Short answer
Indian e-retail reached $65 to $66 billion of GMV in 2025, up 19% to 21%, with 290 to 300 million shoppers and quick commerce at 16% to 17% (Bain). Brand websites grew 33% at Diwali 2025 against 8% for marketplaces, prepaid reached 55% of D2C orders, and RTO peaked at 39.2% (Unicommerce).
1. How this report was built and how to use it
A roundup of published figures on Indian e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands, read between 15 and 22 October 2026. Every figure links to its source at the foot of the page, and figures from companies that sell into the problem they measure are labelled as vendor data.
Indian D2C founders are surrounded by numbers that cannot be checked. A "good ROAS", an "average RTO", a "typical repeat rate" all circulate in agency decks and founder threads without a sample, a period or a definition. This report collects the figures that can be traced to a publisher who says where they came from: Bain & Company's annual How India Shops Online study with Flipkart, Unicommerce's transaction data from more than 6,000 D2C brands, NPCI's payment statistics, IAMAI and Kantar's internet survey of more than 87,000 people, DataReportal's platform reach data, Tracxn's funding records, Meta's and Amazon's published price changes, and a handful of global studies that apply to Indian stores.
The report is organised around the questions a D2C founder or growth lead is asked in a board or planning meeting: how big the market is and where it is growing, whether quick commerce is a channel or a threat, how the brand website compares with marketplaces, what payments and returns do to unit economics, how much it costs to reach and convert a shopper, how to keep customers once acquired, what the festive season really delivers, and where creators fit. Each chapter gives the figures, explains what they do and do not show, works through an example, and links to the calculator on this site that applies the figures to your own numbers.
| Bain & Company with Flipkart | Market size, shoppers, quick commerce, cities, Gen Z | Annual, consistent definitions, large scope | Co-published with a marketplace; ranges rather than point estimates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unicommerce | Orders, RTO, payment mix, channel growth across its client brands | Transaction data, not surveys | Its clients only; it sells software for the problems it reports |
| NPCI | UPI transactions and value | Official, monthly, complete | Covers all UPI use, not only e-commerce |
| IAMAI and Kantar | Internet users, rural and urban, usage | Very large survey sample | Survey of behaviour, not transactions |
| DataReportal (Kepios) | Platform ad reach and internet users | Comparable across countries | Ad reach is not active users |
| Tracxn | Funding rounds, exits | Company-level records | Revisions between editions |
Bain measures e-retail gross merchandise value, the value of goods ordered online. Unicommerce measures orders processed through its own software by its client brands. They answer different questions. Use Bain for the size and direction of the market, Unicommerce for what is happening inside brand operations, and never divide one by the other.
Indian D2C and e-commerce benchmarks at a glance
One headline figure per topic, with its publisher. The chapters give the ranges, samples and caveats behind each one.
| Market size | E-retail gross merchandise value, 2025 | $65–66 billion, +19–21% | Bain with Flipkart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shoppers | Online shoppers, 2025 | 290–300 million | Bain with Flipkart |
| Penetration | Shoppers as a share of internet users | About 30% (US 74%) | Bain with Flipkart |
| Quick commerce | GMV, 2025 / share of e-retail | $10–11 billion / 16–17% | Bain with Flipkart |
| Projection | E-retail GMV by 2030 | $170–180 billion | Bain with Flipkart |
| Smaller cities | Tier 2+ share of incremental orders, 2025 | About half | Bain with Flipkart |
| Festive season | Diwali 2025 order growth / brand website growth | +24% / +33% | Unicommerce (vendor) |
| RTO | Return-to-origin rate at the festive peak | 39.2% (November 2025) | Unicommerce (vendor) |
Where do your D2C numbers stand?
Pick a metric, enter your own figure and see it against the published reference points from this report. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Higher is better for this metric.
Six conclusions the data supports.
- The market is growing again, faster than it did in 2024. Bain put 2025 growth at 19% to 21% against 10% to 12% the year before, with the second half growing about 1.5 times faster than the first.
- Quick commerce is the fastest-growing channel, but it is concentrated. It doubled each year since 2023 and now takes about a sixth of e-retail value, mostly household essentials in the largest cities.
- Brand websites grew faster than marketplaces at Diwali 2025. Unicommerce counted 33% growth on brand websites against 8% on marketplaces, which is the strongest public evidence for investing in a direct channel.
- RTO, not ad cost, is the largest controllable leak. At a 39.2% festive-peak RTO rate, a brand loses margin on two in five shipped orders at exactly the moment ad prices are highest.
- Prepaid is winning, slowly. UPI processes more than 800 million transactions a day and the prepaid share of D2C orders has passed half, which lowers RTO for brands that encourage it.
- Smaller cities are where the next customers are. About two-thirds of new shoppers come from Tier 2+ cities, where shopper penetration is still only 25% to 30% of internet users.
What changed for Indian D2C and e-commerce between 2025 and 2026?
Several publishers in this report release a new edition every year or month, so the change between editions is often more useful than either number alone.
| E-retail GMV growth | 10–12% (2024) | 19–21% (2025) | Bain with Flipkart |
|---|---|---|---|
| E-retail GMV | About $60 billion (2024) | $65–66 billion (2025) | Bain with Flipkart |
| Online shoppers | Over 270 million (2024) | 290–300 million (2025) | Bain with Flipkart |
| Quick commerce share of e-retail | About one-tenth (2024) | 16–17% (2025) | Bain with Flipkart |
| D2C equity funding | About $824 million (2024) | About $898 million (2025) | Tracxn |
| Active internet users | 886 million (2024) | 958 million (2025) | IAMAI and Kantar |
| Prepaid share of D2C orders | 51% (May 2026) | 55% (June 2026) | Unicommerce |
| RTO rate | 39.2% (November 2025) | 21.0% (March 2026, brands applying fixes) | Unicommerce |
1. Growth came back. Bain's 2025 growth estimate nearly doubled the 2024 rate, and accelerated through the year. A brand that grew 15% in 2025 lost share; one that grew 15% in 2024 gained it.
2. Quick commerce moved from a grocery experiment to a sixth of e-retail. Its share rose from about a tenth to 16% to 17% in a year, and it took the largest share of festive growth.
3. Marketplaces cut fees for low-priced products. Amazon India's zero-referral programme grew more than tenfold. For products under ₹1,000 with low repeat purchase, the case for marketplace-first selling improved.
4. Funding stabilised at a lower level. Tracxn's count rose 9% after two years of decline, with most money now going to early-stage brands.
5. Prepaid kept rising, RTO kept hurting. The prepaid share passed half of D2C orders, but the festive peak RTO of 39.2% showed how much margin is still lost when COD demand spikes.
6. WhatsApp order updates now cost money. From October 2026, utility messages inside the service window are charged, so brands that relied on free in-window updates should re-cost their order flows.
Which benchmarks matter for your kind of D2C brand?
Pick the model closest to yours to see the metrics that decide its growth, the chapters to read first and the tools to run your numbers.
Pick your kind of D2C brand
The metrics that decide your growth
- Repeat rate on delivered customers
- Quick-commerce contribution and incrementality
- Cost per delivered first order
- WhatsApp and email flow revenue
- Prepaid share
Chapters to read first
Tools to run your numbers
Short answers: the key benchmark from every chapter
One question and one answer per chapter, with the publisher named. The full chapters, opened with the form below, give the ranges, worked examples, India-specific detail and tools behind each answer.
How big is Indian e-commerce in 2026?
Bain and Flipkart put e-retail GMV at $65 to $66 billion in 2025, up 19% to 21%, with 290 to 300 million shoppers. They project $170 to $180 billion by 2030. Chapter 2.
How big is quick commerce?
Quick commerce reached $10 to $11 billion of GMV in 2025, about 16% to 17% of e-retail, after doubling every year since 2023, with more than 7,000 micro-fulfilment centres in over 200 cities (Bain). Chapter 3.
Is the brand website growing faster than marketplaces?
At Diwali 2025, Unicommerce counted 33% order growth on brand websites against 8% on marketplaces, which still held 38% of purchases. McKinsey projects India's D2C channel growing about 38% a year to 2030. Chapter 4.
How much funding do Indian D2C brands raise?
Tracxn counts about $6 billion across nearly 2,000 rounds from 2021 to August 2026, with $898 million in 2025, up 9%, and 70% of 2025 funding at seed and early stage. Chapter 5.
What share of D2C orders is prepaid?
