Beco-nquering QComm: What Brands Can Learn from Beco’s Clean Breakthrough

When Beco entered the Quick Commerce (QComm) space in late 2022, the brand took a cautious, channel-by-channel approach, focusing on building relationships and strategically integrating into the market. The goal wasn’t immediate growth but rather to understand the landscape, test its offerings, and refine its strategy. By focusing on fewer platforms and investing heavily in those, Beco was able to replicate its successes across multiple channels without spreading itself too thin.

As consumer behavior in QComm evolved, Beco adapted swiftly. The shift towards larger pack sizes and more frequent, unplanned purchases transformed the brand’s approach to product assortment, availability, and pricing. Insight-led decision-making with GobbleCube, including closely tracking stock levels across cities and warehouses, helped ensure smooth operations and minimized stock gaps, while smarter ad placements boosted brand visibility.

In this interview, Aditya Ruia, Co-founder at Beco shares the lessons they have learned along their journey on QComm, from optimizing product assortments to balancing ads and pricing strategies. He offers invaluable insights into how challenger brands can thrive in a competitive and rapidly evolving space, and how to carve out that niche for themselves.

Here are a few excerpts from the interview:

We entered QComm platforms in late 2022 or early 2023 with a channel-by-channel approach. Our focus was to build relationships, get a few products in, and not necessarily grow immediately, but to get our foot in the door. Focusing on fewer channels and investing heavily helped us replicate successful models across others. We didn’t want to be everywhere at once.

QComm isn’t the largest portion of our sales yet, giving us flexibility. Just two months ago, we exited a platform because we weren’t dependent on it. If you start on all platforms without knowing what works, you burn money. By the time you understand the cost of business, your top line grows, but your bottom line suffers.

I say this as a founder - having the flexibility to do what’s right for your brand, not just chase growth at any cost, is crucial.

When we started, about 95% of our category was driven by General Trade (GT) and Modern Trade (MT), with GT being the largest component. People assumed that products in this category were strictly for monthly grocery shopping from local Mom-and-Pop stores.

We saw QComm as a supplement to GT, with similar pack sizes. However, in the last six months, there’s been a shift toward higher pack sizes, and consumer behaviour on QComm has changed significantly. Initially, consumers used QComm for top-up purchases, but now they’re purchasing items like laundry detergents, dishwashing gels, floor cleaners, tissue papers, and toothpaste on demand.

They no longer buy their monthly groceries all at once; instead, they wait until something runs out and then order it immediately.

These purchases are unplanned and occur more frequently, multiple times a day, week, or month, without the hassle of stocking up. For categories like ours, QComm is becoming a natural replacement for traditional channels. Logistics costs are manageable, and it just makes sense that QComm will account for a significant portion of future growth. While eComm and QComm penetration in these categories started at just 5%, it's now around 10–11% for us.

As a challenger brand in a fast-growing, expensive QComm industry, we’ve learned to focus on four key factors critical for success. These “Four A’s” - Assortment, Availability, Ads, and ASP - shape our approach and strategy.

The first key to QComm success is Assortment. Initially, many considered QComm as a top-up platform, but we’ve seen that it’s not just about top-up sales. In categories like laundry detergents, larger packs (e.g., 4-liter sizes) are some of the highest-selling SKUs.

Data shows that QComm has potential for larger volumes. We focus on offering a sharp assortment with the right SKUs, avoiding overwhelming consumers with too many options. By optimizing our assortment, we gain traction early, mitigating challenges in getting space in warehouses or competing for new listings.

Availability is a non-negotiable hygiene factor. We’ve increased our availability on Blinkit from 80% to 93–94%. This is a full-time effort, requiring constant communication with category managers and procurement teams to identify and fix gaps in availability on a per-city, per-SKU basis.

We track stocks at the warehouse and dark store levels to ensure our SKUs are available where they are most in demand. When stock isn’t flowing correctly across warehouses and dark stores, it’s easy to lose momentum. We’ve avoided many of these issues by building a sharp assortment, driving velocity and overcoming challenges. For new products, ensuring stock consistency and faster response times is critical.

Discoverability isn’t as high in QComm, but we can still influence consumer behaviour by strategically placing products in high-visibility areas like ‘Frequently Bought Together’ or ‘Add to Cart’ sections.

