brands can spend on this channel. Moreover, the audience is largely needs-driven and hence scope for discovery of new products is larger on Amazon, for example,” said Wellbeing’s Chhabria.
Amazon India and Flipkart continue to dominate the country’s retail media landscape, generating upwards of ₹14,000 crore in revenue in FY25, per the companies’ financial statements.
Moreover, brands are also actively working on expanding their own websites as a lucrative sales channel, seeking control over pricing and improving margins. The biggest portion of Plum’s marketing budget is earmarked for its own website, which continues to drive a bulk of its sales, Prasad noted.
