Devangshu Dutta
June 30, 2025
In every strategy meeting today, one metric is invariably mentioned: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Whether you’re a well-funded corporate retailer, or raising your first angel round, or a well-established digital duopolist brand scaling Series C, CAC is one of the key performance metrics. “Real” spend that is neatly broken down by channel, optimised by funnel tweaks, scrutinised to the last rupee or dollar.
But there’s a metric we almost never hear about that could be costing brands far more in the long run.
Let’s call it Customer Forfeiture Cost (CFC), the residual lifetime value that is lost when a customer walks away from your business not because of price, competition, or even shifting needs, but because of a “burn”: a delivery missed or messed up, a refund that took weeks, an arrogant customer service call, or a product that failed spectacularly against the promise. In other words, when your brand hurts someone enough to make them walk away. Probably for ever.
It’s a paradox: brands are pumping thousands of crores into acquiring users, but they’re bleeding value at the other end. Yet, while CAC is a line item in every financial statement, CFC is invisible in management dashboards. CEOs don’t announce, “We’ve cut our forfeiture cost by 20% this quarter.”
Yet. every CXO knows it exists. The NPS scores, the social media complaints, the “never again” comments in reviews, the sinking feeling when repeat purchase rates fall.
Why CFC Matters More Than Ever
In every business, during the early stages each sale is a victory. Whether it was the retail chains that grew in the 1990s and early-2000s or the digital upstarts that came up through 2010s and 2020s, scale has been the mantra, and investors have poured money into scaling through the growing consumption of India 1 and India 2 customers.
Today customer acquisition isn’t cheap. The same person who clicked impulsively in 2020 now thinks twice before confirming payment. In this landscape, retention isn’t optional, it’s existential.
Every lost customer isn’t just a refund processed, or a cart abandoned. It’s the long tail of future repeat purchases that will never happen, negative word of mouth and brand distrust in the customer’s circle of influence, and increased future CAC due to declining organic reach.
Way back in 1967, management consultant Peter Drucker wrote in his book “The Effective Executive”: “What gets measured, gets managed”.
Today your CAC may be Rs. 500-1,000. If the average customer life time value (LTV) is Rs. 10,000, and a single burn causes churn after just one order worth Rs. 2,000, your CFC is Rs. 8,000, and that doesn’t even include reputational spillover.
Why We Don’t Measure It
Yes, CFC is hard to quantify. It’s not as easily attributable as ad spends. There’s usually no neat model telling you why someone never returned, because tech stacks aren’t typically designed to track emotional exits. And let’s face it, introspection about broken relationships is uncomfortable, even for management teams.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not real. If a customer leaves because your delivery executive messed up, or because your app crashed during checkout twice in a row, that’s on you, not the market. And in a business climate where sustainable growth is the mantra, LTV is king.
Ignoring CFC is like watching your roof leak and blaming the rain.
Toward a New Discipline
Brands and retailers must start measuring CFC, the value lost when customers disengage due to friction, mistrust, or neglect, and then start working on reducing it. This can be done by:
The Competitive Edge We’re Not Using
In a crowded space where everyone’s vying for eyeballs, trust is the true moat. Customers don’t expect perfection – they do expect accountability, authenticity, and recovery when things go wrong.
Brands that understand and act on Customer Forfeiture Costs will quietly start building a powerful edge: deeper brand loyalty, lower CAC over time thanks to referrals and repeats and greater lifetime value per user.
In other words, real, compounding value.
As the Indian brand ecosystem matures, Customer Forfeiture Cost needs to be as visible and valued as CAC. Acquisition is the invitation; experience is the relationship. Relationships, once broken, are expensive to rebuild; if they can be rebuilt at all.
In the end, growth isn’t just about who comes in. It’s about who stays, and why.
