D2C & E-COMMERCE
MARKETING.

Buying online in India now starts almost anywhere. A reel, a creator's unboxing, a search on Amazon, a ten-minute app at 9pm, a WhatsApp message from a brand that remembered a birthday. Bain and Company counted 290 to 300 million online shoppers in 2025 and put e-retail at ₹6.2 to 6.3 lakh crore in gross merchandise value (converted to rupees at the exchange rate on 16 October 2026), growing 19 to 21 per cent, with smaller cities, Bain's Tier 2+, giving about half of the incremental orders. Direct-to-consumer marketing is the work of being chosen at each of those starting points, and then of being chosen again.

It is also one of the categories where the rules changed most in the last year. The Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules were amended in September 2026, with new duties from 1 January 2027 on how a discount is shown, how a sponsored placement is labelled and how a store proves it is free of dark patterns. This page sets out how we market a brand that sells online, and the rules we build its store and its offers inside.

Who we work with in D2C and e-commerce

Four of the brands on our Work wall sell direct to the people who use them, in four different categories. Sleepyhead makes mattresses and sleep products, a considered purchase bought once in several years. Namaskar Styles sells ethnic Indian wear, a category where the festive calendar sets the year. Atomik Monkey makes hiking accessories for a community that researches every buckle. Eloura is a sexual wellness brand, which sells in a category the ad platforms restrict.

What D2C marketing covers

A brand that sells online has more shelves than a brand that sells in a shop: its own store, the marketplaces, the quick commerce apps, Instagram and WhatsApp. Each of our services has a D2C version of itself.

For a D2C brand we plan social media and performance marketing as one calendar, because the reel that people saved last week is the ad that sells this week, and the review that arrived on Monday is the creative on Friday.

The rules a brand that sells online has to work inside

Indian e-commerce is governed by the Consumer Protection Act 2019 and the rules and guidelines under it, by the Legal Metrology rules, by GST and by the platforms' own policies. Most of it applies to a brand selling from its own store as much as to a marketplace.

The E-Commerce Rules 2020. The Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules 2020, notified on 23 July 2020, require every e-commerce entity to appoint a grievance officer who acknowledges a complaint within 48 hours and resolves it within a month, bar manipulating prices to earn unreasonable profit, bar charging a cancellation fee unless the entity bears the same fee when it cancels, and bar a seller from posing as a consumer to post reviews. A seller must give the total price as a single figure with its break-up and the country of origin, and a brand selling from its own site must display its return, refund, exchange, warranty, delivery, payment and grievance information prominently.

The 2026 amendment. The Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) (Amendment) Rules 2026, notified in September 2026 and in force from 1 January 2027, change how a store sells. Sponsored listings must be distinctly identified with clear and prominent disclosures. A price reduction must show the prior price beside the reduced price, and the prior price means the lowest price in the thirty days before the reduction was announced, which ends the strike-through price that was never charged. Every e-commerce entity must run a yearly self-audit for dark patterns and display a certificate of compliance, may not manipulate search results in a way that misleads users, must show the full country of origin and the importer's details for imported goods, and must join the National Consumer Helpline's convergence process.

Dark patterns. The CCPA's Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns 2023, in force since 30 November 2023, name thirteen patterns: false urgency, basket sneaking, confirm shaming, forced action, subscription trap, interface interference, bait and switch, drip pricing, disguised advertisement, nagging, trick question, SaaS billing and rogue malwares. In plain words, for a store: no countdown timer that resets, no item added to the cart that the shopper did not choose, no "No thanks, I like paying full price" button, no account forced before checkout, no subscription that is easy to start and hard to stop, no hidden charge revealed at the last step, no ad dressed as a review. In June 2025 the CCPA asked every platform to self-audit within three months; by November 2025 26 platforms had declared compliance, among them Flipkart, Myntra, Zepto, Swiggy and Zomato; and in June 2026 the CCPA fined PhysicsWallah ₹5 lakh and McAfee ₹1 lakh for basket sneaking, confirm shaming, forced action, interface interference and trick questions. Urgency that is true, such as a stock count from the inventory system, is allowed; urgency that is invented is not.

Advertising and influencers. The ASCI Code requires every claim to be capable of substantiation and bars misleading by implication or omission. Under the CCPA's 2022 guidelines, a misleading ad can draw a CCPA penalty of up to ₹10 lakh, and ₹50 lakh for repeated violations, and an endorsement must reflect a genuine, reasonably current opinion. The Department of Consumer Affairs' endorsement guide of January 2023, which spells out the 2022 guidelines, requires every creator to disclose a material connection, including free products and discounts, prominently and clearly within the post, and not to endorse what they have not used. Our guide to influencer marketing rates and rules in India goes through the labels and the timing.

Customer data. A store collects more personal data than most businesses. The Digital Personal Data Protection Rules were notified in November 2025, with the consent and notice duties applying after an eighteen-month phase-in and penalties up to ₹250 crore, and the 2026 e-commerce amendment separately bars using consumer data for specified purposes without express and affirmative consent. So every account, newsletter and WhatsApp opt-in we build is a clear, unticked choice, and the data goes to a creator or a marketplace only where the customer agreed.

We treat these rules as the brief for the checkout, not a review at the end, because a store that is honest about price and stock converts better once the shopper trusts it, and the fines now have names attached.

