Flipkart to offer 90-minute deliveries of groceries

New Delhi: Walmart-owned Flipkart on Tuesday announced 90-minute delivery for groceries as it seeks to take on Amazon.com and billionaire Mukesh Ambani's upstart JioMart in the fast-growing Indian market.

The hyperlocal delivery service 'Flipkart Quick', which will also offer 90-minute deliveries of fresh vegetables, meat, and mobile phones, will initially be available at select locations in Bengaluru and would be gradually scaled up and expanded to six large cities by the end of the year, Flipkart Vice-President Sandeep Karwa said. India's $950 billion retail market is predicted to grow to $1.3 trillion by FY26. Of this, e-commerce business is estimated at around $78 billion which is expected to cross $100 billion by 2025. And grocery is the latest category where e-commerce firms are slugging it out.

Amazon offers a quick-delivery service for groceries. This segment also has competition from Alibaba-based BigBasket and JioMart which is experimenting with using WhatsApp to connect consumers with local Kirana stores.

"...everything which we expect our neighbourhood departmental store to carry is all what we made live. Along with this, we've also announced the launch of our fruits and vegetables, and meats category...we've created a storage space where we've enabled a lot of our sellers to store their inventory," Karwa added.