55% in June 2026, up from 51% in May (Unicommerce). UPI handled 24.07 billion transactions in September 2026, and at Diwali 2025 COD order value still grew 35%. Chapter 6.
What is the RTO rate for Indian D2C brands?
Across brands on Unicommerce's platforms, RTO peaked at 39.2% in November 2025, fell to 25.6% in January 2026 and to 21.0% in March 2026 for brands that applied its recommended fixes. Chapter 7.
What does it cost to reach Indian shoppers?
Instagram reaches 481 million people in India with ads and YouTube 500 million (DataReportal). E-retail ads take about a quarter of Indian digital ad spend, and Android holds about 94% of mobile devices, which keeps Meta's conversion signal stronger than in the US. Chapter 8.
How do D2C brands keep customers?
Automated email flows earn nearly 41% of email revenue from 5.3% of sends (Klaviyo), and Meta charges ₹0.8631 per WhatsApp marketing message and ₹0.115 per utility message to Indian numbers. Chapter 9.
How much does the festive season matter?
Festive periods bring about one in four new online shoppers (Bain), and Diwali 2025 orders grew 24% with quick commerce up 120% (Unicommerce). Chapter 10.
How big is creator marketing in India?
EY estimated India's influencer marketing industry at ₹2,344 crore in 2024 and ₹3,375 crore by 2026, and the wider creator economy at ₹12,500 crore in 2024. Chapter 11.
Where will the next shoppers come from?
Tier 2+ cities brought about two-thirds of new shoppers and half of incremental orders in 2025, and Gen Z makes up 40% to 45% of shoppers (Bain). Chapter 12.
Cite the original publisher shown beside each figure. To reference the report itself: Rahul D Sarker, "D2C and E-commerce Benchmarks India 2026", rahuldsarker.co, October 2026, https://rahuldsarker.co/d2c-ecommerce-benchmarks-india. The key figures are available as a CSV file.
Read the full 2026 India D2C and e-commerce benchmarks report
The key figures, the benchmark checker and the short answers above are open to everyone. The full report is free: add your details once and every chapter opens in this browser.
- 12 chapters from market size to creators, every figure sourced
- Worked examples for break-even ROAS, RTO, channel and WhatsApp costs
- Sortable tables you can filter and copy
- Calculators inside the chapters for your own numbers
- A monthly D2C scorecard and a glossary
Get the full report
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2. How big is Indian e-commerce in 2026, and how fast is it growing?
Bain and Flipkart put Indian e-retail gross merchandise value at $65 to $66 billion in 2025, up 19% to 21%, after a slow 2024 when growth fell to 10% to 12%. The shopper base reached 290 to 300 million, double the level of five years earlier, and Bain projects $170 to $180 billion of GMV by 2030.
| E-retail GMV | About $60 billion | $65–66 billion |
|---|---|---|
| Annual growth | 10–12% (down from above 20% historically) | 19–21% |
| Online shoppers | Over 270 million | 290–300 million |
| Quick commerce | About one-tenth of e-retail spend; over two-thirds of e-grocery orders | $10–11 billion; 16–17% of e-retail GMV |
| Gen Z share of shoppers | Almost 40% | 40–45% |
| 2030 projection | $170–190 billion, over 18% a year | $170–180 billion, more than 20% a year |
What changed between the two editions. The 2024 slowdown was real: Bain described growth falling to 10% to 12% after years above 20%. The 2025 recovery was stronger than many expected, and accelerated through the year, with second-half growth of 22% to 24% and Bain estimating 23% to 25% for the first quarter of 2026. Private consumption growth rose from 8% across 2022 to 2024 to 10.5% in 2025, which explains part of the rebound. The rest came from quick commerce, which doubled again, and from new shoppers in smaller cities.
Penetration is still low. Bain estimates that only about 30% of Indian internet users shop online, against 92% in China and 74% in the US. In Bengaluru and Hyderabad penetration already exceeds 70%, so the gap is concentrated outside the largest cities. Indian e-retail is about 1.6% of GDP, against 4% to 4.5% in Indonesia and 13% to 14% in China. Bain expects e-retail to reach 10% to 12% of total retail spend by 2030, and 28% to 30% of non-grocery spend.
The internet base keeps widening. IAMAI and Kantar's Internet in India 2025 study, built on a survey of more than 87,000 people across 400 towns and 1,000 villages, counted 958 million active internet users, up about 8%, with about 548 million in rural India growing nearly four times as fast as urban India. It also found 230 million people, 56% of urban active users, had shopped online in the past year. DataReportal, using a different method, counts 1.03 billion internet users at the end of 2025. The two figures are not contradictory: they count different things (active monthly use against any use), and both show the online population still growing.
Online shopper penetration of internet users (Bain, 2026 edition)
What the market numbers mean for a brand. A growing market lifts weak and strong brands alike, which makes it easy to mistake market growth for brand performance. The useful comparison is your growth against the market's: a D2C brand growing 15% in a year when e-retail grew 20% lost share. The second implication is geographic. The fastest-growing, least-penetrated customers are in Tier 2+ cities, where cash on delivery, return-to-origin and delivery times are all worse, so growth there costs more per delivered order. Chapter 12 covers what that means for targeting and payments.
Bain's 2030 projection, $170 to $180 billion, implies roughly tripling the market in five years. Projections from co-publishers with a stake in the market should be read as direction rather than forecast, but even the slow-growth year of 2024 grew by double digits. Planning on a market that grows 15% to 20% a year is reasonable; planning on your brand matching that without a reason is not.
| Brand A | +35% | +19–21% | Gaining share: growing about 1.7 times the market |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand B | +20% | +19–21% | Holding share: growing with the market |
| Brand C | +12% | +19–21% | Losing share despite double-digit growth |
Myth Indian e-commerce stalled in 2024 and will stay slow.
Reality Bain put 2024 growth at 10% to 12%, but 2025 recovered to 19% to 21% and accelerated in the second half.
Myth Most Indians already shop online.
Reality About 30% of internet users shop online, against 74% in the US; outside the big cities it is 25% to 30%.
Myth GMV is the revenue brands keep.
Reality GMV counts goods ordered before cancellations, RTO and returns. Delivered revenue is what reaches the bank.
- Did we grow faster or slower than the market last year?
- How much of our growth came from new cities, and what did those orders cost to deliver?
- Are we reporting GMV, placed revenue or delivered revenue to the board?
- Which of our categories are under-penetrated online, and which are already crowded?
Compare your growth with the market’s, measured on delivered revenue, and expect the next customers to come from smaller cities at a higher cost per delivered order. Size your opportunity with the total addressable market estimator.
3. How big is quick commerce, and should a D2C brand sell through it?
Quick commerce reached $10 to $11 billion of GMV in 2025, about 16% to 17% of Indian e-retail, after doubling every year since 2023. Bain projects $65 to $70 billion by 2030 and expects it to contribute 45% to 50% of incremental e-retail GMV over the next five years. At Diwali 2025, quick-commerce orders grew 120% across Unicommerce’s clients.
| GMV, 2025 | $10–11 billion | Bain, 2026 edition |
|---|---|---|
| Share of e-retail GMV | 16–17% | Bain, 2026 edition |
| Share of e-grocery orders (2024) | Over two-thirds | Bain, 2025 edition |
| Household essentials share of GMV | 85–90% | Bain, 2026 edition |
| Non-grocery share of GMV (2024) | 15–20% | Bain, 2025 edition |
| E-grocery penetration of the grocery market | About 1.5%, roughly five times 2020 | Bain, 2026 edition |
| Projected GMV, 2030 | $65–70 billion | Bain, 2026 edition |
| Share of incremental e-retail GMV, next five years | 45–50% | Bain, 2026 edition |
Why quick commerce converts so well. Bain found quick-commerce sessions last under five minutes, against more than ten in traditional e-retail, with about eight times the visit-to-order conversion. Shoppers open the app knowing what they want, the assortment is narrow, and delivery is measured in minutes. It also relies less on cash on delivery than traditional e-retail, which removes much of the RTO problem chapter 7 describes. Those are the economics a D2C brand cannot match on its own website for everyday categories.
Why it is still concentrated. Two-thirds of new micro-fulfilment centres opened in the top ten cities, and 85% to 90% of GMV is household essentials. For a brand selling skincare, snacks, personal care or home supplies in metros, quick commerce is now a primary channel. For a brand selling fashion, furniture, electronics accessories or anything considered over several visits, it is a minor one, and for customers in Tier 2+ cities it is often unavailable.