What the ad platforms and marketplaces allow

The platforms decide which categories a campaign can attempt, and in India the lines are specific. Google's sexual content policy lists India among the locations where sexual content ads, including sexual merchandise, will not serve at all, and its sexual health and wellness exception for personal lubricants applies in nine countries that do not include India. Meta's adult products or services standard bars ads that promote the sale or use of adult products, while allowing ads for sexual health, wellness and reproductive products to people aged 18 and over that do not focus on sexual pleasure. Meta's personal attributes rule bars any ad that asserts or implies a person's health, age or other attributes. Those policies set the channel mix for a sexual wellness brand: organic content, creators, WhatsApp and the marketplaces carry more of the plan than paid search can.

For supplements and wellness products, Google's healthcare and medicines policy prohibits products that imply they are as effective as prescription drugs or are marketed as safe or effective without approval. For everyone, Google's misrepresentation policy bars offers that are unavailable at the destination and pricing that gives a false impression of the cost, which is close to what the 2026 amendment now writes into Indian law. Shopping ads and free listings are available in India in rupees, and the marketplaces are crowded shelves: Amazon India's seller base crossed 20 lakh in September 2026 and Flipkart reports more than 14 lakh sellers, so a listing competes on its content and its reviews before it competes on its ad budget.

What works for brands that sell online

The creative that sells a product online shows it doing its job. A mattress is a video of someone turning over without the glass of water spilling, not a render. Ethnic wear is the fabric moving on a real person in daylight, with the sizing answered in the caption. A hiking accessory is a creator using it on an actual trail, with the "Ad" label where ASCI asks for it. Our own photographer, video editors and designers shoot for all the shelves at once, so one day's shoot gives the store its product page, Amazon its listing images and Instagram its reels, and our note on why Indian brands sound the same on Instagram explains why we write each brand's captions in its own voice rather than the category's.

The second order matters more than the first. A post-purchase flow on WhatsApp and email, a replenishment reminder timed to the product, a review request that follows IS 19000 rather than a discount for five stars, and a creator programme that sends people back to the store rather than to a marketplace where the brand pays a referral fee. WhatsApp has been charged per message since 1 July 2025, with a reply inside 24 hours to someone who clicked a Click to WhatsApp ad opening a 72-hour window in which messages are free, so the Click to WhatsApp campaign and the CRM are planned together. Quick commerce is now a shelf in its own right. Bain found more than two-thirds of e-grocery orders placed on quick commerce platforms in 2024 and 16 to 17 per cent of all e-retail GMV flowing through them in 2025. Swiggy Instamart alone reported ₹9,230 crore in gross order value in the quarter to September 2026, so for the right category the launch plan includes the dark store before it includes the billboard.

Returns and cash on delivery are a marketing problem

Nothing erodes a D2C margin like a parcel that comes back. Unicommerce's India D2C Report 2026, built from 410 million shipments across more than 6,000 brands on its platform, recorded return-to-origin as high as 39.2 per cent at the November 2025 festive peak, with cash-on-delivery orders returning at 58 per cent in the festive quarter against under 15 per cent for prepaid orders. The brands that had return-to-origin down to 21 per cent by March 2026 all had a prepaid incentive at checkout, pin-code courier routing and address verification before dispatch. That is a creative and CRM brief as much as a logistics one: a prepaid discount shown plainly on the product page, a UPI-first checkout, an order confirmation on WhatsApp that asks the customer to confirm the address, and ad creative that sets the right expectation of size, colour and delivery time so the parcel is not refused at the door. UPI suits that checkout: in September 2026 the government said person-to-merchant UPI payments up to ₹2,000 will stay free, with a 0.4 per cent charge above that for larger merchants. Unicommerce also found tier 2 and tier 3 cities driving 66 per cent of incremental D2C order volumes in FY26, which is where the address problem and the opportunity both live.

Being found: search, AI answers and marketplace search

Three search engines matter to a brand that sells online: Google, the marketplace's own search and, increasingly, the AI answer. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and that of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, trust is most important, so we write category and product pages that answer the questions people ask, with the declarations, the sizing and the returns policy on the page, and mark them up so an AI answer can quote them. Inside Amazon and Flipkart, the listing is the search engine: the title, the bullets, the A+ content and the review count shape the rank before the ad budget does, and reviews are collected the honest way because the 2020 rules bar a brand from posting as a consumer. Our guide to answer engine optimisation explains how the same page serves a cautious shopper and an AI tool.

How we measure D2C marketing

The number a founder cares about is contribution after returns, and the number after it is the repeat rate. So we track orders by channel, prepaid share, return-to-origin, contribution after returns and ad spend, first-order and repeat-order revenue, and the cost of a new customer against what that customer spends in the year, and we report them beside return on ad spend and the engagement numbers. A reel is judged on whether it sent people to the product page and whether they bought; a marketplace campaign on its share of category search and its organic rank the month after; a WhatsApp flow on the second order it produced, not the open rate.

The report also carries what we are changing next month and why. For a brand that sells online, that often means fewer discounts and better product pages, because a shopper who trusts the price comes back, and the regulator now asks for the same thing.

What it costs

We quote against the brief, because one brand needs a monthly social media retainer with a shoot every quarter, another needs a store rebuilt before the festive season, and a third needs performance campaigns across Meta, Google and Amazon with a WhatsApp programme behind them. Ad budgets, marketplace fees and creator fees are paid from your own accounts, and GST at 18% applies to agency fees.

If you run a brand that sells online, send us the brief. We reply with what we would do, which rules apply to it, and roughly what it would cost.