Swiggy Instamart opens its first offline experiential store in Gurugram as quick commerce race heats up

Swiggy has opened an offline, Instamart-branded experiential store in Gurugram as part of a limited consumer experiment.

Swiggy's Instamart-branded experiential store

According to reports, the physical store is offering fresh fruits and vegetables, pulses, new D2C brand launches and Instamart’s private label products. Instamart will be providing the seller-owned and operated store with branding and services.

Sales will go directly to the seller, not routed through Swiggy in this experiential store.

Customers can walk through aisles in this retail outlet to select items they want to purchase, just like in any physical store, and complete billing at the counters, without needing to interact with the digital ‘Instamart app’.

The store is under 1,000 square feet in size, strikingly smaller than Instamart’s dark stores, which typically range between 2,500 and 4,000 square feet, and its larger “megapod” formats, which can reach up to 8,000 square feet.

The offline store will stock only a few hundred SKUs, compared with nearly 40,000 SKUs typically housed in a dark store.

Currently, only one store has opened. With it, Swiggy plans to position such stores around residential societies as discovery and experience-led formats rather than full-fledged retail outlets.

However, no expansion plan has been charted out for the same.

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