What a brand gives up. The platform controls the customer, the price display, the search ranking and most of the data. Visibility increasingly depends on retail media: paid placement inside the app's search results and category pages. Dentsu counted Indian e-retail ad spend up 55.86% in 2025, and FICCI-EY put e-commerce and point-of-sale advertising at ₹22,000 crore, up 50%. A brand that relies on quick commerce should expect a growing share of its marketing budget to go to the platforms themselves.
- The product is bought often and without much comparison
- Your customers are in the top ten cities
- You can price for platform margins and still earn contribution
- You have budget for in-app ads to win search placement
- Availability matters more than the customer relationship
- The purchase is considered or high-value
- Repeat purchase and subscriptions drive value
- You need customer data for email, WhatsApp and retargeting
- Customers are spread beyond the metros
- The brand story needs space that a listing cannot give
| Is the demand incremental? | Quick-commerce sales may simply move existing customers from your site or other retailers | Total sales in the cities where you launch, before and after |
|---|---|---|
| What is contribution after platform margin and ads? | Platform margins and in-app ad spend can exceed your website’s acquisition cost | Contribution per order after all platform fees and ads |
| Who owns the reorder? | Repeat orders may go to the platform’s own label or a competitor in the same search | Your share of category searches over time |
| Can supply keep up? | Stock-outs in dark stores lose ranking quickly | Fill rate by city and store |
Tools and resources for this chapter
| Pick matched cities | Choose two or three cities with similar past sales; launch in one, hold back the others | Gives a comparison for what would have happened anyway |
|---|---|---|
| Measure total sales, not platform sales | Add website, marketplace and quick-commerce sales in each city | Platform sales alone hide cannibalisation |
| Run for at least eight weeks | Cover several reorder cycles for repeat categories | Early weeks overstate novelty demand |
| Compare contribution, not revenue | Subtract platform margin, in-app ads and trade terms | A sales lift can still lose money |
| Decide by city tier | Roll out where total contribution rose; hold where it fell | Quick commerce economics differ sharply by city |
- What share of our category is now sold through quick commerce in our top cities?
- What is our contribution per order on quick commerce after margin and in-app ads?
- Did our website sales fall in cities where we launched on quick commerce?
- Who wins the reorder: us, the platform’s own label or a competitor?
Quick commerce is now the largest source of new e-retail growth for everyday categories in big cities. Treat it as a channel with its own unit economics and test incrementality city by city before shifting budget from your own website, where you keep the customer.
4. Is the brand website growing faster than marketplaces?
At Diwali 2025, orders on brand websites grew 33% across Unicommerce’s clients, against 8% on marketplaces, which still carried 38% of purchases. Quick commerce grew fastest of all at 120%. Marketplaces responded in 2026 with lower fees: Amazon India extended zero referral fees to more than 12.5 crore products under ₹1,000 from 16 March 2026.
Order growth by channel, Diwali 2025 festive season (Unicommerce clients, 25 days, year on year)
Unicommerce analysed more than 150 million transactions processed through its Uniware software over the 25-day festive periods of 2024 and 2025. It is vendor data from brands that use its software, which skews towards brands with a meaningful direct channel, so the gap between websites and marketplaces may be wider in this sample than across all of Indian retail. Even allowing for that, the direction is clear and matches McKinsey's projection, reported by Apparel Resources, of the D2C channel growing about 38% a year to 2030, faster than marketplaces.
Why brand websites are growing. Three things changed between 2023 and 2026. Checkout tools that pre-fill addresses and offer UPI at delivery have closed much of the conversion gap with marketplaces. WhatsApp and server-side tracking have made it cheaper to bring customers back without paying a marketplace again. And Indian shoppers have become more willing to buy from brands they discover on Instagram and YouTube, the platforms that reach the most Indians with ads (chapter 8).
Why marketplaces still matter. They carried 38% of Diwali purchases, they bring demand a brand cannot create on its own, and they handle logistics. Amazon India's March 2026 fee cut makes them cheaper for low-priced products: zero referral fees on products under ₹1,000 in more than 1,800 categories, Easy Ship fees down more than 20% for products under ₹300, and savings of 90% or more on selling fees for a second unit shipped in the same box. Amazon's own example shows a ₹999 necklace set falling from ₹324 to ₹100 in fees, a 69% cut.
| Fashion jewellery necklace set | ₹999 | Easy Ship | ₹324 | ₹100 | ₹224 (69%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Earphones | ₹798 | Fulfilment by Amazon | ₹248 | ₹109 | ₹139 (56%) |
| T-shirt | ₹299 | Easy Ship | ₹71 | ₹56 | ₹15 (21%) |
| Brand website | Ads, shipping both ways, RTO, gateway and store fees | Full: customer, order and event data | What can we afford to pay for a first order, and for a 12-month customer? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketplaces | Referral and closing fees, fulfilment, in-store ads | Limited: platform reports | Which products and price points belong here after the 2026 fee changes? |
| Quick commerce | Platform margin, listing and ad fees, trade terms | Minimal | Is this new demand or the same customers, faster, at lower margin? |
| WhatsApp and social commerce | Per-message fees, content, community time | Direct, consented relationship | Can it lift repeat purchase enough to pay for itself? |
| Price | ₹999 | ₹999 |
|---|---|---|
| Platform fees | ₹0 | ₹100 (Amazon’s example) plus 18% GST on fees |
| Payment gateway (prepaid, 2% + GST) | About ₹24 | Included |
| Shipping | ₹45 (illustrative Shiprocket average) | Included in Easy Ship fee |
| RTO allowance at 20% RTO, ₹45 return | About ₹9 plus lost margin on returned orders | Lower, platform-managed |
| Customer acquisition | Your ad cost per order | Optional in-store ads |
| Customer data for repeat purchase | Yes | No |
Myth Marketplaces are always cheaper than a website.
Reality Fees vary by price, category and fulfilment. After the 2026 cuts, low-priced items often are cheaper there; high-repeat products usually earn more direct.
Myth D2C means website only.
Reality Most growing brands sell across their website, marketplaces and quick commerce, and judge each on contribution.
Myth Funding is back to 2021 levels.
Reality Tracxn counted about $898 million in 2025, roughly half the 2022 peak, mostly at early stage.
- What is our contribution per order on each channel after every fee, ad and return?
- Which products should move to marketplaces after the 2026 fee cuts, and which should stay website-first?
- How many of our marketplace buyers later buy direct?
- Are we growing faster than 33% on our own website, and if not, why?
Run the website and marketplaces as one portfolio judged on contribution and repeat purchase. Lower marketplace fees in 2026 make low-priced, low-repeat products cheaper to sell there; keep high-repeat, high-margin products and the customer relationship on your own site. Compare channel economics with the performance marketing margin protector.
5. How much funding are Indian D2C brands raising, and how do they exit?
Tracxn counts about $6 billion of equity funding across nearly 2,000 rounds for Indian D2C brands between January 2021 and August 2026, with 15 IPOs and 105 acquisitions. Funding peaked at about $1.6 billion in 2022, fell to about $824 million in 2024 and rose 9% to about $898 million in 2025, with 70% of 2025 funding at seed and early stage.
Indian D2C equity funding by year (Tracxn, US$ million, years with published figures)
Fewer large rounds, steady deal counts. Tracxn records between 307 and 380 rounds in every full year of the period, with 2024 the busiest by count, so the fall in money raised came from smaller cheques rather than fewer deals. Late-stage funding value fell 69% between 2022 and 2025, even as late-stage round counts returned to 2021 levels. Investors are still backing new brands, but they are writing smaller cheques until a brand shows profitable unit economics.
Concentration. Five brands, Lenskart, Licious, FreshToHome, BlueStone and Country Delight, account for about $2.3 billion of lifetime funding, with Lenskart alone about $981 million. Most Indian D2C brands will never raise at that scale, which is why the operating benchmarks in this report matter more to them than funding benchmarks.
How brands exit. 105 acquisitions against 15 IPOs in the period means a sale to a larger consumer company remains the most common exit. The acquirers are largely established consumer-goods groups, which buy brands with a loyal customer base, healthy margins and a direct channel they can scale through their own distribution. Those are the same metrics this report tracks: repeat purchase, contribution per order and the share of revenue coming from owned channels.
