India's mobile-first shoppers are rewriting how brands win customers

2026-07-04 — customer acquisition strategy India

I was looking at some order data from Admitad the other day. Three million transactions tracked across 2025 and 2026, all in India. The numbers hit me differently than I expected.

India's e-commerce grew 16% in order volume through May 2026. GMV jumped 18%. That's not the kind of growth you see in a market that's flattening out.

But here's the thing that matters.

Mobile went from 45% of all purchases to 49% in five months. Nearly half. And mobile services—the category itself—grew 35%. People are buying things on their phones now, not thinking about it as some weird corner case. It's just how they shop.

If you're building an acquisition strategy for India that isn't mobile-first, you're building for the market from three years ago. You're just not.

Marketplaces still own more than 71% of all transactions. Flipkart, Amazon India, Meesho—those three apps are where the customer journey starts and ends for most people. You can build a beautiful direct-to-consumer site. Customers will glance at it once and go back to the marketplace app. That's not a failure of your branding. That's just where the attention is.

Most consultants get this wrong, including us sometimes. They act like this is a problem to solve. It's not. It's a constraint to accept.

Affiliate marketing is having a moment

The quieter shift in the data is what's happening with affiliate channels. The share of brands using affiliate marketing in their mix rose 7%. Publisher revenue—the money going to influencers, content sites, comparison platforms—grew 15% year-on-year. Something like 22% of Indian e-commerce consumers now come through affiliate touchpoints.

That 7% jump isn't random.

Affiliate marketing is performance-based. You pay when you get a sale. Not an impression. Not a click that might lead nowhere. A sale. In a market where the CFO is asking harder questions about where money goes and what it comes back as, that's the structure that wins almost every conversation. Actually, that's not quite right—it wins the conversation before anyone else even gets to speak.

Compare it to the other way. Brand awareness spend. Money into the air, hoping it lands somewhere near a purchase. The spreadsheet argument for that gets thinner every quarter.

So what does this mean for a brand actually trying to compete here?

Mobile is where the customer is living. Affiliate channels are how you reach them when they're not looking for your brand specifically. You need to invest in those partnerships. Content creators. Comparison platforms. The things that drive measurable traffic. And then—this is important—you need a mobile experience that doesn't leak the sale once someone shows up.

A good affiliate program with a broken mobile funnel is still a broken funnel.

Google and Deloitte did some projection about India's e-commerce market hitting $250 billion by 2030. Maybe that holds. The direction though—that's not in doubt. What's less clear to most brands is that the 2021 model is dead. Heavy brand spend, desktop-first design, direct traffic as the success metric. That model describes almost nothing about what's actually happening in mid-2026.

The customers are on phones. They're arriving through referral partners. They're transacting inside marketplaces. The brands that have already rebuilt around those realities have a real head start.

Everyone else is scrambling to catch up.