(Written by Devangshu Dutta, Founder of Third Eyesight, this was published in Financial Express on 2 July 2025)
admin
June 1, 2025
Sharleen Dsouza, Business Standard
Mumbai, 1 June 2025
Reliance Consumer Products is in a sweet spot – and it intends to stay there. Launched barely three years ago, the company has already entered the list of India’s top 10 fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) players by revenue in the 2024-25 financial year (FY25).
After making headlines by acquiring Campa Cola in 2022 — and taking the brand overseas in under two years — Reliance Consumer Products quickly expanded into food and non-food categories under the ‘Independence’ brand. Now, it has trained its sights on a new frontier: Confectionery.
This marks the company’s third major focus area after gaining traction in beverages and staples. Though present in biscuits and namkeens, its immediate priority is grabbing a share of the Indian consumer’s pocket change — via candies, chocolates, and toffees.
Its entry into the confectionery business began quietly in 2022 with a pilot of Joyland candies in Uttar Pradesh. It soon went on an acquisition spree — first picking up the 30-year-old Maharashtra-based Toffeeman brand in 2023, followed by a 51 per cent stake in Lotus Chocolates, and then acquiring the 82-
year-old Ravalgaon, home to nostalgic brands like Pan Pasand, Mango Mood, and Laco. It has been steadily building a formidable candy arsenal.
However, the Mukesh Ambani-led company isn’t limiting itself to Re 1 or Rs 2 price points. According to a source, it is developing an end-to-end confectionery portfolio — across toffees, candies, and chocolate-based products — and plans to enter sub-segments like gums, jellies, and lollipops. It is also betting on old-school favourites, launching chocolate-based confections such as eclairs, Lotus Symphony (toffee with a chocolate centre), and Lotus Zellers (moulded chocolate miniatures).
It is piloting distribution in five states — Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh — with plans to go pan-India this fiscal and reach one million outlets, the source added.
Why the big bet? The Indian confectionery market is expected to grow from Rs. 37,900 crore in 2024 to~59,700 crore by 2033, at a compound annual growth rate of 5.2 per cent, according to global consultancy IMARC Group. North India leads the market with a 32.8 per cent share. IMARC adds that modern retail formats, better digital connectivity, and product innovation are driving market penetration in both urban and semi-urban areas.
India’s sweet tooth has deep roots. Parle began selling candies in the 1920s, followed by Ravalgaon —now part of Reliance Consumer Products’ growing portfolio – in the 1940s.
Experts say the company’s strategy from the start was clear: Dominate. And it has the war chest to play the long game.
“Over two decades, Reliance has gained consumer-side experience and enormous momentum through various retail formats, and has figured out vertical integration in procurement,” said Devangshu Dutta, chief executive officer of consultancy Third Eyesight.
“Its experience in staples comes from private labels, and starting with Campa, its acquisitions in food, beverage and FMCG have grown. As a group, it has the muscle and a long-term approach to make a mark in the market.”
Dhanraj Bhagat, partner at Grant Thornton India LLP, pointed out thatthe FMCG market is notoriously tough — especially when scaling regional brands nationally. “But Reliance has deep pockets for brand building,” he said. That’s what sets it apart — it can spend big and be patient, he added.
While the company is making a dent via its distribution penetration strategy, it also needs to spend on publicity, Bhagat added. “Reliance has the money, so it is a different ball game for it as this gives the company the ability to spend and play the long-term game.”
Reliance Consumer Products is also offering higher margins to distributors in categories like Campa and confectionery, giving it a competitive edge. Its aggressive incentives have forced rivals to raise their own distributor margins — a sign of how this sweet battle is heating up.
(Published in Business Standard)
admin
May 25, 2025
Gargi Sarkar, Inc42
25 May 2025
SUMMARY: Swiggy and Zomato are scaling back non-core bets such as 10-minute food delivery, private labels, and event logistics to sharpen focus on core businesses and improve profitability. Both companies are betting on platform fees and selective verticals like quick commerce and ticketing, but analysts warn that financial discipline, not endless expansion, is key to long-term sustainability. The foodtech duo is stuck in a balancing act of rationalising what works and doesn’t. However, going ahead, this rationalisation game is only going to get more pronounced as they will strive to shield their core bread and butter businesses
For foodtech giants Swiggy and Zomato (now Eternal), the last few years have been about engaging in a battle for expansion, so much so that it has become difficult to tell them apart.