Tracxn's own figures differ slightly between editions: an earlier edition put 2024 funding at $757 million, down 18%, while the August 2026 edition gives about $824 million. Databases revise past years as late-reported rounds come in, so compare years within one edition.
| Contribution margin per delivered order | Shows whether growth makes or loses money before overheads | Chapters 6 and 7 |
|---|---|---|
| Repeat purchase rate by cohort | Revenue that does not need new ad spend | Chapter 9 |
| Share of revenue from owned channels | Control of the customer and pricing | Chapter 4 |
| Customer acquisition cost against first-order margin | How long it takes to earn back acquisition | Chapter 8 |
| RTO and returns by payment method | Hidden losses in reported revenue | Chapter 7 |
- Could we show an acquirer contribution per delivered order by cohort today?
- What share of our revenue comes from customers we can reach without paying a platform?
- If we raised nothing next year, which growth would we cut first?
- Are our reported numbers GMV, placed revenue or delivered revenue?
Money is available for early-stage D2C brands but scarce for late-stage growth without profitable unit economics. Build the numbers an acquirer or late-stage investor will ask for, delivered contribution and cohort repeat, before you need them. The marketing due diligence guide lists what gets checked.
6. What share of D2C orders is prepaid, and how is UPI changing payments?
Prepaid orders reached 55% of D2C orders in June 2026, up from 51% in May, across Unicommerce’s clients. UPI processed 24.07 billion transactions worth ₹29.37 lakh crore in September 2026, more than 800 million a day. Cash on delivery is shrinking as a share but not disappearing: at Diwali 2025, COD order value still grew 35%.
Prepaid is rising for three reasons. UPI is now habitual: NPCI's figures show more than 800 million transactions a day by September 2026. Checkout tools have made paying online as quick as choosing COD. And Bain observes shoppers moving from cash on delivery to paying by UPI at the door, which keeps the reassurance of paying on arrival while removing the cash handling. Quick commerce, which Bain notes relies less on COD than traditional e-retail, also pulls the average up.
But COD is not going away. At Diwali 2025, Unicommerce counted COD orders growing 22% by volume and 35% by value, close to prepaid growth of 26%. COD remains the way many first-time and smaller-city shoppers buy from a brand they do not yet trust. The commercial question is not whether to offer COD but how to price and confirm it so that refused parcels do not destroy the margin, which is what chapter 7 measures.
What payment costs. Razorpay's published standard pricing is 2% plus GST on domestic cards, UPI and netbanking; COD carries courier collection fees instead. On a ₹1,000 order, the prepaid gateway cost is about ₹24 including GST on the fee, usually far less than the expected cost of a COD order once RTO is counted.
| Payment cost | About ₹24 (2% + 18% GST on the fee) | Courier COD fee (varies by courier plan) |
|---|---|---|
| Chance the order is returned undelivered | Low | Much higher: most RTO comes from COD (chapter 7) |
| Cost of an RTO | Rare | Forward and return shipping, packaging, stock locked for days |
| Cash cycle | Settled by the gateway | Remitted by the courier after delivery |
| Customer reach | Shoppers comfortable paying upfront | First-time and less-trusting shoppers, especially in smaller cities |
| Prepaid incentive | Small discount or free shipping for paying upfront | Prepaid share and margin after the incentive |
|---|---|---|
| COD confirmation on WhatsApp | A utility message asks the buyer to confirm before dispatch | RTO on confirmed vs unconfirmed COD orders |
| Partial prepayment | A token amount paid upfront on high-value COD orders | Conversion rate and RTO on those orders |
| UPI at delivery | Courier collects by UPI instead of cash | Remittance speed and refusal rate |
| COD limits | COD hidden for high-risk pin codes or order values | Lost orders against RTO saved |
Myth Removing COD fixes RTO.
Reality It also removes the customers who only buy with COD. Confirmation, pin-code rules and prepaid incentives usually keep more profit.
Myth UPI growth means COD is finished.
Reality At Diwali 2025, COD order value still grew 35%.
Myth A 2× ROAS is profitable at a 50% margin.
Reality Not once RTO, shipping both ways and fees are counted; at 25% RTO the worked example needs 3.05×.
- What is our prepaid share by city tier and by new against returning customers?
- What does a COD order cost us after RTO, and what does a prepaid order cost after the gateway fee?
- Do we confirm COD orders before dispatch?
- Would a prepaid incentive cost less than the RTO it prevents?
Every point of COD that moves to prepaid lowers RTO and frees cash. Offer COD where it wins customers, confirm it before shipping, and price the incentive to prepay against the RTO it saves.
7. What is the RTO rate for Indian D2C brands, and what does it do to break-even ROAS?
Across brands on Unicommerce’s platforms, return-to-origin peaked at 39.2% in November 2025, the festive peak, fell to 25.6% in January 2026 and to 21.0% by March 2026 for brands that applied its recommended fixes. At a 50% gross margin, moving RTO from zero to 25% raises the ROAS needed to break even on placed orders from 2.16× to 3.05× in this site’s worked example.
RTO rate across D2C brands on Unicommerce’s platforms
Unicommerce's April 2026 India D2C report draws on its Uniware and Shipway platforms, covering more than 6,000 D2C brands and more than 410 million shipments. It sells software to address RTO, and the figures are platform-wide rather than by category, but no larger published dataset exists. The festive pattern matters most: the highest RTO coincides with the highest ad prices, so the most expensive acquisition of the year is also the least likely to turn into delivered revenue.
What RTO costs. An RTO order costs forward shipping, return shipping and packaging, ties up stock for days or weeks, and earns nothing. Ad platforms count it as a sale, because the order was placed. That is why a D2C brand can show a healthy ROAS in Meta or Google and lose money: the platform's revenue includes orders that never arrived.
Break-even rises fast. The textbook break-even ROAS is 1 ÷ gross margin. This site's worked example, using Razorpay's published 2% gateway fee and Shiprocket's published ₹45 shipping average for illustration, shows how RTO changes that number at a 50% gross margin: 2.16× with no RTO, 2.30× at 5%, 2.62× at 15% and 3.05× at 25%. A brand targeting 2.5× in Ads Manager with 25% RTO is losing money on every order the dashboard calls profitable.
Break-even ROAS on placed orders at a 50% gross margin, by overall RTO rate (worked example)
| Placed order value | ₹1,200 | What Meta or Google reports |
|---|---|---|
| Delivered share | 87.65% | 45% COD × 75% delivered + 55% prepaid × 98% delivered |
| Delivered revenue | ₹1,052 | ₹1,200 × 87.65% |
| Gross profit (CM1) | ₹631 | 60% of delivered revenue |
| Shipping, COD, gateway, packaging | ₹126 | ₹70 forward, ₹7 return share, ₹10 COD fees, ₹13 gateway, ₹25 packaging |
| Contribution before marketing (CM2) | ₹505 | The most you can pay to acquire this order and break even |
| Platform break-even ROAS | 2.37× | ₹1,200 ÷ ₹505 |
| Impulse COD orders | High RTO on first-time COD buyers from social ads | COD confirmation on WhatsApp before dispatch |
|---|---|---|
| Wrong or incomplete addresses | Courier reports of undeliverable addresses | Address validation and pin-code checks at checkout |
| Slow delivery | Refusals rise with delivery days | Faster courier for high-RTO regions; show delivery dates honestly |
| Fraud and repeat refusers | Same phone numbers refusing repeatedly | Block or require prepayment for repeat refusers |
| Festive overload | RTO spikes in October and November | Tighter COD rules and capacity planning for the peak |
Tools and resources for this chapter
- What is our RTO rate by payment method, city tier and traffic source?
- What was RTO in last year’s festive season, and what is the plan this year?
- Do ad platforms receive delivered orders, or only placed ones?
- What break-even ROAS do we set targets against, and does it include RTO?
Judge every channel and campaign on delivered revenue. RTO is usually the largest margin leak an Indian D2C brand can control, and cutting it often does more for profit than any improvement in ad efficiency.
8. What does it cost to reach and convert Indian shoppers online?
Instagram reaches 481 million people in India with ads, YouTube 500 million and Facebook 403 million (DataReportal). E-retail ads take about a quarter of Indian digital ad spend. Android holds about 94% of Indian mobile devices, so Meta loses far less conversion signal to Apple’s privacy controls than in the US, but no independent dataset of Indian D2C cost per order exists.
| YouTube | 500 million | 34.1% | +9.0 million, end 2024 to late 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 481 million | 32.8% | +89.5 million (+22.9%), October 2024 to October 2025 | |
| 403 million | 27.5% | +30.3 million (+8.1%) | |
| Snapchat | 213 million | 14.5% | +8.37 million (+4.1%) |
| LinkedIn (members) | 170 million | 11.6% | +30.0 million (+21.4%) |
| Messenger | 108 million | 7.4% | +0.5 million |
| X | 22.2 million | 1.5% | −3.1 million (−12.3%) |
Reach is not the constraint. Instagram added nearly 90 million reachable users in a year and now reaches about a third of India's population. For most D2C categories, the audience exists several times over. What limits results is creative volume, conversion signal and the cost of a delivered order.
