If you’ve opened the Zepto app recently, you might have thought your screen was broken. All those annoying, extra fees? Gone. The handling fee? Vanished. What is the surge fee for ordering in the rain? Evaporated.
This isn’t a temporary sale. This is a declaration of war.
Under the banner of an “All New Experience,” Zepto has fundamentally changed the rules of quick commerce. It’s a brutally simple and aggressive new model, and it’s backed by a $900 million war chest.
What Zepto Just Did
Zepto’s new pricing is designed to do one thing: eliminate all friction from the ordering process.
- Handling Fees: Scrapped.
- Surge & Rain Fees: Gone. Zepto is now paying for driver incentives out of its own pocket, not yours.
- Free Delivery: The minimum order for free delivery was slashed in half, from Rs 199 to just Rs 99.
- Small Cart Fees: Eliminated.
The new math is simple: Any order over Rs 99 is delivered completely free of all ancillary charges. Below that, it’s just a flat Rs 30 fee.
This is a “volume-at-all-costs” strategy. Zepto has officially stopped trying to make a profit on your order and has started a war for market dominance.
Making the Competition Look Ridiculous
This move instantly makes Zepto’s chief rivals, Zomato’s Blinkit and Swiggy’s Instamart, look expensive, complicated, and out of touch.
As of now, both Blinkit and Instamart are still charging a complex stack of fees:
- Handling fees
- Delivery fees (on orders under Rs 199)
- Small cart fees
- Surge and rain fees
The real “kill shot” is on the small, impulse order. Let’s say you just want to order a single item that costs around Rs 85-90.
- On Zepto: You’d pay the Rs 30 delivery fee for a total of around Rs 115.
- On Blinkit: You’d get hit with a delivery fee (Rs 30), plus a handling fee (~Rs 4), plus a small cart fee (Rs 20). Your total balloons to over Rs 143.
- On Instamart: It’s even worse, with a fee stack that can push the same order to over Rs 154.
The Masterstroke: A Trap for Zomato and Swiggy
This is where the strategy goes from aggressive to brilliant. Zepto is a pure-play—it only does quick commerce. Its rivals, Blinkit and Instamart, are owned by Zomato and Swiggy.
This creates an impossible dilemma for them.
Zomato and Swiggy are both under intense pressure from their public market investors to be profitable. They’ve been achieving this by aggressively increasing platform fees on their core food delivery businesses.
Zepto has just forced them into a strategic trap:
- Protect Food Profits: Do nothing. Refuse to match Zepto’s price cuts in grocery. This preserves the profitability of their core food business but means they are actively ceding the entire quick commerce market to Zepto, day by day.
- Protect Grocery Share: Match Zepto’s fee cuts. This means funding a new, high-burn subsidy war in grocery. This would torch their parent company’s hard-won profitability, likely tanking their stock price.
Zepto, as an agile, private insurgent, faces no such dilemma. It has brilliantly attacked its rivals’ most vulnerable, high-burn segment, forcing them into a no-win situation.
The Endgame: A War of Timing
This isn’t a war Zepto can win by bankrupting its rivals; Zomato has cash. This is a war of IPO timing.
The $900 million isn’t meant to last forever. It’s meant to last just long enough—perhaps 12-18 months—to achieve two goals:
- Steal a dominant market share from Blinkit and Instamart.
- File its IPO with an unassailable high-growth story before the money runs out.
The goal is to use private capital to fund the war, and then tap public capital from the IPO to sustain it.
The most dangerous, long-term impact of this? Zepto has “poisoned the well.” Just when the industry was successfully “training” customers to accept fees for convenience, Zepto has violently re-trained the entire market to expect zero fees. It will now be almost impossible for any platform to re-introduce these charges without facing a massive customer revolt.
In short, Zepto is using its $900 million to try and buy “default app” status—the habit of opening its app first without even checking the others. Your cheap groceries are just a lucky side effect of this corporate Hunger Games.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Does Zepto give free money?
No, not exactly “free money.” Zepto gives discounts, cashback, and promo credits, which feel like free money but are just ways to save on your orders. You’ll often see these as “cash” in your Zepto wallet.
How do I get free delivery on Zepto?
It’s super simple: just make sure your order is over ₹99. If it is, the delivery fee is automatically waived.
Does Zepto charge for delivery?
Only for small orders. If your order is under ₹99, they add a flat ₹30 delivery fee. They’ve recently removed all other charges like surge fees or handling fees.
What other apps give free delivery on the first order?
It changes all the time, but here’s the general deal:
Others (like Blinkit, BigBasket): They focus more on discount codes for your first order rather than guaranteed free delivery.
Swiggy: Usually offers free delivery on your first food order.
Dunzo: Often provides free delivery on your first few orders.
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