From quick commerce and cloud kitchens to intercity food delivery and even selling tickets for events and concerts, the two companies appear to be aping each other’s every move to be everything everywhere all at once.
However, what began as a bold bet to dominate every possible vertical falling under the ambit of food, lifestyle and entertainment is now undergoing a major course correction.
For starters, both are reconsidering their blitzkrieg, and while at it, they are gracefully stepping away from non-core bets, diluting underperforming or experimental units to focus on core operations to drive profitability.
For context: Zomato, which once saw the future of food logistics in ultra-fast deliveries, gave up on its 15-minute food delivery service, Quick, four months after its launch in January. It has also pulled the plug on its home-made meal service, Zomato Everyday. Tailored for office-goers and budget-conscious consumers, the service was floated in January 2025.
Swiggy, too, has made similar retreats. It suspended Swiggy Genie, its courier and pick-up-and-drop service that had gained popularity during the pandemic. The company also gave up on its private label food business by entering a strategic agreement with Kouzina, a chain of virtual restaurants, granting it exclusive rights to operate Swiggy’s digital-first food brands.
So, what has triggered this metaphorical fission in strategy?
One possible reason could be the growing realisation that profitability hinges on diversifying smartly rather than untamed expansion.
A market analyst, who did not wish to be named, pointed out that the duo’s attempt to rule their customers’ wallets for everything from food to groceries and entertainment to lifestyle has been quite ambitious. “The course correction was overdue,” the analyst said.
He believes that foodtechs are now forced to burn the visceral fat in the form of non-core businesses because those have been slowing them down, also eating into the revenues of core businesses and impacting operational efficiencies.
“Moreover, the more the segments, the higher the chances of operational hiccups. Managing logistics, customer experience, and quality control across a wide array of verticals inevitably leads to fragmentation and strain on core operations,” he added.
State Of Eternal Affairs: Zomato’s Diversification Saga
Eternal’s push to transform Zomato into a broader lifestyle platform in 2024 was not only about ambition but also a strategic response to a slowing core business — food delivery, according to industry observers.
Also, a glance at the table below reveals how the company has seen a marginal QoQ increase in its monthly transacting users.
In terms of monthly transacting customers, Zomato’s food delivery growth began strong with a 6.84% QoQ jump in Q1, but momentum quickly slowed, and Q2 saw only a 1.97% sequential rise, followed by a slight decline of 0.97% in Q3. This dip signalled stagnation, and although Q4 showed a mild recovery (1.95%), overall FY25 growth of the company’s monthly transacting users (food delivery) was modest at just 2.96%
Interestingly, Eternal founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal, too, acknowledged a slowdown in the company’s food delivery business while announcing the company’s Q4 FY25 results. He said the slowdown was due to rising competition from quick commerce platforms and weak discretionary spending. Goyal added that services like Zepto Cafe, Swiggy Snacc, and Blinkit Bistro, too, were eating into demand for restaurant deliveries.
In terms of Zomato’s food delivery numbers, average monthly transacting numbers grew to 20.9 Mn in Q4 FY25 from 20.5 Mn in Q4 FY24. Net order value (NOV) growth also remained subdued at 14% YoY versus the 20% YoY growth guidance.
Hence, the company was under pressure to unlock new revenue streams. Blinkit’s success became the reference point, and the company started envisioning similar success stories with other verticals too, a former Zomato employee said.
This was when the company got engulfed in the wave of diversification, paving the path for Zomato’s yet another bold move (besides Blinkit) — the INR 2,078 Cr acquisition of Paytm’s movies and events ticketing business, Insider, in August last year.