Signal is stronger than in the US, but often broken. StatCounter put iOS at 6.05% of Indian mobile devices in September 2026, against 53.59% in the US, so Apple's tracking prompts remove far less data from Indian campaigns. The more common problems in India are duplicated pixel and server events, orders sent to Meta before they are confirmed or delivered, and too few conversion events per ad set: Meta's help centre says an ad set needs about 50 optimisation events a week to leave the learning phase. Meta deduplicates browser and server events sharing an event ID within 48 hours, and rejects events older than seven days.
Where the money goes. Bain estimates e-retail ads at about 25% of Indian digital ad spend, and dentsu counted ₹17,601 crore of e-retail ad spend in 2025, up 55.86%. Marketplaces and quick-commerce apps are now among the largest ad sellers in the country. A brand selling across channels is buying attention on Meta and Google to drive website orders, and paying the marketplaces again for visibility inside their stores.
E-commerce conversion rate by category (Dynamic Yield benchmarks published by Shopify, global)
Conversion. No Indian dataset of D2C website conversion rates with a published method was found, so the global Dynamic Yield figures above are the best available reference. Category drives the rate more than country: repeat, low-priced categories convert at two to four times the rate of furniture or jewellery. Baymard's survey of US shoppers found extra costs at checkout the most common reason for abandoning (40%), followed by slow delivery (20%) and distrust of card payments (19%); in India, surprise delivery charges and delivery dates matter just as much, while UPI reduces the card-trust problem.
Speed. Most Indian shoppers browse on mid-range Android phones over mobile data. Google's Core Web Vitals treat a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less at the 75th percentile as good, and Deloitte's study for Google found a 0.1-second improvement lifted retail conversions by 8.4%. Test on a mid-range phone on a throttled connection, not on office Wi-Fi.
| Contribution before marketing per placed order | From chapter 7’s worked example | ₹505 |
|---|---|---|
| Target profit after ads | 10% of ₹1,200 order value | ₹120 |
| Maximum acquisition cost per placed order | ₹505 − ₹120 | ₹385 |
| ROAS to target on placed orders | ₹1,200 ÷ ₹385 | 3.12× |
| If Meta over-reports by 20% | 3.12 × 1.2 | Set about 3.7× in the platform |
Tools and resources for this chapter
Myth Indian audiences are too small for scale.
Reality Instagram alone reaches 481 million people in India with ads.
Myth iOS privacy is why Meta stopped working.
Reality iOS is about 6% of Indian mobile devices; duplicated or premature purchase events are the more common cause.
Myth WhatsApp messages are free.
Reality Since October 2026, utility messages are charged even inside the 24-hour window, and marketing messages cost ₹0.8631 each.
- How many purchase events does each ad set get a week?
- Are browser and server purchase events deduplicated by order ID?
- What is our conversion rate on mobile at the 75th percentile load time?
- What do we pay per delivered order, not per placed order?
Reach is abundant and signal loss is lower than in the US, so most Indian D2C acquisition problems are measurement and creative problems. Fix events and judge campaigns on delivered orders before raising budgets.
9. How do D2C brands keep customers, and what do email and WhatsApp cost?
In Klaviyo’s data, automated flows were 5.3% of emails sent but earned nearly 41% of email revenue, and abandoned-cart emails earned $6.77 per recipient on average. In India, WhatsApp does much of the work email does elsewhere: since 1 October 2026 Meta charges ₹0.8631 per marketing message and ₹0.115 per utility message to Indian numbers, before GST.
| Share of emails sent | 5.3% | 94.7% |
|---|---|---|
| Average click rate | 5.58% | 1.69% |
| Share of email revenue | Nearly 41% | About 59% |
| Share of revenue from new buyers | Nearly 48% | 16% |
| COD order placed | Confirm or cancel, with buttons | Utility | ₹0.115 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Order shipped | Tracking link | Utility | ₹0.115 |
| Out for delivery or failed attempt | Courier status | Utility | ₹0.115 |
| Checkout abandoned | Reminder to complete purchase | Marketing | ₹0.8631 |
| Any update with a discount or upsell | Order update plus promotion | Marketing | ₹0.8631 |
| Reply to a customer message | Free-form, inside 24 hours | Service | Free for 1,000 a month per number, then ₹0.115 |
| Chat started from a Click-to-WhatsApp ad | Any messages | Free entry point | Free for 72 hours |
Retention is where D2C economics are won. A first order often barely covers its acquisition cost, especially after RTO; the second and third orders, reached through owned channels, carry the profit. That is why acquirers in chapter 5 look at cohort repeat rates first.
Email and WhatsApp do different jobs. Email is cheap per message and suits content, newsletters and longer offers. WhatsApp reaches Indian shoppers who rarely open promotional email and suits time-sensitive messages: COD confirmation, shipping, delivery and short re-engagement offers. At ₹0.115 a utility message, confirming a COD order costs a fraction of the ₹90 or more of shipping lost on a single RTO in this report's examples.
The 1 October 2026 change. Meta now charges for utility templates inside the 24-hour service window and for service replies beyond 1,000 a month per number. Brands that used the free window for order updates now pay for them, so the monthly WhatsApp bill should be modelled by category before choosing a provider. Meta also ties messaging limits to quality: new business portfolios start at 250 unique users a day and rise in steps as quality holds, and Meta requires opt-in before messaging.
Email still needs hygiene. Gmail requires senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to authenticate, offer one-click unsubscribe, and keep spam complaints below 0.30%, ideally below 0.10%. Mailchimp's average click rate across users is 2.62%, and 1.74% in e-commerce.
| COD confirmations | 6,000 | ₹0.115 | ₹690 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shipping and delivery updates | 20,000 | ₹0.115 | ₹2,300 |
| Abandoned checkout reminders | 4,000 | ₹0.8631 | ₹3,452 |
| Monthly promotional broadcast | 10,000 | ₹0.8631 | ₹8,631 |
| Total before GST | 40,000 | n/a | ₹15,073 |
| Total with 18% GST | n/a | n/a | ₹17,787 |
Tools and resources for this chapter
| First orders delivered | 1,000 | 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Acquisition cost per first order | ₹450 | ₹450 |
| Contribution per order before marketing | ₹500 | ₹500 |
| Customers ordering again within 90 days | 15% | 30% |
| Cost of a repeat order via email or WhatsApp | About ₹20 | About ₹20 |
| Contribution after acquisition, first 90 days | ₹50,000 + 150 × ₹480 = ₹1,22,000 | ₹50,000 + 300 × ₹480 = ₹1,94,000 |
- What share of our revenue comes from repeat customers, by cohort?
- Which flows do we run, and what does each earn per recipient?
- What did WhatsApp cost last month by category since the October 2026 change?
- How many customers block or report us per broadcast?
Build triggered flows before broadcasts, use WhatsApp for time-sensitive order messages, and measure repeat purchase by cohort. The second order is where most D2C brands make their margin.
10. How much does the festive season matter for Indian D2C brands?
Festive periods bring about one in four new online shoppers in India (Bain), and daily traffic during Flipkart’s Big Billion Days is nearly three times normal. Across Unicommerce’s clients, Diwali 2025 orders grew 24% and GMV 23%, quick commerce orders 120% and brand websites 33%. The same season produced the year’s highest RTO rate: 39.2% in November 2025.
| Orders, all channels | +24% |
|---|---|
| GMV | +23% |
| Tier II cities | +28% |
| Tier I cities and metros | +24% |
| Tier III towns | +23% |
| Quick commerce orders | +120% |
| Brand website orders | +33% |
| Marketplace orders | +8% (38% of purchases) |
The festive season is where customers are won, and where margins are lost. It brings a quarter of new online shoppers, which makes it the best time of year to acquire customers who will buy again. It also brings the highest ad prices of the year, because FMCG and e-commerce, the two largest advertising categories in dentsu's count, concentrate spend in the same weeks. And it brings the highest RTO, because more first-time and COD buyers order on impulse. A brand that plans festive spend on platform ROAS alone will usually overspend.
