How can retailers keep up with consumers who want it now?
Quick commerce could push stores toward fulfilment and service roles.
Retailers may need to change how they sell, market, and deliver products as consumers increasingly expect immediate solutions instead of planning purchases in advance, according to Kearney.
“Consumers are focusing less on planning purchases and more on solving their needs immediately,” the global management consulting firm said in an August report. “That shift changes not only where they shop, but also how they evaluate retailers in the first place.”
Quick-commerce adoption remains at an early stage, but Kearney said early users are already showing different shopping behaviours.
For decades, retailers have focused on making planned shopping easier by expanding product ranges, improving supply chains, building loyalty programmes, and shortening delivery times. Quick commerce could instead push retailers to organise around individual customer needs and moments of demand.
Merchandising could focus on specific shopping missions rather than bigger baskets, whilst marketing could reach consumers when a need emerges rather than weeks before a purchase.
Stores could increasingly serve as fulfilment centres, whilst supply chains could put greater emphasis on responding quickly to demand alongside forecasting.
Loyalty programmes could also focus more on reliability and helping customers resolve problems when they arise.
Quick commerce could likewise make consumers more comfortable with agentic commerce, in which digital platforms or artificial intelligence (AI) agents recommend products, select retailers, and complete purchases.
“As consumers get more accustomed to asking digital platforms to solve their urgent problems, the leap to allowing those same platforms—and eventually AI agents—to recommend products, choose retailers, and complete purchases becomes much smaller,” Kearney said.
That could shift competition from influencing shoppers to becoming the platform they or AI agents consult first when a need arises.
Retailers that are difficult for AI systems to discover, assess, or transact with could lose business as purchasing becomes more automated, Kearney said.
Retailers do not necessarily need to offer 30-minute delivery. Instead, they need to determine whether their operating models can meet consumers’ expectations for immediate solutions, it added.
Kearney said retailers should identify high-value urgent customer needs, shift resources toward those moments, and build business models around their value.
They could also redesign loyalty programmes around reliability, provide personalised solutions based on context, and make products, inventory, and services easier for consumers and AI systems to find.
Operational changes could include placing inventory closer to customers, using real-time demand data, and turning stores into fulfilment and service hubs.
Unified data, scalable technology platforms, specialised skills, and faster decision-making will support the shift, Kearney said.
Questions to ponder:
- How can retailers respond to urgent customer needs without making delivery costs unsustainable?
- Will quick commerce make physical stores more important as fulfilment and service hubs?
- How should retailers prepare for AI agents making purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers?
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EXPERT OPINION
Not every purchase is urgent and treating all of them that way makes fast delivery unaffordable to run at scale. Retailers should separate the two: keep existing supply chains for planned, larger baskets, and build a smaller, higher-cost fulfilment layer only for moments where speed is genuinely worth paying for. That means identifying which categories and customer needs actually carry urgency, then pricing delivery to reflect that value rather than subsidizing fast shipping across the whole catalogue just to match competitors.
Stores stand to gain from this shift rather than lose relevance. A dark store built purely for fulfilment is expensive to stand up from scratch, while an existing store already sits close to the customer, already holds inventory, and already has staff on site, it just needs to be re-tasked. That gives retailers with large, established store networks a real structural edge over pure e-commerce players building fulfilment capacity from nothing.
Quick commerce is becoming an increasingly important part of retail, reshaping fulfilment, merchandising, marketing, loyalty and the role of stores. From a brand perspective, I would build on this by looking across the E2E consumer journey, and how the implications differ by category.
The importance of “now” varies by category. Some are naturally suited to urgent, mission-based purchasing — sun cream when a need arises, for example, or everyday essentials when consumers run out. Others are more research-intensive, higher-ticket or efficacy-driven. A whitening serum, for instance, may require consideration of efficacy, ingredients and reviews. For these categories, quick commerce may matter particularly at the bottom of the funnel, while very different behaviors are reshaping the top of the funnel.
AI is increasingly influencing how consumers discover, research and compare products, particularly for more complex decisions. AI may be reshaping the top of the funnel at the same time that quick commerce reshapes the bottom.
This makes AI discoverability / AEO increasingly relevant. But in some ways, it also brings brands back to fundamentals: having rich, credible, structured and continuously refreshed content that clearly explains what the brand and products stand for, what they do, and for whom they are relevant. AEO is then about making those fundamentals accessible to AI systems.
Ultimately, the question for brands is not simply “How do we respond to quick commerce?”, but “What is changing across our consumer journey, given the nature of our category, and which muscles should we build?” The answer may be faster fulfilment, stronger content and AEO, better conversion, or a combination.