The acquisition that was planned with the launch of the ‘District’ app meant but one thing — declaration of war against BookMyShow, the lone behemoth in the realm of the entertainment ticketing segment. Even the company knew the path wouldn’t be all rainbows and sunshine.
In its Q4 FY24 earnings call, the management acknowledged that while the gross order value (GOV) of the going-out vertical continues to grow at over 100% YoY, the business still operates at an adjusted EBITDA loss of -2 to -2.5% of net order value (NOV).
Besides, given that the transition of users from Paytm’s ticketing business and Zomato’s dining out platform to the District app requires sustained investment, the company doesn’t expect the business to turn profitable in the near term.
But Zomato expects losses to eventually see stability at current levels.
“However, even with plateauing losses, the company will have to keep spending on creating supply. This means: curating new event experiences, forging partnerships and acquiring new users for the District app… and all of this translates into one thing — prolonged burn,” the market analyst added.
Moving on, Zomato’s ambition to become a lifestyle super app didn’t just manifest into flashy verticals like events, entertainment, and ticketing — it also showed up in its renewed aggression in food delivery, the very space where it first made its name.
Therefore, Zomato began piloting a 15-minute food delivery service in select parts of Mumbai and Bengaluru early this year.
But the company now finds the initiative extremely difficult to operationalise as it has failed to generate incremental demand.
“Customers do not necessarily want food fast, they just want it reliably. A 10-minute turnaround without full control over the supply chain leads to poor customer experiences, operational stress, and negligible upside. Instead of delighting users, it makes the company vulnerable to inconsistent quality and frequent delays,” a Zomato insider added.
Satish Meena, the founder of Datum Intelligence, opined that without controlling the entire supply chain, delivering food items within 10 to 15 minutes cannot be a profitable proposition.
Swiggy’s U-Turns
In 2024, also the year of its public listing, Swiggy aggressively expanded its service offerings, launching several new verticals to diversify beyond its core food delivery business.
Among the most prominent launches was Bolt, a 10-minute food delivery platform. Initially launched in Bengaluru, Chennai and Mumbai, Bolt quickly expanded to over 400 cities, with over 40,000 restaurants, including KFC, McDonald’s and Starbucks.
To complement Bolt, Swiggy introduced Snacc, a separate app for instant delivery of snacks, beverages, and small meals within 15 minutes.
Continuing to diversify its portfolio, Swiggy launched Pyng, an AI-powered platform that bridges users with verified experts like yoga teachers or chartered accountants.
With this, Swiggy marked its entry into the on-demand services marketplace, making professional services easier to access.
Apart from these customer-facing services, Swiggy also entered events via Scenes and the B2B space with Assure, to keep pace with Zomato.
Interestingly, Swiggy, too, has begun consolidating its operations. The company has shut down Genie, its hyperlocal courier business, which competed with Porter, Borzo and Uber.
According to a competitor, sourcing delivery riders specifically for packages is a challenge, particularly in cities like Bengaluru. For Swiggy, which was already managing fleets for food delivery and quick commerce through Instamart, sustaining a separate rider network for Genie only added to the complexity.
In another such move, Swiggy exited its private label food business by transferring exclusive rights for its digital-first brands, including The Bowl Company and Homely, to cloud kitchen operator Kouzina.
Balance Sheet Blues
Imperative to highlight that the rollbacks by Zomato and Swiggy are rooted in the growing pressures on their respective balance sheets.
After diversifying at a breakneck speed, they are now faced with the hard realities of cost structures that don’t always align with revenue potential.
In Q4 FY25, Zomato and Swiggy both reported robust top-line growth. Zomato’s revenue surged to INR 5,833 Cr, largely buoyed by its three core pillars — the food delivery business (INR 1,739 crore), Blinkit’s quick commerce arm (INR 769 Cr), and Hyperpure, its B2B supply chain vertical, which posted a 99% YoY growth in revenue to INR 1,840 Cr.
