So, what is Q-Commerce?
Quick commerce, also known as q-commerce, is a new category of e-commerce that enables customers to receive products and services within hours or even minutes of placing an order. It combines on-demand delivery and instant gratification, allowing customers to quickly and easily order products through mobile apps or the web and receive them rapidly.
Your wife isn’t home and you decide to make a quick Maggi for dinner. Only that you can’t find a pack and are lazy to go out and buy it. You wish someone got it for you.
Your mom is making dosai and runs out of oil. She knows making oil-less dosai is not possible or palatable. None will touch it giving a whole new meaning to the term contactless dining. She wants you to go get it but you would rather watch the match and wish someone else could.
Your sister realizes at midnight she’s run out of diapers. She wakes her husband who is more pissed than worrying about his son pissing on the bed. Your sister wishes she had a better husband who got her things at odd hours.
Help is on the way for your family. And quick too. Welcome to Q-commerce – the next dimension of e-commerce. As the name suggests, it’s all about speed. Quick commerce meaning q-commerce lets consumers expect delivery less than an hour of placing an order. In a way of speaking, Q-commerce is e-commerce that’s arrived quicker!
E-commerce vs Q-commerce
It combines the merits of traditional e-commerce with innovations in last-mile delivery. It builds on the omnipresence of the internet to deliver products in a jiffy. The speed of delivery is the key.
This may seem like a ridiculously impossible timeline but Q-commerce is more about small orders, rather than the wide assortment offered by retailers. Redseer consulting estimates the Indian market opportunity of qcommerce to be $ 0.3 billion in terms of overall GMV. This is expected to reach $ 5 billion by 2025. Quick growth, so to speak!
Changing consumer dynamics, altering social and cultural realities coupled with a fast-changing, rapidly-moving world have all conspired to create this perfect storm. People today are time-starved. They are unplanned compared to their parents, are more value-seeking, have more disposable income and are in the mood to spend it too. Importantly, they belong to an increasing breed called I-want-it-now generation, who can’t wait, don’t want to wait and wonder why anyone should ever keep them waiting.
What’s faster than Q-commerce is the rush players who have quickly moved into this space. New players like Zepto have waltzed in as much as the traditional biggies like Swiggy, Dunzo and Big Basket who are changing colors and shifting to Q-commerce. Grofers has gone one step further and have even changed their all-grocery business model to a qcommerce one and offer a whole range of other products too. For good measure, they have even changed their name to Blinkit.
Swiggy just got a $ 700 million funding to their Q-commerce venture, Instamart. Zepto got $ 60 million. Real quick, if I may add!
Benefits of Q commerce
So, what is quick commerce is clear and sorted now. Isn’t it essential to understand the real benefits of quick commerce? We’ll tell you quickly and easily, just like it should be!
More happy customers: With faster delivery times, customers are more likely to be satisfied with the quick shopping experience that retailers offer and are more likely to return to their stores in the future. The fastest way to build your very own loyal advocates sitting in the store or monitoring the store operations from even your mobile!
Competitive USP: Building brand identity and shining more than competitors is always challenging. Especially for small businesses to compete with major online competition is tough. But it need not be. Now, small businesses can differentiate themselves from competitors offering only traditional e-commerce services by offering Q commerce services. Let the speed of quick commerce become the ally in this competition.
Improved operational efficiency: Remember that one rack that never gets organized because it is time-consuming. But when we get to it, we learn that all that was needed was a couple of organizers, and the rack reveals the precious items we have been looking for a long time. Q-commerce is the rack waiting to show unimaginable efficiency for small businesses. With the help of Gofrugal’s omnichannel capabilities as organizers, small businesses can enjoy the benefit of streamlining their operations by optimizing inventory management, order fulfillment, and delivery logistics.
Increased sales: Faster delivery times can lead to increased sales, as customers are more likely to make purchases when they know they can receive their items quickly.
Increased Profit Margin: Quick commerce provides more opportunities to gain profit from each sale for those who use the maximum out of it. The revenue statistics for quick commerce (source: statista) increased by 50% higher than the previous data during the pandemic, meaning that 50% of consumers paid extra money to buy what they needed quickly. Also, note that quick commerce focuses on small quantities of products; you can take advantage of this to drive sales for your most profitable category of products.
Lower Logistics Costs: Local deliveries offer advantages over traditional e-Commerce shipping, such as faster delivery times and lower costs. With the right inventory management, online ordering app, and delivery management tool, retailers may reduce the logistics costs for these deliveries, freeing up resources for other operations.
Access to new customers: Q-commerce can help small businesses reach new customers who value fast delivery times, and in the current scenario where everything is instant, right now, agile, quick commerce is the only way to grab new attention.
Impact of Q-commerce on traditional retailers
Does all this frenetic bustle and market around Q-commerce sound like the death knell for traditional mom and pop stores? Is it the end of the road for the neighborhood Kirana?
The answer is a happy no. On the contrary, the more Q-commerce space gets crowded and noisy, the better it is for the local retail stores. This is where their real game begins.
If Q-commerce was ever tailor-made for someone, it’s for the neighborhood retailer. Who else knows the customers better? Who else can deliver it faster than the guy who is right across the street? Importantly, who else did you grow up with and have been served every step of the way?