Tier II grew fastest. Unicommerce counted 28% order growth in Tier II cities against 24% in metros and Tier I, and Tier II and III cities together placed about 55% of festive orders. Smaller-city shoppers are the growth, but they carry higher COD shares and longer delivery times, which is where the RTO comes from.
What to measure after the season. The success of a festive campaign is not the revenue in the week, but the delivered revenue net of RTO and the share of festive first-time buyers who buy again within 90 days. Both can be measured by tagging festive cohorts in your store and CRM.
A festive season plan built on delivered revenue
- TargetsEight weeks beforeSet break-even ROAS on delivered revenue using last year’s festive RTO, not the annual average.
- CreativeSix weeks beforeBuild creative volume: festive auctions punish fatigue, and Meta needs about 50 optimisation events a week per ad set.
- OperationsFour weeks beforeTighten COD rules for high-RTO pin codes, switch on WhatsApp confirmation, agree courier capacity.
- ControlDuringReview delivered-order ROAS daily against the target, not platform ROAS.
- PayoffWithin 90 days afterMeasure repeat purchase of festive first-time buyers against other cohorts.
Myth The festive season is always the most profitable time of year.
Reality It brings the most orders, but also the highest ad prices and the highest RTO; profit depends on delivered revenue and repeat purchase afterwards.
Myth Festive buyers are one-off bargain hunters.
Reality Festive periods bring about a quarter of new online shoppers (Bain); measure how many come back before writing them off.
Myth More budget in festive weeks always means more profit.
Reality Only while the extra orders are delivered and earn more than their acquisition cost; set limits on delivered-order ROAS, not platform ROAS.
- What was our delivered revenue, not placed revenue, in last year’s festive season?
- How many festive first-time buyers bought again within 90 days?
- What RTO rate should this year’s targets assume?
- Do we have enough creative to rotate through four to six peak weeks?
Plan the festive season as a customer-acquisition event judged on delivered revenue and repeat purchase. The brands that win it set targets on festive RTO, protect margins on COD, and measure the cohort afterwards.
11. How big is creator marketing in India, and how should D2C brands measure it?
EY and Collective Artists Network estimated India’s influencer marketing industry at ₹2,344 crore in 2024 and ₹3,375 crore by 2026. EY separately put the wider creator economy at ₹12,500 crore in 2024, heading for about ₹50,000 crore by 2030. IAMAI and Kantar found 588 million Indians, 61% of internet users, watched short video in 2025.
The estimates vary, and that is the point. EY's influencer marketing figure counts brand spend through agencies and platforms; its creator-economy figure is far broader, including creators' other income. Industry participants quoted in trade press argue that direct brand-to-creator deals, which nobody tracks, make the real spend much larger. For a brand, the market size matters less than the fact that short video, consumed by most Indian internet users and by rural users slightly more than urban ones, is where product discovery now happens. Bain notes Gen Z discovers trends through influencers on social media and immersive video.
Measurement is the weak point. A creator's post reports views and engagement, which are activity, not sales. The questions that matter are whether the campaign drove orders that would not otherwise have happened, and whether those buyers came back. Tracked links and discount codes catch part of the effect; branded search and direct traffic during the campaign catch more; a regional test catches the most.
| Views, likes, comments | Reach and attention | No link to sales |
|---|---|---|
| Tracked links (UTM) and creator codes | Orders from people who clicked or used the code | Misses people who saw the post and searched later |
| Branded search and direct traffic lift | Demand created during the campaign window | Other activity in the same weeks blurs it |
| Regional or time-based holdout | Incremental orders against regions or weeks without the campaign | Needs enough volume and planning |
| Cohort repeat rate of creator-acquired buyers | Whether the customers were worth acquiring | Takes 60 to 90 days to read |
Myth Bigger followings sell more.
Reality Reach is not purchase intent; judge creators on tracked orders, branded search lift and repeat purchase.
Myth Creator marketing cannot be measured.
Reality Tracked links, codes, branded search and regional tests give increasingly strong evidence.
Myth Creator spend is small in India.
Reality EY estimated ₹3,375 crore for influencer marketing by 2026, and industry participants argue untracked direct deals add much more.
- Does every creator have a tracked link or code?
- Did branded search rise during the last creator campaign?
- Do creator-acquired customers buy again as often as others?
- Are we paying for views or for outcomes?
Creators are where Indian shoppers discover brands, but views are not sales. Track every creator, watch branded search, and judge creators on the repeat behaviour of the customers they bring.
12. Where will the next Indian online shoppers come from?
Tier 2+ cities, beyond the top 50 or so, brought about two-thirds of new shoppers and about half of incremental e-retail orders in 2025, yet only 25% to 30% of their internet users shop online, against 45% to 50% in metros and Tier 1 (Bain). Gen Z makes up 40% to 45% of shoppers and nearly half of incremental orders. Rural India now has about 548 million active internet users (IAMAI and Kantar).
| Shoppers as a share of internet users | 45–50% | 25–30% |
|---|---|---|
| Share of new shoppers, 2025 | About a third | About two-thirds |
| Share of incremental orders, 2025 | About half | About half |
| Quick commerce availability | High: most micro-fulfilment centres | Limited |
Smaller cities are the growth, with different economics. Unicommerce's festive data showed Tier II orders growing faster than metros. Those customers are more likely to choose COD, more likely to refuse a parcel, and further from a warehouse, so a brand should expect higher RTO and longer delivery times and plan payment rules and courier choices by pin code rather than nationally.
Gen Z shops differently. Bain describes Gen Z discovering brands through influencers, social feeds and immersive video, and using instant credit and buy-now-pay-later more than older shoppers. IAMAI and Kantar found 57% of 15 to 24-year-olds use AI-enabled features such as voice and image search, against 44% of all users. For a D2C brand, that means creative built for short video, discovery on Instagram and YouTube (chapter 8), and checkout that offers UPI and credit options.
Language and devices. IAMAI and Kantar counted 193 million people using more than one device, and 18% of users going online through someone else's phone, nearly 80% of them in rural areas. Shared devices make cookie-based retargeting and frequency caps less reliable, which is another reason to send server-side events and use phone-number-based messaging.
Tools and resources for this chapter
Myth Smaller-city shoppers only buy cheap products.
Reality They are the main source of new shoppers and half of incremental orders; price sensitivity varies by category.
Myth Gen Z only shops on marketplaces.
Reality Bain finds Gen Z discovers brands through creators and short video, which favours brands with a strong social presence.
- What share of our new customers come from Tier 2+ cities, and what is their RTO?
- Do our payment and courier rules differ by pin code?
- Is our creative built for short video?
- Do we offer UPI and credit options at checkout?
The next hundred million Indian shoppers live mostly outside the big cities and are young. Win them with short-video discovery, honest delivery promises and payment rules set by pin code, and price their higher cost to serve into your targets.
13. What does a month of D2C unit economics look like, from ad spend to contribution?
Putting the chapters together: one illustrative month for a brand selling a ₹1,500 average order, with the RTO, payment and shipping assumptions drawn from the published figures in this report. The point is not the exact numbers but how the gap between platform-reported revenue and contribution opens up.
| Placed orders | 3,000 | Platform-attributed and organic together |
|---|---|---|
| Placed revenue | ₹45,00,000 | 3,000 × ₹1,500 |
| COD orders / prepaid orders | 1,500 / 1,500 | 50% COD (Unicommerce’s June 2026 prepaid share was 55%) |
| RTO on COD / prepaid | 30% / 3% | Between Unicommerce’s 21% and 39.2% platform-wide range for COD-heavy months |
| Delivered orders | 2,505 | 1,500 × 70% + 1,500 × 97% |
| Delivered revenue | ₹37,57,500 | 2,505 × ₹1,500 |
| Gross profit at 55% margin (CM1) | ₹20,66,625 | Delivered revenue × 55% |
| Forward shipping | ₹1,35,000 | 3,000 shipped × ₹45 (Shiprocket’s published average, illustrative) |
Where the money went. Of ₹45 lakh of placed revenue, ₹7.4 lakh never arrived because of RTO, ₹16.9 lakh went on goods, and ₹2.8 lakh on shipping, returns, gateway and packaging. Ad spend took ₹15 lakh. What was left, about ₹2.8 lakh, has to pay for the team and everything else. This is why the scorecard in chapter 14 starts with delivered revenue and contribution rather than ROAS.