However, despite the momentum, the company’s net profit declined sharply to INR 39 Cr in the quarter, largely thanks to ongoing investments in Blinkit and newer bets like the ‘District’ lifestyle app.
Meanwhile, Swiggy clocked INR 4,410 Cr in revenue in Q4, up 45% YoY, but saw its net loss nearly double to INR 1,081 Cr. The widening losses were fuelled by surging operational expenses.
“All of this explains the strategic pullbacks witnessed lately, Swiggy exiting Genie and private labels, Zomato pulling the plug on services like Quick and Legends. The rationalisation marks a reset, indicating that while growth via diversification was necessary, financial discipline and profitability are in the spotlight,” the market analyst said.
Platform Fee To The Rescue… But For How Long?
While it won’t be easy for Zomato and Swiggy to suddenly change course, the future of these two foodtech giants is all about heading towards a more focussed set of revenue streams driven by value rather than FOMO.
In the process, both foodtech giants appear to have struck gold with the platform fee, which has grown from just INR 2 in 2023 to INR 10 today.
But the real question is: Can rising platform fee help the duo neutralise the impact of aggressive expansion? Or is rationalisation the only way forward?
Devangshu Dutta, the founder of Third Eyesight, thinks otherwise. He believes that the companies will not stop looking for new revenue streams, even as they will continue to amputate the ones that offer little value.
“All of these companies have to look for growth, which is a given. If their existing businesses are not delivering the kind of growth they need to justify their stock price or valuation, then they have to look at new avenues.”
According to him, we are bound to see a flurry of experiments, trials of different services and new verticals as these companies attempt to expand their addressable markets.
At the end of the day, the foodtech duo is stuck in a balancing act of rationalising what works and doesn’t. However, going ahead, this rationalisation game is only going to get more pronounced as they will strive to shield their core bread and butter businesses.
[Edited by Shishir Parasher]
(Published in Inc42)
admin
May 23, 2025
By Kunal Purohit and Ananya Bhattacharya, Rest of World
Mumbai, India, 23 May 2025
Online retail continues to elude India’s richest man.
The Shein India app, launched by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail in partnership with the Chinese fast-fashion giant, has struggled to gain traction in a market where Amazon and Walmart have been fighting neck-to-neck for nearly a decade. Downloads for Shein India nosedived from 50,000 a day shortly after its launch in early February to 3,311 in early April, according to AppMagic, a U.S.-based app performance tracker.
In April, when U.S. tariffs hit China, the app saw renewed interest as it was in the news, but experts are unclear on whether this growth is sustainable.
“Unlike earlier times, now … [the] market is saturated with multiple options and offers, and user interest can quickly dwindle,” Yugal Joshi, partner at global research firm Everest Group, told Rest of World.
Kushal Bhatnagar of Indian consulting firm Redseer, however, sees the late-April spike as a healthy sign, given that Reliance has yet to run paid marketing campaigns for Shein.
Reliance Retail declined to respond to Rest of World’s queries about its partnership with Shein.
Reliance launched Shein for India five years after the original Shein app was banned in the country over border tensions with China. But the Shein that has returned is entirely separate from Shein’s global platform: Rather than selling made-in-China clothes and accessories directly to consumers, Shein now operates as a technology partner, while Reliance Retail handles the heavy lifting — from sourcing and manufacturing to distribution. All consumer data is managed by the Indian company.
The partnership is part of Ambani’s broader effort to overhaul his retail business, whose valuation fell to $50 billion in 2025 from $125 billion in 2022. Although the company has made a push into digital platforms like JioMart, Ajio, and most recently Shein India, the bulk of its retail revenue still comes from its 18,000 physical stores.
Lagging behind Amazon and Walmart-backed Flipkart, which together control nearly 60% of India’s e-commerce market, Reliance has spent years trying to break into the sector. Between 2020 and 2025, Ambani’s group acquired majority stakes in companies spanning digital services, online pharmaceuticals, and quick commerce. But the investments have yet to position Reliance as a serious challenger to Amazon and Flipkart.
