Quick Commerce – A Trend With High Potential

They are becoming more and more present in German cities: people on bicycles or scooters, often in colorful workwear, who dash through the streets delivering online orders. The orange-dressed Lieferando bikers have been around for quite some time, but they are recently accompanied more and more often by other deliverers: Gorillas or Flink bikers, for instance. They are the face of a new up-and-coming eCommerce trend. Quick commerce is eCommerce in a faster form. It adds innovations in delivery to traditional eCommerce. Strategically located warehouses and the use of bicycles and scooters, which move quicker in dense traffic, allow for a faster processing of orders and thus significantly reduce delivery times. The extremely short delivery times of often less than one hour are the new quick commerce players’ decisive competitive advantage. According to a Capterra survey, 46% of German online shoppers would approve of shorter delivery times of their online orders in general. When it comes to food, the delivery time is especially important: 69% would like to have their grocery orders delivered on the same day, 25% within one hour. Quick commerce thus seems like the perfect answer to current customer needs – a trend that also reflects in a current Statista survey:

According to a Survey conducted by Statista among more than 3,000 online shoppers in Germany in January 2022 shows that most Germans have not yet used the quick grocery delivery services, but a substantial share are open towards the innovative trend. While only 17% had already ordered something at a quick commerce platform in the 12 months prior to the survey, another 40% stated that they could imagine trying quick commerce grocery delivery in the near future. That turns 57% of German online shoppers into potential quick commerce customers.

When looking at user numbers of concrete grocery delivery platforms, it turns out that “traditional” deliverers like amazonfresh or REWE are still many times as frequently used as the biggest quick commerce players1 in Germany. While 43% of online shoppers ordered groceries and amazonfresh in the 12 months prior to the survey, quick commerce platforms like Flink, Gorillas or Flaschenpost only reach just above 10%. User numbers are likely to rise, though, as quick commerce is still in its infancy stage and has great potential, as our first infographic shows.

1: Grocery deliverers that have average delivery times of 3 hours or less are considered quick commerce players. Some of the players in the survey are not listed on eCommerceDB because their business models are out of scope (e.g. app-only).