Meena sells hand painted diyas and festive decor from a small workshop in Jaipur. Last Diwali, she listed her best pieces on a quick commerce app because a cousin convinced her it was the fastest way to get sales during the festive rush. Orders came in within hours, and for two weeks her phone did not stop buzzing with delivery pickups. Then the season ended, the app delisted most of her catalog to make room for new sellers, and by December she had no way to reach a single one of those customers again. She did not have their numbers, their emails, or even a record of what they had bought. All she had was a payout in her bank account and a platform commission that had quietly eaten close to a fifth of every order.
This is the exact tension small business owners across India are sitting with this festive season. Quick commerce platforms such as Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart have moved well beyond groceries this year, pushing hard into fashion, beauty, electronics, and home decor, and industry coverage around this festive season has repeatedly flagged how fast that expansion is happening. For a small brand, the appeal is obvious: instant access to a large, ready-to-buy audience without spending a rupee on your own marketing. But the question worth asking before you sign up for another platform is simple. Who actually owns the customer at the end of the sale, you or the app?
What quick commerce actually gives a small business
To be fair to the model, quick commerce solves a real problem. A new seller with no audience of their own can get in front of buyers within days, not months. There is no need to build traffic, run ads, or explain to a first time customer why they should trust an unfamiliar shop, since the platform's own reputation does that work. During a festive spike, when demand is compressed into a few intense weeks, that speed can genuinely be the difference between a good season and a missed one. Reports on this year's festive retail have pointed to a large and growing share of India's incremental online shoppers coming from tier 2 and tier 3 towns, and quick commerce has been one of the easier ways for a small seller in those markets to reach that demand quickly.
The catch is what you give up to get that speed. Commissions on quick commerce and marketplace listings typically run anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of the order value depending on category, on top of packaging and, in many cases, return handling costs. A product that nets you Rs 400 in profit sold directly might leave you with Rs 250 or less through a platform, once every fee is accounted for. You also do not control your own listing. A price war triggered by a competitor, a sudden algorithm change, or simply the platform deciding your category is not a priority anymore can shrink your visibility overnight, and there is no customer support line that will explain why.
The part that matters after the festive season ends
The bigger cost is not the commission, it is the missing relationship. When a customer buys from you through a marketplace or a quick commerce app, that customer belongs to the platform, not to you. You cannot message them next month about a new collection, cannot offer a returning customer a small discount, and often cannot even see their name properly. Every sale is a one time transaction that has to be won again from scratch, at full commission, the next time you need business.
A website changes that equation entirely. When someone buys through your own site, or even just fills a contact form after finding you through Google, you keep their number and their order history. You can follow up on WhatsApp when your next batch is ready, without paying a platform a cut for the privilege. If you have not compared what it actually costs to run your own site against platform fees over a year, it is worth working through how much a website costs in India before assuming platforms are the cheaper option. For many small sellers, a website that costs a few hundred rupees a month ends up cheaper than a single month of marketplace commissions once volume picks up.
A hybrid approach works better than picking one
None of this means quick commerce or marketplaces are a mistake. The realistic answer for most small businesses is to use both, but to treat them differently. Platforms are useful for discovery, for reaching a new buyer who has never heard of you and would not have found you otherwise. Your own website, together with a well maintained Google Business Profile, is where you turn that first purchase into a repeat customer without paying a recurring toll on every single order.
This is easier to manage in practice than it sounds. If you already run a WhatsApp catalog for regulars, keep it, but link it from your website so search traffic and word of mouth both land in the same place. If you have been debating whether an Instagram shop is enough on its own, the quick commerce comparison makes the case even stronger for having a proper site, since neither an Instagram page nor a marketplace listing is something you actually control. And if payments have been the reason you delayed building a site, setting up UPI collection for your business takes far less effort than most owners expect.
What to prioritise before the next big shopping window
For a business like Meena's, the practical fix is not to leave the quick commerce app, since it genuinely brought in sales she would not have had otherwise. It is to make sure every package, every WhatsApp reply, and every product photo also points customers toward her own website and Google listing, so that a platform buyer today can become a direct repeat customer in three months. That single habit, printing a small card with your website and WhatsApp number inside every order, is one of the cheapest customer retention tools a small business has.
Diwali and the weeks around it are still the busiest stretch of the year for Indian retail, both online and offline, and this year's festive spending is expected to be strong across categories from clothing to electronics to home decor. Whichever platforms you choose to sell on this season, make sure at least one channel, your own website, is one that no algorithm change or delisting decision can take away from you. Platforms can bring you customers fast. Only a channel you own can bring the same customer back for free.