Analysts say the Indian behemoth hopes to leverage Shein’s artificial intelligence-powered trendspotting and automated inventory systems to pursue an ambitious goal: capturing a major share of India’s e-commerce market, projected to hit $345 billion by 2030.
According to Kaustav Sengupta, director of insights at VisionNxt, an Indian government-funded initiative that uses AI to forecast fashion trends, such a model is likely to make good use of Reliance’s humongous customer data sets: more than 476 million subscribers for its Jio telecom brand, 300 million users for e-commerce platform JioMart, and 452 million subscribers for its news and entertainment portfolio, consisting of 63 channels, a streaming service, and digital news outlets.
“With these data points, Reliance wants to now sell fashion products, so all it needs is a system where it can feed all these data points,” Sengupta told Rest of World. He said the model would be able to predict best-selling products and suggest the right prices for them.
The original Shein app uses AI-driven models for intelligent warehousing and to spot customer trends before manufacturing a new product. It scales the manufacturing up or tweaks the designs based on the feedback. At any given time, the Shein website has a catalogue of more than 600,000 items. Its Indian iteration does not match up, according to reviews on the Google Play store. Several customer reviews for Reliance’s Shein app are critical of higher prices and reduced options. The app’s rating hovered at 2 out of 5 until February; in May, it climbed to 4.4, but reviews were still a mixed bag.
Reviews of the Indian app highlight the disparity with Shein’s global version, criticizing higher prices and a reduced selection of categories and styles.
As of April 25, Reliance Retail said only 12,000 products were live on Shein India, a stark contrast to the 600,000 items available on Shein’s global platforms. While Shein is reportedly set to debut on the London Stock Exchange this year, Ambani’s years-old promise to take Reliance Retail public remains unfulfilled.
Reliance Retail, which accounts for around 30% of the conglomerate’s overall business, is facing a slowdown in annual growth. Its sales rose just 7.9% in the fiscal year ending March 2025, down from 17.8% the previous year. Meanwhile, shares of rival Tata Group’s retail and fashion arm, Trent, have soared by 133%.
“Reliance would have looked at reviving that momentum and riding on it, while for Shein, adding India back on its portfolio of markets could be a plus point before its proposed public listing,” Devangshu Dutta, founder of Third Eyesight, a brand management consultancy that has worked with various global e-commerce brands including Ikea, told Rest of World.
A Reliance Retail official privy to information about its fast fashion expansion plans told Rest of World the partnership with Shein also hinges on global manufacturing ambitions as the Chinese company is trying to “source its products from other countries like India” to meet the “additional demand that is coming from newer markets.” Reliance Retail has tapped a network of small and midsize Indian manufacturers to locally source products, and its subsidiary Nextgen Fast Fashion Limited is leading the charge. “We need to first scale up our domestic manufacturing, before our partnership starts manufacturing for global markets. Let us see how that goes, first,” the official said, requesting anonymity as he is not authorized to share this information publicly.
India’s Gen Z population is at 377 million and counting, and their spending power is set to surpass $2 trillion by 2035, according to a 2024 report by Boston Consulting Group. Every fast-fashion retailer wants to capture this market, but it “is very new even for Reliance,” Rimjim Deka, founder of Indian fast-fashion platform Littlebox, told Rest of World.
Deka said smaller brands like hers “just see [a trend] and implement it,” which could take a large conglomerate months to do, by which time the trend may have lost relevance.
Reliance’s previous attempts to attract young shoppers with clothing brands like Foundry and Yousta failed to find much success. Anandita Bhuyan, who works in trend forecasting and product creation for fast-fashion clients like H&M and Myntra, told Rest of World the company has struggled to effectively leverage consumer data and target India’s youth.
According to the Reliance Retail official, the company is confident that if “there are 10 existing brands, the 11th brand will also get picked up as long as there is value and there is fashion.”
