Christmas 2025: What a Festive Day Reveals About India’s On-Demand Economy

Festive days often create the illusion of step-change growth. But Christmas Day 2025 tells a more nuanced story about how India’s on-demand platforms are maturing.

Across both Food Delivery and Quick Commerce, Christmas delivered a clear uplift. Yet the nature of that uplift differed meaningfully by channel, offering valuable signals on how consumer behaviour, platform design, and growth levers are evolving.

Food Delivery: A Reliable Volume Engine, Not a Demand Spike

On 25th December, food delivery platforms recorded a steady festive uplift, with Gross Order Value scaling to ~1.3x of BAU levels (H1 FY26). This growth was primarily volume-led, supported by a ~1.2x increase in order volumes, while Average Order Value saw only a modest ~1.1x improvement.

What stands out is not the magnitude, but the consistency. Year-on-year order growth on Christmas broadly tracked the underlying monthly run-rate, reinforcing that Christmas has become a dependable, high-engagement day, rather than a disruptive demand event.

Platforms leaned into this predictability by lowering effective ordering thresholds through free-delivery constructs, running festive engagement campaigns, and curating Christmas-specific assortments such as cakes and select festive cuisines. The result was sustained throughput and engagement across the day, without introducing volatility into demand patterns.

In essence, Christmas continues to play a stabilising role for food delivery: reinforcing habitual usage and driving volumes, rather than reshaping consumption behaviour.

Quick Commerce: Frequency Wins Over Basket Size

Now, let’s look at the impact of Christmas on Quick Commerce sales. By contrast, Quick Commerce showcased a sharper and more distinctive festive response. GMV reached ~1.3x of BAU levels (Sep–Nov’25), driven entirely by higher order volumes, with AOV remaining broadly flat.

This is telling. Unlike food delivery, where baskets expanded marginally, Quick Commerce demand was characterised by more shopping missions, not bigger ones. Festive urgency translated into higher frequency—multiple, small, occasion-led orders rather than consolidated baskets.

Platforms actively designed for this behaviour with sharp entry price points, reduced minimum order values, lower no-fee thresholds, and strong festive merchandising encouraged incremental purchases. Seasonal essentials performed well, but so did adjacencies – beauty and personal care, fragrances, toys – highlighting Quick Commerce’s growing role as a last-minute festive utility, well beyond groceries.

Christmas reaffirmed Quick Commerce’s core strength: high-throughput, frequency-driven demand, optimised for immediacy rather than basket expansion.

The Bigger Signal: Two Channels, Two Distinct Growth Models

Taken together, Christmas 2025 underscores a critical point for platforms, brands, and investors alike:

• Food Delivery is consolidating its role as a volume-stable, habit-led channel, where festive occasions sustain engagement but rarely redefine demand curves.

• Quick Commerce is emerging as a frequency amplifier, capturing urgency-driven use cases through design choices that prioritise speed, access, and repeat missions over ticket size.

Festive days are no longer about outsized spikes; they are stress tests of channel maturity. And Christmas 2025 showed that India’s on-demand economy is not just growing, but specialising.

The winners going forward will be those who design distinctly for these behaviours by different events and cohorts, recognising that not all festive demand is created equal, and that growth today is less about chasing peaks and more about owning the right moments.