How does a quick commerce platform survive on thin delivery fees?
It builds a high-margin ad business on top.
This isn't a new idea. Walmart, Amazon, eBay, Alibaba have all done it. They use their own shopper data to let brands buy ad placements, and that high-margin ad money quietly props up the thin-margin retail underneath. Zepto is running the same playbook, just much earlier.
And the numbers are moving fast:
➡️ FY24 ad receipts: ₹58 Cr, about 1.1% of NRV
➡️ FY25: ₹769 Cr, 6.1% of NRV
➡️ FY26: ₹1,931 Cr, 7.8% of NRV
Last quarter alone they pulled in ₹641 Cr, growing faster than the core order volume itself.
Here's why this matters more than people realise.
Digital ad revenue runs at something like 70-90% margin, because it rides on software that already exists.
No extra dark store, no extra rider, no extra inventory to add a rupee of it.
And FMCG brands are happy to pay, because the person seeing the ad is minutes away from actually buying.
That high-margin money is what lets Zepto keep delivery cheap and keep prices low, while pushing acquisition cost down to almost ₹1 per order
So the mistake most people are making is reading Zepto as a delivery app.
It's closer to an ad and data business that just happens to deliver groceries
#Zepto #Ipo