Which lever moves it most. Three modest changes add up quickly in this example:
- Cutting COD RTO from 30% to 21%, the level Unicommerce reported for brands applying its fixes, delivers about 135 more orders and adds roughly ₹1.1 lakh of gross profit, less a little return shipping saved.
- Moving the prepaid share from 50% to 55%, where Unicommerce's June 2026 figure sits, shifts 150 orders from 30% RTO to 3% RTO, recovering about 40 delivered orders.
- Lifting repeat purchase so that a fifth of the month's orders come from email and WhatsApp rather than paid ads lowers ad spend for the same revenue.
None of these require a better ROAS in the ad platform. They are operational and retention levers, which is why the most profitable Indian D2C brands are usually the ones with the best delivery and repeat-purchase numbers rather than the cheapest clicks.
Where ₹45 lakh of placed revenue went in the illustrative month (₹ lakh)
A healthy platform ROAS can sit on top of a thin business. Build this table for your own last month, with real RTO, fees and returns, and you will know which lever to pull first. The RTO-adjusted ROAS calculator and the margin protector automate most of it.
14. Which numbers should a D2C brand review every month?
Ten numbers, each measured the same way every month and compared with your own trend first and the benchmarks in this report second. Most of them can only be measured if delivered orders, not placed orders, flow back into your reporting.
| Delivered revenue growth | Delivered revenue this month against the same month last year | Market growth 19–21% in 2025 (Bain) |
|---|---|---|
| Contribution per delivered order | Gross profit minus shipping, returns, fees and packaging | Worked example: ₹505 on a ₹1,200 order |
| Blended cost per delivered order | All marketing spend ÷ delivered orders | Must stay below contribution per order |
| RTO rate, COD and prepaid | Undelivered orders ÷ shipped orders, by payment method | 21–39% across Unicommerce clients |
| Prepaid share | Prepaid orders ÷ all orders | 55% in June 2026 (Unicommerce) |
| Website conversion rate | Orders ÷ sessions, by device | 2.66% global average; varies by category |
| Repeat rate, 90 days | Share of a month’s first-time buyers who order again within 90 days | Your own cohort trend |
| Revenue from owned channels | Email, WhatsApp, direct and organic revenue ÷ total | Your own trend |
| Platform over-reporting | Platform-attributed revenue ÷ backend delivered revenue for paid traffic | Your own measurement |
| Channel mix | Revenue share: website, marketplaces, quick commerce | Diwali 2025: websites +33%, marketplaces +8% |
Your ROAS looks healthy but the bank balance does not. Why?
Is ROAS measured on delivered orders or placed orders?
See the whole decision tree
Is ROAS measured on delivered orders or placed orders?
- Placed ordersRestate on delivered revenueRTO and cancellations are inside the platform figure. Recalculate with the RTO-adjusted ROAS calculator.Open the calculator →
- Delivered orders
Does your break-even ROAS include shipping both ways, fees and packaging?
- NoRaise the break-evenWork out contribution per order after every cost; the textbook 1 ÷ margin is too low for Indian D2C.See the break-even ladder →
- YesCheck platform over-reportingCompare platform-attributed revenue with backend revenue for the same orders; duplicated events often inflate it.Open the ROAS to MER converter →
- No
Appendix A: where reliable Indian D2C benchmarks do not exist yet
For several numbers founders are asked about every week, no published Indian dataset with a stated method could be found. Listing the gaps is more useful than filling them with figures that cannot be checked.
| D2C ROAS by category | Agency ranges without attribution windows or revenue definitions | Your break-even ROAS on delivered revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Meta and Google cost per order by category | Agency claims | Your account history; small tests per audience |
| Website conversion rate for Indian D2C | Global vendor averages | Your own analytics by device and source |
| Repeat purchase rate by category | Founder anecdotes | Your cohorts, measured on delivered customers |
| Quick-commerce margins and ROAS for brands | Confidential platform terms | Contribution per order from your own settlements |
| Creator campaign ROAS | Case studies chosen by agencies | Tracked codes plus regional tests |
| Returns (not RTO) by category | Marketplace anecdotes | Your own returns data |
The gaps exist because the people who hold the data, brands, agencies and platforms, rarely publish it with a method. Unicommerce's RTO figures and Bain's market figures are the exceptions, which is why they appear throughout this report. A D2C brand with clean delivered-order data already has a better benchmark for its own decisions than anything published. Industry groups and founder communities could change this by pooling anonymised figures with stated definitions; where such a dataset appears, it will be added to the next edition.
Appendix B: glossary of D2C and e-commerce terms used in this report
Definitions differ between publishers and between brands. These are the definitions used here.
| GMV (gross merchandise value) | Value of goods ordered, before cancellations and returns | What Bain measures; larger than revenue kept |
|---|---|---|
| Placed revenue | Value of orders placed on your store | What ad platforms report |
| Delivered revenue | Placed revenue minus cancellations and RTO | The revenue that reaches the bank |
| RTO (return to origin) | A shipped order returned undelivered, usually a refused COD parcel | Costs shipping both ways and earns nothing |
| COD (cash on delivery) | Payment collected by the courier at delivery | Higher RTO risk |
| Prepaid share | Orders paid online ÷ all orders | Unicommerce: 55% in June 2026 |
| CM1 | Delivered revenue minus cost of goods | Gross profit |
| CM2 | CM1 minus shipping, returns, payment fees and packaging | Contribution before marketing |
Appendix C: how each publisher counts, and why their numbers differ
Most disagreements between Indian e-commerce figures come from definitions, not errors. Knowing how each source counts lets you use the right one for the question.
Bain with Flipkart estimates e-retail gross merchandise value: the value of physical goods ordered online, before cancellations and returns, built from company data, consumer research and Flipkart's own data. It gives ranges ($65 to $66 billion) rather than points, and revises earlier years as data improves. Use it for market size, growth and share of shoppers. Do not compare a brand's delivered revenue with Bain's GMV growth without allowing for returns.
Unicommerce reports what passes through its Uniware and Shipway software: orders, shipments, payment methods and returns for its client brands, more than 6,000 D2C brands and more than 410 million shipments in its 2026 D2C report. It measures real operations, which makes its RTO and prepaid figures uniquely useful, but its clients are not a random sample of Indian brands, and it sells software for the problems it measures. Use it for operational benchmarks, labelled as vendor data.
NPCI publishes every UPI transaction, monthly. It is complete and official, but covers all UPI payments, including person-to-person transfers, so it describes payment habits rather than e-commerce specifically.
IAMAI and Kantar survey people, more than 87,000 in the 2025 edition, about what they do online. Surveys capture behaviour across the whole population, including people who rarely transact, so their user counts differ from platform data. DataReportal (Kepios) combines platform ad tools and other data into comparable country figures; its ad reach numbers are what advertisers can target, not unique active people.
Tracxn records disclosed funding rounds and acquisitions. Late disclosures cause revisions, which is why its 2024 total differs between editions. EY estimates industry sizes from interviews and modelling, and its influencer and creator-economy figures measure different things.
The rule that follows: pick one source per question, cite it with its definition, and compare like with like.
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India D2C and e-commerce benchmarks: common questions
How big is the Indian e-commerce market in 2026?
Bain and Flipkart put Indian e-retail GMV at $65 to $66 billion in 2025, up 19% to 21%, and project $170 to $180 billion by 2030. GMV counts goods ordered before returns, so brands keep less than this.
How many people shop online in India?
Bain counts 290 to 300 million online shoppers in 2025, about 30% of internet users. IAMAI and Kantar found 230 million people, 56% of urban active internet users, had shopped online in the past year.
How big is quick commerce in India?
Quick commerce reached $10 to $11 billion of GMV in 2025, 16% to 17% of e-retail, after doubling every year since 2023. Bain projects $65 to $70 billion by 2030.
What is the average RTO rate for D2C brands in India?
Across brands on Unicommerce’s platforms, RTO was 39.2% at the November 2025 festive peak, 25.6% in January 2026 and 21.0% in March 2026 for brands that applied its recommended fixes. It varies widely by category and COD share.
What share of Indian D2C orders is prepaid?
Unicommerce reported 55% of D2C orders prepaid in June 2026, up from 51% in May. COD remains common among first-time and smaller-city buyers.
Are brand websites growing faster than marketplaces?
At Diwali 2025, Unicommerce counted 33% order growth on brand websites against 8% on marketplaces, which still held 38% of purchases. Quick commerce grew 120%.
How much do Indian D2C brands raise in funding?