Q-commerce biggies work by setting up dark stores in millions of neighborhoods. They carry far few stocks and far fewer variants of each. But the Redseer study, mentioned earlier, found out that only 20 million Households are addressable by Q-commerce companies in India. To put that figure in perspective, there are more than 250 million households in India. And most of them are served currently by the neighborhood retailer. Do the math and you can find the hidden potential!
Why should retailers adopt Q-commerce?
For starters, they need to realize they can and will fight and win this q-commerce war. All they need is the invisible hand of technology that will serve as their Brahmastra in this war. Let me bring you up to speed, pardon my pun.
Foremost, Q-commerce requires you to have a rigorous business discipline.You need to perfect the entire gamut of key operations viz., purchase, stock refilling to the godowns and from there to the racks, daily stock taking, seamless online ordering tools, automated stock picking process based on order, home delivery management system and periodic engagements with customers through notifications. In short, you need a robust ERP to manage all operations that are involved right from the time the product enters your store till it reaches your customer’s home. Not any ERP, but a software that’s wider in scope and one that is constantly upgrading itself rendering it in tune with the times.
How to implement Q-commerce for your business?
The easy way to implement Q-Commerce for your business is by selecting the right digital solutions. Here are the most important steps to consider before implementing Q-Commerce for your business:
Step 1: Keeping up with the stock
The cornerstone of Q-commerce is solid and robust inventory management. When Inventory control is spotless, order management becomes efficient.
A robust ERP such as Gofrugal can assist you in managing your inventory in real-time. Accurate online stock information enables you to operate incredibly quickly and efficiently.
Step 2: Choosing a flexible online order management solution
Right on cue! You must be prepared to receive consumer orders through mobile or the web. An accurate order-picking solution helps local retailers to fulfill orders quickly.
Gofrugal’s OrderEasy, an ERP-integrated online order management platform, helps manage a retailer’s e-commerce operations. Once the store receives a customer order, it conveys it faster to the staff so they can pick the right product without errors. It can also quote complementary products to the order so retailers can upsell and cross-sell.
Step 3: Well-train staff to locate the right products and pack the orders
Or you can go with StockPick, another deep solution solving the niche problem of order picking. This app can be a real game-changer eliminating the need for dedicated and well-trained staff to locate the right product, variant, and specifics.
Step 4: Bridge the gap between demand and delivery
An integrated delivery management application to help delivery executives reach the destination with a defined process. A quick note here: Frustrated delivery executives are a real threat to Q-Commerce! We don’t want that now, do we?
With Gofrugal’s GoDeliver, delivery management app, you can automatically assign the delivery to the free delivery executives. It would also lay out the quickest map to the customer, so the delivery can be done within the time the store had promised and simultaneously takes off excess pressures of the delivery executives.
Key Features of a Q-Commerce Business Model
The bedrock of Q-commerce is a strong and robust inventory management. More so to take on the dark stores that the biggies are going to open in every neighborhood. You need some stable apps to manage your operations and mitigate attendant errors. You need a flexible online order management solution to receive orders from consumers through mobile or web, accurate order picking solution to fulfill the orders quickly and finally an integrated delivery management application to assist delivery executives to reach the destination with no follow-ups.
Gofrugal’s OrderEasy, ERP integrated online order management platform to help you with managing your entire e-commerce operations. Once you receive a customer order, it would convey it faster to your staff so they can pick the right product without errors. It can also quote complementary products to the order so you can sell more and bill more!
Complementing the app is another deep solution solving a niche problem of order picking, called Stockpick. This app is a real game-changer. You don’t need a dedicated and well-trained staff to locate the right product, the right variant and right flavor. All you need is just a semi-skilled person who knows how to run the scanner over the product barcode. It helps you pick the orders quickly without any errors or hassle.
To round it all, you have GoDeliver, which would automatically assign it to the delivery boy who is free. It would also lay out the quickest map to the customer so the delivery can be done within the time you had promised and the customer had wanted.
The setup is done, but what next to make it sustainable? Gofrugal’s GoAct solution empowers businesses to monitor the performance anywhere through an online graphical reports to spot, fix and execute decisions to streamline the Q-commerce operations.
The future of Quick Commerce
The future of quick commerce is likely to be shaped by the integration of technology, including the use of mobile apps, AI-powered chatbots, and automated warehouses and delivery vehicles to streamline the ordering and delivery process.
In addition to traditional Retail and grocery products, we may see an increase in q-commerce offerings for services such as meal delivery, prescription drugs, and even healthcare services.
Hyperlocal Deliveries Are on a Growth Spree
The new dimension where Q-Commerce will have a major impact in the coming year is the hyperlocal sector. It is set to grow with deliveries within a fixed radius in typically 30-40 minutes. The sector is driven by multiple factors, out of which quick commerce and adoption of omnichannel strategy play a key role. With the launch of the government’s ONDC, Open Network for DigitalCommerce, the hyperlocal delivery model has become the key to quick commerce, and it’s here to stay.
And the best part is that business owners with Gofrugal are already up to the speed and ahead of the future because you get a well-rounded ERP, a range of apps to complement it, and can also integrate easily with ONDC!
Q-commerce is a need for speed game. A 20-20 cricket match, so to speak. You have the complete assortment of products that your locality needs. You are in the customer’s neighborhood. If anyone can play the game harder, faster and better, it’s you. All you need is a well-rounded ERP like Gofrugal and a range of apps to complement it and complete it. Q-commerce then becomes child’s play.
Let your game begin!
