In e-commerce, speed matters. It’s one of the top requests by consumers - often the deal maker - that will drive sales for one retailer or marketplace over its competitors.Amazon’s once cutting edge two-day delivery for Prime members now seems painfully slow compared with other services that can deliver orders to customers at breakneck speeds. Even same day delivery is now looking old school - and typically its only available in a limited number of large cities.On the other side of the pond Chinese and Indian e-commerce players have pioneered an amped up version of faster deliveries often referred to as ‘instant retail’, 'quick commerce’ or ‘flash retail’, where orders are delivered in under an hour.Big Idea, Small MarginsIndian e-commerce startup Warpli, which started up in 2022, aims to deliver fashion, beauty, electronics and home furnishings in less than 30 minutes to get consumers hooked.One of the keys to instant delivery is limiting the consumers’ choices to items that are available in stores or in distribution centers or warehouses within 6 miles (10km) from their homes.Flipcart (India) has added a service called Flipkart Quick, which promises grocery deliveries in 45 minutes and home appliances, mobile phones and fashion accessories in 60 minutes. On the downside, the trend towards quick commerce has brought more competition into the market, putting pressure on margins. These companies are estimated to lose between 20-50 rupees ($0.24 to 0.50) per delivery, according to the Economic Times. That’s a problem when order sizes are small and putting limits on basket sizes to qualify for free delivery in a sense mitigates part of why consumers use these services to begin with. Retail 4.0In China, speed deliveries are an alternative to having convenience stores on every corner.Meituan (China) can deliver everyday essential items to consumers in about 30 minutes. The company estimated that its instant retail business will exceed 400 billion yuan ($56 billion) by 2026."China might not be the country with the most convenience stores in per capita terms, but it's able to offer the most convenient around-the-clock shopping experience for many thanks to instant retail services," said Xiao Kun, vice president of Meituan and head of the e-commerce giant's flash shopping business, which has partnered with over 4,600 large chain retailers and 370,000 stores to offer related services."Instant retail is an evolutionary version of online shopping that has not only met consumers' demands, but also created new demands," Pei Liang, head of the China Chain-Store & Franchise Association told Xinhua news. "It's the iconic model of the fourth retail revolution."This emerging retail business has maintained an average annual growth rate of more than 50 % in recent years, with its market size topping 504 billion yuan (about $70.3 billion) in 2022, according to a report by the Ministry of Commerce (MOC).The report predicted that by 2025, China's instant retail market volume will be three times that of 2022. The growing market has secured investment from China's leading e-commerce players.JD.com has said that it will empower the digital retail transformation of more than 2 million Chinese small and medium-sized physical stores in five years. Sephora has added instant retail services in all its offline stores in China. China's online retail volume expanded 11.2 percent in the first 10 months of this year, much faster than the 6.9-percent growth of total retail sales of consumer goods. Instant retail is seen as a key driver of this growth.The Chinese government is promoting instant retail beyond big cities. It has unveiled plans to boost instant retail services in county-level regions and rural areas as a move to encourage consumption, a key driver of the world's second-largest economy."Instant retail is one of the consumption bandwagons of the times, and it's driven not only by internet technologies, but also by the improvement of logistics infrastructure and per capita GDP in China," said Meituan senior vice president Wang Puzhong, who heads the company's home-delivery businesses.