A 15-Minute Delivery Service is Piloted by Tata's Neu To Stay Head-to-Head in Race

Nitin Konde, Varun Bhardwaj

Nov 27, 2024 — 2 min read

Tata Neu Pilots 15-Minute Delivery to Compete in Quick Commerce

As India's need for speedy deliveries increases, the Tata Group's e-commerce business, Neu, is testing a quick commerce delivery service called Neu Flash. The 15-minute delivery service is currently available in more than 20 Indian cities.

The service has been extended to a number of tier-II cities, while the main markets are big metro areas like Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, and Chennai. A carefully chosen range of products will be offered during the first phase of the rollout, which is currently restricted to a few pin codes within these cities.

Offering Wide Range of Products

Neu Flash provides product delivery for anything from groceries and electronics to clothing and cosmetics. The app provides fast delivery in a number of categories, such as food, electronics, clothing, and cosmetics, and is based on Tata's current digital infrastructure. It makes use of BigBasket's pre-existing hyperlocal network, while Tata Cliq handles fashion and lifestyle items and Croma oversees electronics deliveries.

Following its previous difficulties in the superapp category, Tata Digital is attempting to improve Neu's market position with this growth. The rapid commerce expansion comes after Neu's platform underwent significant backend enhancements over the previous 12 months, such as a redesigned user interface and improved integration of Tata's digital assets.

Current Scenario of Quick Commerce Industry in India

According to industry data, the rapid commerce business in India has expanded by 280% in the past two years, and the top three companies, Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart, have combined to generate over $1 billion in revenue for FY24. This occurs as Indian businesses are stepping up their rapid commerce solutions. Amazon India is getting ready to debut its rapid commerce service, Tez, while Myntra recently introduced M-Now for 30-minute- to 2-hour deliveries. The fierce competition in the rapid commerce area is shown by Zepto's recent $350 million fundraising round, which was led by Motilal Oswal's Private Wealth division. The company has raised $1.35 billion this year alone to increase the number of its dark stores and diversify its product offerings, demonstrating the significant investments being made by competitors to gain market share in this quickly expanding industry.

E-commerce and other retail formats are being disrupted by quick commerce, which, according to a recent Bernstein analysis, is expanding more quickly than contemporary retail chains like Reliance Retail, Dmart, and Spencer Retail. This is one of the reasons why consumer platforms are responding to the shift by preparing to deliver a variety of goods outside of groceries in 10–20 minutes.

Tata Neu has been urged to exercise caution when spending large sums of money on consumer incentives, so it will be fascinating to see how it handles the fast commerce sector. Meanwhile, the industry leaders have plenty of money and are making every effort to gain market share.