Zepto is now suggest swapping expensive items in your cart for cheaper alternatives.

This isn’t your typical up-sell or cross-sell. It’s actually a “down-sell” through cart swaps. They’re actively encouraging you to spend less money on certain items. Seems counterintuitive.

The UX is super simple too. You see an item, they suggest a cheaper alternative, one tap and it’s swapped. They’re showing this after you’ve built your cart because that’s when price sensitivity kicks in - when you see the final amount.

Why I think they might be doing it:

  • Testing price sensitivity - They can gather valuable data on how willing users are to switch brands based on price. This is gold for their algorithms.
  • Moving unsold inventory - Got items approaching expiry date? Get them into carts through swaps.
  • Clearing overstocked inventory - Rather than discounting everything, target specific overstock items through strategic swaps.
  • Boosting preferred sellers - If you’re a new challenger brand launching on Zepto, there’s a clear opportunity to accelerate your growth. Zepto can offer you higher sales in exchange for better commission terms. As a preferred seller, you’ll benefit from stronger visibility and improved placement. Additionally, Zepto can leverage Swap to drive up your daily orders, helping you build early momentum and gain traction faster.
  • Private label - Tomorrow Zepto will nudge price sensitive users towards their own private label.
  • Each line item matters - Back at GoMart, Gojek’s groceries delivery product, we used to see drop-offs when packaging fees felt bigger as a proportion to the cart. Users judge the entire order at each line item.
  • The switched product could be a sponsored product - Zepto reduces AOV by ~5%, impacting their margin on the order by 5%* 10% (0.5%), while the ads revenue might be ~1%. A friend told me about a payment switch in another on demand company, which essentially acted as a sponsored payment product, where if you switched to another bank and did more transactions through the payment method of the bank the on demand company would make more. Brands can bid for these sponsored spots.
  • Increasing margin, Margin over AOV - Sometimes a lower-priced item might actually have better margins. In grocery especially, small margin improvements compound significantly at scale.
  • Building trust - This is perhaps the most underrated benefit. When a company actively helps you save money, it creates tremendous goodwill. Users feel like the app is on their side. This also helps counter the narrative around the dark patterns they are accused of deploying across the app.
  • Avoiding you cross some price threshold - Psychological thresholds matter a lot in commerce. When your cart hits certain price points (₹500, ₹1000), conversion drops. If a single expensive item pushes you over that threshold, you might abandon the entire cart. By suggesting a swap to keep you under that threshold, Zepto potentially saves the entire order.
  • Conversion to single cart - I don’t use Zepto, so not sure this is relevant, but on Swiggy I sometimes end up with two deliveries because one item lives in a different store. If the small second cart is only there for a pricey cone, I drop it. A swap keeps everything in one basket so the order feels worth the delivery fee. This can be one a way to solve it.

I believe this feature helps with retention. When users feel an app is helping them make smarter purchases rather than just extracting maximum value, they’re more likely to return.

The beauty is in the simplicity. It doesn’t feel intrusive or like a hard sell - just a helpful suggestion that the user can easily ignore.

[Edited by Claude, my editing buddy. It’s time it starts delivering ROI on my $20 monthly spend. It can’t just be a personality hire anymore.]