“Shein already has a recall among the youth. It gives us yet another brand in our portfolio through which we can cater to the youth,” the official said.
Shein was built in China on the back of more than 5,400 micro manufacturers — a scattered and loosely organized network of small and midsize factories.
In January this year, on a visit to China, Deka met with manufacturers working for Shein and Temu. On the outskirts of Guangzhou, Deka saw factories set up in areas that appeared residential, with “women sitting inside houses” making clothes.
“The tech is built in a way that somebody sitting there is able to see that, okay, next 15 days or next one month, how much I should be making … that is the kind of integration they have done,” Deka said.
Deka told Rest of World this model is easier to replicate at a smaller scale. “Me, coming from [the] supply chain industry, I understand that it is much easier for a brand like us because we are at a very smaller scale. We can still go to those people, we can still build it in a very unorganized way and then pull it off,” she said. Her company’s annual net revenue is 750 million Indian rupees ($8.6 million).
“[But] somebody like Reliance, they just cannot go haphazard here. … It has to be always organized,” Deka said.
Shein moved its headquarters to Singapore sometime between late 2021 and early 2022, a strategic departure to distance itself from its Chinese origins and facilitate hassle-free international expansion amid the U.S.-China trade war.
India is part of Shein’s wider strategy to diversify its supply chain — one that also includes a newly leased warehouse near Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and efforts to establish alternative manufacturing hubs in Brazil and Turkey.
But in India, Reliance needs Shein as much as Shein needs Reliance for its global pivot. According to Bloomberg, Reliance Retail is focusing on creating leaner operations to weather a wider consumption slump in the Indian economy.
“It remains to be seen whether the Reliance-Shein combine can deliver on the brand’s promise with a wide range of products, fast and on-trend,” Dutta said. “In the years that Shein has been absent, the Indian market has evolved further, competition has intensified, and past goodwill is not enough to provide sales momentum.”
Kunal Purohit is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai, India.
Ananya Bhattacharya is a reporter for Rest of World covering South Asia’s tech scene. She is based in Mumbai, India.
(Published in Rest of World)
admin
May 19, 2025
Aakriti Bansal, Medianama
May 19, 2025
Zepto has launched Zepto Atom, a paid analytics product for consumer brands. The tool offers live dashboards with minute-level updates, PIN-code level performance maps, and Zepto GPT, an in-house Natural Language Processing (NLP) assistant trained on internal data.
While Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart have not announced comparable offerings, Zepto is pitching Atom as a first-of-its-kind play in quick commerce data access.
The launch comes as Zepto gears up for a public offering. The company is in talks to sell $250 million in secondary shares to Indian investors to boost local ownership ahead of its IPO. With a $5 billion valuation and a presence in just 15 cities, Zepto is seeking new ways to expand both revenue and market influence.
A strategic product in the lead-up to IPO
Zepto’s push to monetise platform tools comes at a time when it is attempting to raise its domestic shareholder base to 50%, reportedly as part of regulatory preparation for a future IPO. CLSA, in its 2024 App-racadabra report, estimates Zepto holds 28% of India’s quick commerce market despite a limited presence, trailing Blinkit at 39%.
With Zepto Atom, the company appears to turn its data infrastructure into a service layer for brands. This raises questions about how user behaviour transforms into brand-facing insight.
Zepto’s Multi-Lever Margin Play
Zepto’s cost structure is divided into warehouse transport, dark store operations, last-mile delivery, and corporate overheads. According to CLSA’s App-racadabra report, the company has achieved measurable efficiency gains across each of these categories. For instance, long-haul warehouse transport costs fell from Rs 1.7 per order in March 2022 to Rs 0.8 in February 2024. Handling costs inside dark stores declined from Rs 11 per order in June 2023 to under Rs 10 by January 2024. Last-mile delivery expenses dropped 20% between December 2023 and February 2024, from Rs 50 to Rs 40 per order.
