Myntra's M-Now already accounts for 10% of orders in the metro locations where it operates, with customer penetration above 20%. Reliance Retail's Ajio Rush is chasing the same window from the other direction, promising fashion delivery inside four hours in key cities. Both companies are pouring investment into shaving hours, then minutes, off how long it takes a T-shirt or a kurta to reach a doorstep. Neither has said much publicly about the number that should worry them more than delivery speed: fashion and footwear returns in Indian e-commerce run at 25-35% year-round, and Myntra's own return rate specifically sits in the 35-45% range. Ajio's has come down, but only to 34%, from 38%.
That is not a rounding error sitting next to a growth story. It's a structural tension nobody racing toward one-hour fashion delivery has fully priced in: the faster and more convenient you make ordering, the more casually customers order — and apparel, unlike almost anything else sold online, gets returned constantly because size, fit and how a fabric actually drapes are things a product photo cannot settle.
What "fast" actually costs once a third of it comes back
Every returned item is not a cancelled sale — it's two logistics trips instead of one, and the second one is more expensive than the first. Ajio's own reported per-unit costs put forward logistics at roughly ₹38 and reverse logistics at an additional ₹22 on top of that — reverse logistics running at least ₹15-20 more per item than the forward trip is the pattern across the industry, not an Ajio-specific quirk. A return isn't free shipping in reverse; it's picking up a single item from a residential address, quality-checking it for resale condition, and re-entering it into inventory, all of which cost more per unit than a shipment consolidated at a warehouse ever does.
Quick commerce makes this worse in a specific, mechanical way rather than a vague one. A same-day or next-day order shipped from a large regional warehouse can be batched with dozens of other orders on the same delivery run, spreading the forward cost across volume. An hour-delivery order fulfilled from a hyperlocal dark store, sized for speed rather than density, doesn't get that batching benefit — it's a dedicated trip for one order, and if that order comes back, it's a second dedicated trip in the other direction. The entire economic case for quick commerce rests on customers valuing speed enough to justify a higher per-order fulfilment cost. Apparel is the one major category where that higher cost gets doubled roughly a third of the time.
Three different bets on the same problem
Myntra, Ajio and H&M are not actually running the same play, even though "compete on fashion delivery" makes them sound like they are:
| Myntra M-Now | Ajio Rush | Myntra × H&M | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The bet | Speed — under an hour in live metros | Speed — under four hours, wider city coverage | Scale via physical stores, not speed |
| Current traction | 10% of orders in live locations, 20%+ penetration | Expanding across key cities | H&M live in 42 physical stores plus hm.com |
| Return exposure | High — impulse-friendly ultra-fast ordering | Lower urgency window may reduce impulse buys | Lower — in-store fit reduces size-driven returns |
The H&M partnership is the quiet counter-argument sitting inside the same industry. Rather than compressing delivery time further, it leans on physical stores doing the one thing a product photo can't: letting a shopper try something on before they own it. That doesn't scale the way a dark-store network does, and it will never be the fastest option on the page. But it also doesn't generate the specific failure mode — same-day delivery followed by same-week return — that speed-first fashion commerce is structurally exposed to. Fit risk resolved in a changing room simply doesn't turn into a reverse-logistics trip.
How the return rate actually gets pulled down
The reduction from 38% to 34% at Ajio, and whatever Myntra is working toward from its higher starting point, isn't coming from a single fix — it's coming from several smaller ones stacked together, each aimed at a different reason apparel gets returned:
- Size-recommendation tools that use a shopper's past purchases and brand-specific fit data to suggest a size before checkout, rather than relying on a generic size chart that doesn't account for how differently two brands cut the same labelled size.
- Exchange-first flows that nudge a shopper toward swapping for a different size instead of a full refund, which keeps the item (and the customer) inside the platform's own inventory loop rather than generating a return that goes nowhere useful.
- Return-behaviour scoring, quietly tightening policies — smaller return windows, fewer free return pickups — for the specific subset of accounts driving a disproportionate share of return volume, rather than penalising every customer for a problem concentrated among a minority of them.
- Better product imagery and video, closer to what a changing room provides, aimed at reducing the "it looked different in the photo" category of return that no size algorithm can fix because the sizing was never the issue.
None of these are exotic. What's new is the pressure to make them work faster, because a platform that used to have two or three days of transit time to let a customer reconsider an impulse order now has none of that friction left. Quick commerce removes the natural cooling-off period that slower shipping accidentally provided.
Why the investment is happening anyway
The obvious question is why Myntra and Reliance Retail are pouring money into faster delivery when the category's return math argues for slowing down, not speeding up. The answer is that speed is a customer-acquisition and frequency lever, not a margin lever, and both companies are betting the frequency gain outweighs the return-cost increase over a customer's lifetime rather than on any single order. An hour-delivery option pulls in occasional buyers who otherwise wouldn't bother ordering fashion online at all — impulse-driven purchases that a two-day wait would have talked them out of — and, more importantly, it trains existing customers to reach for the app more often for smaller, more frequent orders instead of batching purchases into fewer, larger ones. More frequent ordering means more data on a given shopper's actual fit and preferences, which is exactly the input the size-recommendation tools above need to keep improving. The bet is a flywheel: faster delivery drives more orders, more orders sharpen the return-reduction tooling, and a sharper tool eventually lowers the return rate enough to make the faster delivery affordable in the first place. It's a bet on the flywheel outrunning the losses before the losses compound.
Reliance Retail has one structural advantage in that bet that Myntra doesn't: Ajio Rush can share dark-store and delivery infrastructure with Reliance's broader quick-commerce push across grocery and general merchandise, spreading the fixed cost of that hyperlocal network across categories rather than building a fashion-only delivery layer from scratch. Myntra, as a fashion-first platform without a grocery or general-merchandise business behind it, has to make M-Now's economics work on fashion volume alone — a materially harder version of the same bet.
Why this hasn't broken anything yet
None of this has forced a retreat, because both Myntra and Ajio are managing the return rate down at the same time they scale delivery speed up — Ajio's drop from 38% to 34% shows the lever exists and is being pulled, through better size-recommendation tooling, size-exchange-instead-of-return flows, and stricter policies on serial returners. India's broader reverse logistics market, already sized in the tens of billions of dollars and still growing at a mid-single-digit compound rate, exists precisely because this problem has been manageable at scale for years, on slower delivery timelines. What's different now is that the two levers — delivery speed and return volume — are being pulled in opposite directions simultaneously for the first time, on a bet that reducing the return rate can outpace the cost quick commerce adds to every return that still happens.
What actually decides who wins this
The company that wins the fashion-delivery race over the next year won't necessarily be whoever gets fastest first. It will be whichever platform gets its return rate down furthest before rivals do — because at 35% returns, a fashion platform is effectively running two supply chains for every successful sale, and quick commerce's whole value proposition assumes it's running one. Myntra and Ajio both know this, which is why the size-recommendation and returns-reduction investments are happening quietly alongside the delivery-speed headlines rather than instead of them. The speed numbers are what get announced. The return-rate numbers are what will actually decide whether either company's version of instant fashion is a business or a very fast way to lose money on logistics twice per transaction instead of once.
