Most searched product on Swiggy Instamart? Bedsheets

He also admitted that the lines between e-commerce and quick commerce are blurring fast.

Swiggy Instamart customers have gone from searching for batteries in the initial days of quick commerce to now searching for bedsheets, CEO Sriharsha Majety has said, highlighting how quick deliveries have evolved in short span of time, giving stiff competition to e-commerce giants.

“There aren’t that many boundaries between e-commerce and quick commerce. If users are getting used to the platform, they want more and more selection…in year one type of batteries would have been what the consumers wanted to search for (but) it was bedsheets as of three months back,” Majety said at CNBC-TV18’s Global Leadership Summit on November 14.

“You would wonder why people want bedsheets in 10 minutes but they want it. They wanted a bedsheet and if it could be available in 1o minutes then they want it.”

He admitted that the lines between e-commerce and quick commerce are blurring fast. Rapid delivery, in its current form, will not be able to “deliver the whole world” in 10 minutes and companies in the space are all together figuring out where to draw the line.

Quick commerce in India is worth more than $5.5 billion and has rapidly evolved beyond grocery items to delivering electronics, clothes, sports equipment and more in 10-15 minutes.

Majety was speaking at the event just a day after taking his company public in one of most anticipated new-age IPOs in India. In the 10-year long journey of Swiggy, Majety has had a rollercoaster ride.

“The most challenging task for me as a founder was to take as many people along as possible. It is not always easy but to choose that path of win-win every single time is the biggest challenge. It only keeps increasing as the company gets larger and that’s what we need to buck up for,” Majety said.

Also read: Patience, vindication, joy: Scenes from Swiggy’s successful listing

With the listing, Swiggy has now taken the rivalry with Zomato to Dalal Street as well. Zomato, which went public in 2021, and Swiggy already compete in the food delivery space and are now going toe-to-toe in India’s red-hot quick commerce industry, which has grown to over $5.5 billion in under four years.

Asked if competition keeps him on the edge, especially in quick commerce since Flipkart and others are making inroads, Majety said, “Swiggy was born in the middle of a war. In 2014, we were like the 19th food delivery player… so we’ve seen that through. I can’t remember the last year or two where it felt like a little bit of calm. We don’t know any other world”

Majety said he took four-six quarters to prepare himself to be the founder of a publicly listed company who has to face analysts every quarter and make more public appearances.

On how he is gets battle ready, he said, “I’m not a big fight-driven…mindset. I just don’t operate like that. We’ve always focussed on what we can do, for the consumer, better and that energises (me) and that eventually gets (me) to do better. But directly thinking that this is this person and we need to beat them is just not a way that’s excited us as a company.”

“Whatever success we have had is by figuring out a way to energise ourselves…indirectly.”