Offering trial-inducing products at a lower price point helps drive initial adoption. Once a customer tries the product, they’re more likely to make repeat purchases, even off-platform. As QComm expands geographically and in category depth, this strategy of creating trials and leveraging platform algorithms will help build customer loyalty and drive repeat purchases.

Higher ASP optimizes delivery costs, but pushing for a higher price point too soon can limit adoption, especially for challenger brands. Offering SKUs at a lower ASP helps build trust and allows customers to try out the brand with minimal risk. For challenger brands, driving adoption through affordable entry points establishes a customer base. Once customers try the product, they are more likely to return at higher price points, improving both adoption and brand loyalty.

We’ve streamlined availability by looking at each city or pin code, the SKU, and the dark stores or warehouses we’re optimizing for. GobbleCube began scraping data for around 95–98% of dark stores. Platforms track consumer visits and impressions, so we monitor product availability closely. We identified stock inconsistencies and mismatches in the automatic replenishment system (ARS) with platform category managers and fixed them through manual interventions, increasing order volumes. Platforms face technical challenges, but you must care for your own brand because no one else will. Without data, we’d be lost trying to figure out why orders dropped. Quick slicing and dicing are crucial as the number of dark stores grows.

We didn’t always get notified about launches, unlike larger brands, so we built a model that didn’t rely on the platform’s information. Beyond PO ordering, we focused on dark stores with high performance and distributed products closer to those warehouses.

We shortened PO expiry from 14 days to 10, then to 7, leading to prioritized appointments and faster turnaround times. Availability issues on platforms are as much their problem as ours, so we’ve built a system to improve this. Over the last three months, we’ve scaled it quickly, and our OSAs are now better than some other brands in the category.

Here, GobbleCube’s hyperlocal marketing data has been crucial, helping us track how our GT strength in certain pin codes shows up on QComm. Without building our own scrapers, this data has been invaluable in making smarter, context-driven decisions.

In categories like laundry detergents, we compete with major brands like Surf Excel, Ariel, and Tide. The goal is to enter the purchase consideration set by bidding more on branded searches rather than generic ones. On QComm, consumers usually come with intent, so we focus on competitor and branded keywords. In more commoditized categories like tissue paper, consumers are more open to trying new brands, so we focus less on competition.

If someone searches for a well-known brand, they’re unlikely to switch, making it difficult to gain traction in highly branded categories. Unlike Amazon, where extensive ad tools are available, QComm is simpler, with many activations handled by category managers. Therefore, we tailor our approach to each category, focusing on growing the category in areas where we have over 40% share, rather than fighting for more market share. We focus on building “new-to-brand” or “new-to-category” cohorts and running trials. Ads are iterative, and we experiment with different formats to drive salience. We do get a lot of data from the portal, and combining it across channels helps us build sharper strategies.

I’m not big on platform ads. Consumers just want the right product at the right price with zero friction. Ads are more about maintaining market share or growing the category, not much beyond that. In laundry, we run ads to get visibility because all searches are branded, but it’s not about ROI; it’s about ensuring the product gets added to the basket.

In every category, SKUs exist across different price points. The key is delivering a good PPU while keeping the pack size valid. This ties into assortment and ASP.

Attractive entry price points help, but larger packs allow consumers to trade up quickly. In categories like ours, pricing is critical to induce trial, and once consumers are bought in, prices can increase. Starting with trial packs at a lower ML and then upselling higher packs or cross-category trials is a common strategy.

In India, price elasticity is low in our category. Consumers won’t pay linearly more for better value. Premium-priced brands often reduce their prices over time, as consumers don’t enter this category with premium pricing in mind. We’ve learned that unit economics need to work in QComm, especially since the platform is becoming more expensive. With Blinkit going marketplace, competition is only increasing.

QComm has a lot of unknowns compared to eComm, which has been around for 10–15 years. For example, we don’t know if day-parting for ads works the same way or how dynamic pricing across geographies performs. Can you create alpha daily without discounting across the board, but doing it strategically?

There's a massive opportunity to spot white spaces, launch the right NPDs for each platform, and help the category grow overall. With AI, we can short-circuit the insight process, using tools like GobbleCube to spot trends and generate recommendations. This helps plan for what to do next, beyond just what has happened, and aids in identifying opportunities like BSRs on Amazon to drive cross-platform thinking.