Convenience stores and quick commerce: the challenges

Quick commerce is becoming an essential offer for established online retailers and a route to entering online for less-established players.

While some quick commerce deliveries are fulfilled from dark stores, such as Deliveroo’s sites in central London, most are picked from retailers’ store estates, especially within the convenience channel.

Using convenience stores to fulfil quick commerce orders enables retailers to exploit their pre-existing infrastructure, while stores’ proximity to customers helps facilitate the required speed of delivery.

However, the growth of quick commerce has exposed difficulties in requiring convenience store networks to double up as mini fulfilment centres, a task they were never designed for.

Planning challenges

With retailers seeking incremental revenue from quick commerce orders, rather than moving a portion of their convenience sales online, the stores serve more customers, in a potentially wider radius, especially where deliveries are made using cars or motorcycles.

This can make ranging decisions in the store difficult; quick commerce is not simply a digitised convenience store. Quick commerce shoppers typically opt for more premium products and expect the assortment to be weighted toward brands. Retailers will naturally seek to meet these expectations, taking the opportunity to boost the volume of higher-margin SKUs.

This poses a supply chain challenge for convenience stores fulfilling quick commerce orders. By their nature, convenience stores have space for only a limited assortment, which is typically optimised by the demographic it serves.

Some retailers are increasing the quick commerce assortment by fulfilling orders at superstores. However, this will likely increase the ranging challenge where convenience fulfilment is retained by raising customer expectations.

Risks to customer service

Using convenience stores as fulfilment hubs for quick commerce poses customer service risks to shoppers of both channels.

Quick commerce relies on accurate order picking carried out by store staff, however the small store size and limited staffing can make this challenging, particularly when there is a sudden influx of orders. Incorrect or missing products from shoppers’ orders poses a risk to the incremental revenue gained from the quick commerce channel.

Speed, too, is vital for quick commerce to succeed; orders should be ready for collection when the delivery person arrives. As delivery riders are typically paid per order delivered, packing delays pose a threat to customer service and riders’ incomes.

Simultaneously, the challenge of packing accuracy and speed can mean reduced service for convenience store shoppers, who may find staff unable to assist. This is a problem for shoppers purchasing products requiring age verification when using self-checkouts.

Similarly, the additional in-store traffic driven by delivery people could result in a worsened store experience for shoppers who find the store crowded with delivery people waiting for orders to be packed. This problem can also be found outside stores, such as parking areas.

Quick commerce evolving store design

Although the challenges of using convenience stores as fulfilment centres are clear, quick commerce’s role in gaining incremental spend can improve the viability of poorly performing stores. Similarly, quick commerce will offer a greater return on capital for new convenience stores, influencing store location and design.

Increasingly, new and refitted stores have features to reduce friction in the dual roles they must increasingly play. Waitrose’s new convenience store in Hampton Hill, London, is its first fitted with a hatch to serve its quick commerce partners. The hatch means delivery riders are served faster, whilst reducing in-store traffic.

Sainsbury’s refurbished Pudsey Town Local store in Leeds features self-serve lockers for aggregators and its Chop Chop service drivers to collect orders, reducing wait time and demands on store staff’s time.

Fulfilling orders from superstores

Some retailers have begun fulfilling quick commerce orders from their larger stores, with Gopuff picking orders from three Morrisons supermarkets in London, Newcastle, and Watford. Similarly, Tesco has introduced superstore fulfilment at 42 locations for its Whoosh service.

Superstores, with their larger space and range, are better equipped for order picking. However, this is unlikely to be a silver bullet for retailers, as superstores do not always offer the right proximity to shoppers.

Drone delivery is a possible solution to this problem. Walmart has introduced drone delivery to 75% of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, delivering orders within a 10-mile radius of stores in under 30 minutes.

However, with the rapid growth of quick commerce, picking from superstores risks displacing concerns around customer service and overcrowding, rather than resolving them.

Challenge likely to remain in the longer term

Retailers and their quick commerce partners may be expected to resolve some of these challenges in the coming years, particularly those around range optimisation.

However, the main difficulties in using a convenience store estate to fulfil orders are harder to overcome. An increase in staffing may be financially viable where quick commerce drives sufficient incremental revenue; however, challenges associated with the physical space will remain for the long term.

Want to know more about quick commerce?

The channel’s growth and ongoing development is one of the four trends identified in our Global online trends 2025 report.