Amazon’s quick commerce wildcard is Prime

Description

There are two ways to tell the quick commerce story in India.The first, and the more conventional way this narrative exists is that quick-commerce is a three-way race between Blinkit, which has pulled ahead with 2,200 dark stores and a roughly half-market share lead, Zepto, which has packed 21 stores per city in a metro saturation play, and Instamart, which sits squeezed in the middle. Every metric the category tracks was built around the assumption that this will be contested on the same set of metrics i.e. dark stores, per-store profitability, density, contribution margin, AOV, etc.But there’s a second narrative that’s unfolding.Amazon has walked into quick-commerce, with its latest offering–Amazon Now.And unlike everyone, it has a singular weapon that none of the others has.On the Q1 2026 earnings call, Andy Jassy spoke less about dark stores, delivery times, or city counts. Instead, he specifically cited one number—Prime members tripling their shopping frequency once they start using Amazon Now, with orders growing 25% month over month. Essentially, Amazon is fighting the quick-commerce battle with a different set of numbers, which measures something different from what the rest of the category measures. Amazon owns something that the others don’t, i.e., the consumers themselves, who are locked into it through a subscription product, Prime.This unlocks possibilities for a new kind of flywheel to emerge.In this episode, Praveen sits down with Vishal Gahlaut (chief business officer, Hopscotch; ex-Myntra) and Aditya Suresh (head of India Equity Research, Macquarie Capital) to work through whether Prime is the asset that finally lets Amazon do in quick commerce what it couldn’t do in e-commerce, payments, or groceries—or whether the category has already moved past where Amazon thinks it is.They discuss stuff like:The shift from Manish Tiwary’s tenure to Samir Kumar’s “Prime as the path to profitability” mandate, and what it reveals about how Amazon Now is being built internallyThe supply-side convergence math—fiv