Zodiac by Nitro Is Betting That Quick Commerce

Social media platforms have long been the dominant channel for digital advertising. But there is a fundamental problem with the model that quick commerce is beginning to expose.

"On social media, the default user mode is entertainment, leading to high ad fatigue and sub-1% click-through rates," says Umair Mohammad, founder of Nitro Commerce, an AI-based marketing services startup. "A user opens a quick commerce app to complete a specific task or fix a last-minute need. Because the context is inherently transactional, the platforms can place sponsored tiles, bundles, and in-cart prompts right next to an active basket."

That distinction matters enormously. An ad shown to someone passively scrolling through entertainment content competes with everything else on the screen. An ad shown to someone who has already opened a shopping app with a list in mind is talking to a person who is ready to buy.

Quick commerce platforms also hold something that social media cannot match: rich, deterministic first-party data. Every order generates hard signals: which category was purchased, what time of day, what basket size, and which neighbourhood the order came from. Users return multiple times a month, and each session adds to a profile that is tied to a real address and backed by an actual transaction.

As third-party cookies fade and social media returns on ad spend ebb, that data becomes increasingly valuable. Quick commerce platforms know not just who is buying, but what they buy regularly, when they buy it, and where they live.

The advertising industry has begun to notice.

Ad spends on India's big three quick commerce platforms, Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart, jumped from Rs 1,325 Cr to Rs 4,000 Cr in 2025, a 202% surge in a single year. Projections point to Rs 6,000 Cr by 2026, implying another 50% growth.

Quick commerce media networks are on course to grow at an average of 21% between 2023 and 2027. Retail media, which already commands a significant slice of the digital advertising pie, is seeing its sharpest growth from this category.

These numbers signal that brands are no longer treating quick commerce as an add-on channel. It is becoming a primary revenue engine that sits as close to the point of sale as any advertising format ever has.

For brands, this compression changes the strategic logic entirely. Purchasing decisions on quick commerce platforms are made in seconds, based on the top search results and the first few rows of a category page. Whoever dominates those slots consistently builds mindshare and category share in a way that traditional cost-per-click metrics cannot fully capture.

"In quick commerce, your share of those prime impressions tracks much closer to your actual share of the market than CPC does in this compressed environment," Mohammad explains.

The opportunity is real, but so is the risk.

When brands with no connection to groceries start advertising on a quick commerce platform, the results can backfire. Non-endemic ads, those placed by brands that do not sell their products on the platform but use its data to reach relevant audiences, can slow the app down, disrupt the seamless shopping experience that is the platform's core strength, and simply feel out of place in a way that damages user trust.

"Anything that slows the user down on a platform which they use to complete tasks in minutes risks lower engagement and high drop-off," Mohammad cautions.

The solution, he argues, is tighter contextual rules rather than blanket restrictions. Financial services ads served only on high-value baskets. Telecom ads triggered by heavy digital consumption signals. All of it integrated into native, low-friction placements like post-purchase confirmation screens rather than intrusive interruptions mid-shopping.

The next phase of growth in quick commerce advertising will not be defined by how many brands can squeeze into the feed. It will be defined by how intelligently the platforms balance relevance, speed, and user trust.

Executing on that balance requires infrastructure that most brands do not have and most platforms do not want to build themselves.

This is where Nitro Commerce and its AI platform Zodiac come in.

Zodiac functions as an AI co-pilot for brands navigating the quick commerce advertising landscape. It stitches together sales, inventory, and advertising signals into unified shopper and SKU-level profiles, allowing brands to identify performance patterns across dark stores and quick commerce platforms without relying on fragmented dashboards or manual reporting.

The platform has four integrated layers: identity resolution, intent-led media, agentic engagement, and real-time retention. Together, they allow brands to respond dynamically to user behaviour, whether someone has browsed, dropped off, or returned for a second purchase.

"The moment a user browses, drops off, or comes back for a second purchase, Nitro knows what to do next," Mohammad says.

For platforms themselves, building this infrastructure from scratch is expensive and distracting. Identity graphs, audience managers, billing systems, reporting tools, and compliance infrastructure are all slow and capital-intensive to develop internally.

"Nitro provides these primitives as ready-to-use modules," Mohammad explains, freeing platforms to focus on their core strengths in logistics and assortment.