Personal care often sits in the background of conversations dominated by beauty, fashion, and snacks. On quick commerce platforms, though, this category performs with consistency, urgency, and range. The latest data from Instamart over three months confirms this shift in behavior. People are buying more, repeating purchases, and making deliberate decisions around price and brand.
Personal care products anchor shopping carts across all types of cities and demographics. What may seem like a quiet category on the surface is actually a pulse check for what matters most in day-to-day consumer life.
Frequency Builds Depth
Hair care leads the category in transaction share, contributing nearly 30 percent of all personal care orders. Skincare follows, then bath and body products. These items appear in shopping baskets month after month. A significant portion of users return within the same billing cycle to purchase again.
In behavior terms, this is a reflection of routine-driven consumption. The repeat nature of these purchases gives the category a rhythm that brands can lean into. Timing promotions or launches around known cycles becomes easier when frequency data is this strong.
Pricing Behaves Differently Across Subcategories
Pricing in personal care is neither predictable nor uniform. Some of the highest transaction volumes come from lower average ticket sizes, while smaller volume segments contribute disproportionately to revenue.
Hair accessories, one of the most purchased product types, hover around an average selling price of ₹84. Toothpastes and soaps are priced in the ₹140 to ₹150 range. Baby care products, although representing a smaller portion of transactions, operate at significantly higher averages. Diapers and nutrition-related items often cross ₹500 per item. These products introduce depth and value to baskets without needing large quantity movement.
For any BPC brand manager or category lead, this signals an opportunity to play across both low friction, high repeat products and high average value essentials.
City-Level Behavior Patterns Are Strong
Bangalore leads on order volume, but cities like Pune and Gurugram outperform on average spend per order. Gurugram’s personal care AOV is over 20 percent higher than the national average.
These spending patterns also differ by subcategory. In Chennai, hair oils and skincare dominate. In Mumbai, oral care and hygiene relatively see more frequent movement. Each city reflects its own personal care identity, shaped by weather, lifestyle, and culture.
This data provides clear direction for geo-specific campaigns and city-first launches, especially for new products or local collaborations.
Brands Compete for Loyalty, But Loyalty Is Loose
A few established names make frequent appearances. Colgate, Dettol, and Dove all feature heavily. However, over 40 percent of users switch brands within the same subcategory over multiple transactions.
Shoppers explore alternatives, especially when pricing, availability, or discovery options shift. Lesser-known names manage to keep up with global players, and in many cases, outperform in select cities or product lines, purely on price point.
Time of Day and Day of Month Shape Behavior
The most active window for orders spans late mornings to early evenings; mid-month sees more volume than month ends or early weeks.
These insights become valuable when plotting campaign timelines. Flash sales, subscription nudges, or sampling drops can align with how users naturally shop.
Personal Care Requires Real Behavioral Signals
This category operates through instinctive, practical, and recurring behavior. Surveys or panel-based recall methods struggle to capture this nuance. Pricing choices, brand switching, cart timing, and repeat cycles require a data source grounded in actual transactions.
At Vumonic Datalabs, we decode behavioral trends from verified, anonymized email receipts across top Indian platforms. This data is structured to reflect not preference, but purchase. Every brand, SKU, city, and timestamp is mapped to show what consumers did, not what they say they do.
See What Consumers Are Actually Buying
If you work on brand strategy, consumer insights, or category planning within BPC, you already know how difficult it is to track fragmented shopper journeys. We can help you unify that view.
Reach out to us for access to a custom monthly dashboard that surfaces SKU-level trends, brand share shifts, and pricing behavior, built entirely on real transactions from the platforms that matter.