Amazon Now’s reported rise to $1 billion in annualised gross sales is more than a milestone for one delivery service. It shows how quickly instant commerce is moving from a metro-city convenience into a distributed urban logistics network spanning smaller cities and towns. Amazon says the service has reached more than 60 Indian cities and towns in less than 10 weeks, with plans to reach 100 cities by Diwali.
The expansion places Amazon in a more direct contest with Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, Flipkart Minutes and BigBasket. It also shifts the central question in quick commerce from whether customers will accept delivery within minutes to how widely companies can build, operate and sustain the infrastructure required to offer it.
Amazon’s country manager, Samir Kumar, said Amazon Now had crossed $1 billion in annualised gross sales in India over the past three-month period. He described it as the fastest-growing e-commerce business unit in Amazon India’s history and said orders had doubled every quarter since launch. The company has expanded the service to four times as many cities in less than 10 weeks.
The service now operates through more than 750 micro-fulfilment and urban fulfilment centres. These facilities are the physical layer behind the delivery promise: inventory is placed closer to customers, orders are picked locally and delivery routes are kept short. Unlike a conventional e-commerce model built around a smaller number of large warehouses and longer-distance movement, the quick-commerce model depends on a dense network of neighbourhood-level facilities.
Amazon Now’s footprint includes major metros as well as cities and towns such as Padubidri, Tirupati, Guntur, Gurdaspur, Jalandhar, Vellore, Dharwad, Warangal and Berhampur. Kumar said the company was on track to expand to 100 cities by Diwali, with the planned network extending from Gurdaspur and Hoshiarpur in the north to Vembayam and Alamcode in the south.
That geography is important because it indicates that the next phase of competition is not limited to the largest urban markets. The company’s stated expansion includes locations with different population sizes, consumption patterns and local delivery conditions. The source does not establish how demand or profitability varies across these markets, but the breadth of the rollout shows that companies are testing whether the quick-commerce format can be reproduced beyond the densest metropolitan catchments.
The reported operating figures offer a sense of the scale involved. People familiar with Amazon Now’s operations told Business Standard that the service has an average order value of around ₹540 and handles approximately 700,000 orders a day. They also said Amazon Now has a 10 per cent share of orders and a 14 per cent share by value. These figures are not attributed to a published company filing in the supplied material, but they indicate the importance of both transaction volume and the mix of products being sold through the network.
Amazon says the service carries tens of thousands of products for delivery within minutes or a few hours. Its wider fulfilment proposition includes more than one million products available on the same day, over four million the next day and millions more through Prime Delivery. The quick-commerce assortment includes groceries, fruits and vegetables, frozen food, personal care products, fashion and beauty items, small appliances, and home and kitchen products.
This range suggests that Amazon Now is not being positioned only as an emergency grocery service. The model is being used to combine immediate purchases with a broader selection available through progressively longer delivery windows. That structure allows the company to connect neighbourhood fulfilment with its larger e-commerce network, although the supplied information does not detail how inventory, pricing or delivery economics differ between these service levels.
Amazon’s June 2026 announcement that it planned to build India’s largest delivery-in-minutes network and reach customers in more than 300 cities provides the longer-term context for the current expansion. The move to over 60 cities in less than 10 weeks is an early and rapid step towards that stated ambition. The 100-city target by Diwali is the next near-term milestone, while the 300-city plan represents a much larger infrastructure commitment.
The competitive data shows why companies are scaling quickly. According to a recent CLSA report cited in the source, the quick-commerce footprint had expanded to 477 cities nationally. The top 10 cities accounted for 3,536 dark stores across the five players tracked by the brokerage: Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, Flipkart Minutes and BigBasket.
The concentration of dark stores in the top 10 cities remains significant, but the overall city count points to a market expanding beyond the original core. Blinkit accounted for close to 30 per cent of dark stores across the top 10 cities and more than 34 per cent nationally, according to the cited CLSA data. The company operated in more than 180 cities and had the leading store count in six of the top 10 cities. Zepto led in three of the remaining four.
The same data places Flipkart Minutes ahead of Swiggy Instamart in dark-store count and PIN-code coverage within the top 10 cities. Flipkart Minutes had 627 dark stores in those markets, compared with 615 for Swiggy Instamart. BigBasket had 497. Flipkart Minutes has also quadrupled its business over the past year and operated nearly 1,200 micro-fulfilment centres across more than 150 cities, according to the source.
These numbers reveal two overlapping forms of competition. The first is market coverage: companies are seeking more cities, more PIN codes and a larger customer base. The second is local density: within a city, the number and placement of dark stores determine how much area can be served quickly and how consistently the delivery promise can be met. A national footprint without adequate local density may not produce the same service level as a smaller but tightly concentrated network.
The urban infrastructure implications are therefore substantial. Every expansion requires additional inventory points, delivery workers, local transportation capacity and systems capable of matching orders to nearby stock. The facilities may be less visible than large warehouses or logistics parks, but their cumulative presence changes how commercial space is used within cities. The supplied material does not specify the property formats, rents, employment numbers or traffic effects associated with these centres, so those consequences cannot yet be measured from the available evidence.
What is clear is that fulfilment is becoming a more distributed urban function. Amazon’s network of more than 750 micro-fulfilment and urban fulfilment centres, combined with the wider industry’s 3,536 dark stores in the top 10 cities, represents a shift towards placing commercial inventory close to residential demand. This has implications for how retailers think about location, how delivery networks are designed and how smaller cities are incorporated into national commerce systems.
The policy and administrative framework behind this expansion is not set out in the supplied report. The article does not identify a dedicated government programme, a common regulatory framework for dark stores or a city-level approval process governing these facilities. It also does not provide information on land-use permissions, labour conditions, road-space use or waste generated by the model. Those gaps matter because the expansion is taking place across different urban environments, from large metros to smaller towns, each with its own commercial and transport conditions.
The evidence nevertheless establishes a clear direction. Amazon Now has reported rapid sales growth, quarterly order doubling, expansion to more than 60 cities and a network of over 750 fulfilment centres. Its competitors are also building large and geographically dispersed networks. The result is a quick-commerce market whose defining asset is no longer only the consumer app or the delivery promise, but the physical infrastructure that makes both possible.
The larger urban question is whether this network can maintain the same operating model as it moves into markets with different densities and demand patterns. The supplied material confirms the scale of the expansion, but not the economics of individual cities, the utilisation of facilities or the impact on local infrastructure. Those are the indicators that will determine whether the current race produces a durable urban logistics system or simply a larger contest for footprint.
For now, the next milestones are Amazon Now’s planned expansion to 100 cities by Diwali and its longer-term stated ambition of reaching more than 300 cities. The company’s performance outside the largest metros, alongside dark-store growth across the wider sector, will show how far delivery-in-minutes can become a standard feature of India’s urban commerce network.