HDFC Securities highlights three key levers for e-commerce profitability: raising average order values via premium or bundled products, improving take rates through ads and private labels, and reducing last-mile costs through better routing. Zepto has pursued these through initiatives like Zepto Café, Relish (in-house food and meat brands), the Zepto Pass loyalty program, and now Zepto Atom—signaling a multi-pronged approach to expand margins beyond logistics.
Whether brands will act on the data that Atom delivers, remains an open question.
Granular offtake data is rarely made available to brands, whether it is by offline retailers or by online platforms; so far brands have been largely flying blind, especially when it comes to marketplaces. In that sense, Zepto’s Atom can be a huge enabler and gamechanger,” Devangshu Dutta, Founder, Third Eyesight, told MediaNama.
Not All Brands May Be Ready
Zepto Atom lets brands monitor impressions, conversions, share of voice, and customer retention in near real-time.
“While having access to real-time geographical and time-stamped sales data is potentially an absolute goldmine for any brand, how useful it is will depend much more on how ready or capable the brand is to use the analysis and make adjustments to its strategy,” said Dutta.
Brands can use Zepto GPT, the NLP assistant embedded in Atom, to query platform data conversationally—for instance, to identify under-indexed Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) in a specific PIN code or analyse what’s driving category sales. However, it remains unclear how brands interpret or act on these insights in practice.
The company has not disclosed Atom’s pricing model. It also hasn’t confirmed whether access will be open to all brands or restricted to high-volume partners. These details will likely determine adoption.
How Atom Fits into the Margin Strategy
Zepto Atom’s real-time sales metrics, SKU-level performance data, and customer retention patterns align closely with the margin levers identified by HDFC Securities. By providing granular insights, Atom enables brands to fine-tune pricing, reposition products, and run targeted campaigns, potentially increasing order values, improving take rates, and optimizing delivery routes. Such adjustments could boost volumes and conversions, benefiting Zepto through higher commissions and ad revenues.
“For Zepto it is certainly a differentiator and could be a driver for additional revenue not just in terms of the subscription fees that they would charge but the incremental impact it could make on the brand partners’ sales and, by extension, on Zepto’s own overall fees/revenues,” said Dutta.
Still, widespread adoption may depend on how well Zepto supports brand onboarding and data literacy. “It may make sense for Zepto to even assist brand-side personnel in understanding how best to use the new tools and also help them create tangible operational changes on their side using the insights.”
Search behaviour and profiling concerns remain unresolved
Earlier this month, Zepto used search behaviour to curate mood-specific product categories such as “Crampy” and “Hangry,” in response to searches related to premenstrual syndrome (PMS)—a recurring condition affecting many women before menstruation. Critics told MediaNama that this kind of emotional profiling could occur without user awareness or consent.
Zepto’s privacy policy states that it collects lifestyle, health, and behavioural data for personalisation and internal analysis. However, the company does not explain whether it stores inferred data, shares it with brands, or applies it to pricing and promotions.
Whether Atom makes any of this data visible to brands remains unclear.
Why This Matters
Zepto Atom signals a shift in how quick commerce platforms are looking to generate value—not just from delivery, but from the data their ecosystems produce. With tools like real-time dashboards and search-linked behavioural insights, Zepto is turning user interactions into assets for brand partnerships.
The move raises larger questions about where platform growth is coming from. Is the business of quick commerce becoming the business of behavioural data? As brands gain new visibility through Atom, the balance between consumer experience and commercial analytics becomes harder to separate.
MediaNama has reached out to Zepto with these questions:
What specific types of consumer behaviour and purchase data are made available to brands through Atom?
Does Zepto Atom include inferred metrics such as user intent, repeat behaviour, or emotional tagging in its brand-facing dashboard?
Are brands shown real-time access to individual-level trends, or only aggregated cohort-level insights?
Are users informed that their platform activity may be used to generate commercial insights for brands?
Can users opt out of this data being shared with third parties via Atom?As of publication, Zepto has not responded. We will update the story when we receive a response.
(Published in Medianama)