Amazon pares Fresh in India

A year ago, Amazon was still telling a simple grocery story in India. Amazon Fresh had just expanded from 130 cities to more than 170, with the company pointing to 50% year-on-year growth in the second half of 2024 and pitching the service as a reliable, slotted alternative to the chaos of instant delivery (news18.com). Now that middle lane is the one Amazon is backing away from. According to reporting based on a UBS Global Research note, Amazon plans to scale down Fresh in 10 to 15 major Indian cities and replace it there with Amazon Now, its quick-commerce service (timesofindia.indiatimes.com, economictimes.indiatimes.com). That sounds like a retreat. It is really a concession to how Indian online shopping now works. Quick commerce is no longer a niche for forgotten milk and late-night snacks. Bain said in March 2025 that platforms promising delivery in under 30 minutes already accounted for more than two-thirds of all e-grocery orders in India and about a tenth of all e-retail spending (bain.com). Once that kind of behavior becomes normal, a 4-to-24-hour grocery service stops looking like a smart compromise and starts looking like dead space. Amazon’s answer is Amazon Now. The company launched it in Bengaluru in 2025, then expanded to Delhi and Mumbai, and by September said it had opened more than 100 micro-fulfilment centres across those three cities. Amazon also said daily orders were growing 25% month on month and that Prime members were shopping three times more often after they started using the service (aboutamazon.in). That kind of frequency matters more than the old Fresh model ever could, because quick commerce is built on habit, not weekly planning. The economics are different too. UBS estimates Amazon Now is already live in six cities and could expand to 10 to 15, covering roughly 80% of current quick-commerce demand in India. The same reporting says Amazon Now is running about 450 dark stores, adding around two a day, and handling roughly 300,000 to 350,000 orders per day across the network (economictimes.indiatimes.com, timesofindia.indiatimes.com). Those are not the numbers of a side project. They are the numbers of a company deciding which delivery promise deserves capital. What gets squeezed out is the in-between. Fresh still survives in places where Amazon Now has not arrived, and reports say it will remain active in more than 100 cities outside the top urban quick-commerce battlegrounds (timesofindia.indiatimes.com). That is the real shape of the shift. Big metros get dense networks, dark stores, and ten-minute promises. Smaller cities keep the broader, slower service. India is not converging on one delivery model. It is splitting into tiers, and Amazon is finally acting like it knows that. Even the basket tells the story. UBS says Amazon Now’s average order value is about Rs 260 to Rs 300, rising to Rs 320 to Rs 360 in stores older than six months, still held back by a category mix that began with FMCG and only recently widened into things like electronics and toys (timesofindia.indiatimes.com). That is what quick commerce looks like when it matures: not one giant grocery haul, but a stream of smaller purchases, pushed through a growing mesh of dark stores at roughly two new locations a day (economictimes.indiatimes.com).