Tracxn counts about $898 million of D2C funding in 2025, up 9%, and about $6 billion across nearly 2,000 rounds from January 2021 to August 2026, with 15 IPOs and 105 acquisitions.
What did Amazon India change in its seller fees in 2026?
From 16 March 2026, Amazon India charges zero referral fees on more than 12.5 crore products priced under ₹1,000 across 1,800+ categories, cut Easy Ship fees by more than 20% for products under ₹300, and says some sellers’ total fees fall by up to 70%.
What is a good ROAS for a D2C brand in India?
One above your own break-even on delivered revenue. In this report’s worked example, a ₹1,200 order with 45% COD, 25% COD RTO and a 60% margin breaks even at 2.37× on placed orders, against a textbook 1.67×.
How many Indians can Meta and YouTube ads reach?
DataReportal reports ad reach in India of 500 million on YouTube, 481 million on Instagram and 403 million on Facebook in late 2025.
How much does WhatsApp marketing cost in India?
From 1 October 2026, Meta charges ₹0.8631 per marketing message and ₹0.115 per utility message to Indian numbers, before 18% GST and provider fees.
How big is influencer marketing in India?
EY and Collective Artists Network estimated ₹2,344 crore in 2024 and ₹3,375 crore by 2026. EY put the wider creator economy at ₹12,500 crore in 2024.
Where are new online shoppers in India coming from?
Bain found about two-thirds of new shoppers and half of incremental orders in 2025 came from Tier 2+ cities, and Gen Z makes up 40% to 45% of shoppers.
Should a D2C brand sell on quick commerce?
For everyday categories sold in the largest cities, often yes: Bain found quick commerce converts about eight times better than traditional e-retail. Test incrementality city by city and judge it on contribution after platform margin and in-app ads.
How much does UPI matter for D2C brands?
UPI processed 24.07 billion transactions in September 2026, more than 800 million a day, and Bain notes shoppers moving from cash on delivery to paying by UPI at the door. More prepaid orders mean lower RTO.
What does a COD order really cost?
Beyond courier COD fees, a refused COD parcel costs shipping both ways and packaging and earns nothing. In this report’s worked example, RTO raises break-even ROAS at a 50% margin from 2.16× to 3.05×.
Why is my Meta ROAS high but my profit low?
Usually because ROAS counts placed orders, including future RTO, and break-even targets ignore shipping and fees. In this report’s illustrative month, a 3.0× platform ROAS leaves about 6% of placed revenue before overheads.
What is the Indian e-commerce market expected to reach by 2030?
Bain projects $170 to $180 billion of e-retail GMV by 2030, with quick commerce at $65 to $70 billion and e-retail reaching 10% to 12% of total retail spend.
How many Indians use the internet?
IAMAI and Kantar counted 958 million active internet users in 2025, 57% of them rural. DataReportal counts 1.03 billion internet users at the end of 2025 using a different method.
How much does the festive season matter?
Festive periods bring about one in four new online shoppers (Bain). Diwali 2025 orders grew 24% across Unicommerce’s clients, but the same season produced the year’s highest RTO.
Sources
- How India Shops Online 2026 (8 April 2026), Bain & Company (with Flipkart). Accessed 2026-10-22.
- How India Shops Online 2025 (26 March 2025), Bain & Company (with Flipkart). Accessed 2026-10-22.
- India's internet user base tops 950 million as rural growth, AI drive adoption (IAMAI and Kantar, Internet in India 2025), Business Today. Accessed 2026-10-22.
- Unicommerce reports 24% order volume growth during 2025 Diwali festive season (17 October 2025), MediaBrief. Accessed 2026-10-22.
- India's D2C Sector Raised USD 6B Since 2021: Tracxn Report (27 August 2026), Entrepreneur India. Accessed 2026-10-22.
- Amazon announces zero referral fees on over 12.5 crore products; sellers to save up to 70% in fees (2 March 2026), Amazon India press centre. Accessed 2026-10-22.
- India's influencer marketing industry estimated to reach INR3,375 crore by 2026: EY, Collective Artists Network's Big Bang Social report (April 2024), EY India. Accessed 2026-10-22.
- India's creator economy set to touch Rs 500 billion by 2030: EY, exchange4media. Accessed 2026-10-22.
- India D2C Report 2026: Operations, RTO and Growth Data, Unicommerce (vendor dataset). Accessed 2026-10-19.
- Unicommerce Benchmark Report: May vs June 2026, Unicommerce (vendor dataset). Accessed 2026-10-18.
- India's e-commerce orders up 24%, Qcom jumps 120% during 2025 Diwali: Report, Social Samosa. Accessed 2026-10-15.
- D2C channels growing faster than e-commerce marketplaces in India: report (McKinsey & Company), Apparel Resources. Accessed 2026-10-15.
- UPI transactions surge 23% to 24.07 billion in September: NPCI, DD News. Accessed 2026-10-15.
- Digital 2026: India, DataReportal (Kepios). Accessed 2026-10-15.
- Mobile Operating System Market Share India, StatCounter Global Stats. Accessed 2026-10-15.
- Mobile Operating System Market Share United States of America, StatCounter Global Stats. Accessed 2026-10-15.
- Digital becomes India’s largest ad channel: dentsu Digital Advertising Report 2026, Social Samosa. Accessed 2026-10-21.
- India's media and entertainment sector grew 9% to INR2.78 trillion in 2025, driven by digital and live experiences: FICCI-EY report (24 March 2026), EY India. Accessed 2026-10-21.
- Digital media hits ₹1,00,000 crore, ad revenues surge to ₹94,700 crore: FICCI-EY report, Storyboard18. Accessed 2026-10-21.
- Pricing, Razorpay. Accessed 2026-10-18.
- Shiprocket pricing plans, Shiprocket (vendor-published). Accessed 2026-10-18.
- What Is MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio)? Formula + 2026 DTC Benchmarks, Eightx (DTC finance consultancy, vendor-published). Accessed 2026-10-17.
- The abandoned cart benchmarks report: 2026 data to inform your strategy, Klaviyo (vendor data). Accessed 2026-10-17.
- 2026 email marketing benchmarks by industry, Klaviyo (vendor data). Accessed 2026-10-17.
- Pricing on the WhatsApp Business Platform (with INR rate card effective 1 October 2026), Meta for Developers. Accessed 2026-10-17.
- Messaging limits, Meta for Developers. Accessed 2026-10-18.
- Get opt-in for WhatsApp, Meta for Developers. Accessed 2026-10-17.
- WhatsApp Business API Pricing, Interakt (vendor-published). Accessed 2026-10-17.
- 50 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics 2026, Baymard Institute. Accessed 2026-10-19.
- Ecommerce Conversion Rate: Benchmarks & Tips (2026), citing Dynamic Yield, Shopify (vendor-published). Accessed 2026-10-17.
- Site Speed is (Still) Impacting Your Conversion Rate, Portent (agency-published). Accessed 2026-10-18.
- Milliseconds Make Millions (commissioned by Google), Deloitte Ireland. Accessed 2026-10-18.
- Web Vitals, web.dev (Google). Accessed 2026-10-21.
- About the learning phase, Meta Business Help Centre. Accessed 2026-10-19.
- Ad Account Insights reference, Meta for Developers. Accessed 2026-10-18.
- Using the Conversions API, Meta for Developers. Accessed 2026-10-15.
- Handling duplicate Pixel and Conversions API events, Meta for Developers. Accessed 2026-10-15.
- Conversions API best practices, Meta for Developers. Accessed 2026-10-15.
- About Target ROAS bidding, Google Ads Help. Accessed 2026-10-18.
- Email sender guidelines, Google Workspace Admin Help. Accessed 2026-10-21.
- Email Marketing Benchmarks and Metrics Businesses Should Track, Mailchimp (vendor data). Accessed 2026-10-17.
- Foreign Exchange Reference Rates, Financial Benchmarks India Pvt Ltd (FBIL). Accessed 2026-10-17.
- Internet users in India set to cross 900 mn in 2025 (IAMAI and Kantar, Internet in India 2024), The Week (PTI). Accessed 2026-10-15.
- How India Shops Online 2025, Bain & Company. Accessed 2026-10-15.
- Digital Ad Revenue Climbs to Nearly $300B as IAB Celebrates 30 Year Anniversary (IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, 16 April 2026), Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Accessed 2026-10-21.
- GST (Goods and Services Tax) on purchases, Google Payments Centre Help. Accessed 2026-10-18.