How to sell online without marketplace commissions — the 0% playbook

What commissions actually cost you

Take a ₹500 product selling 150 orders a month — a small but real store. The marketplace’s “all-in take” (commission + closing fee + payment collection) typically lands between 15% and 25%. Here’s what that skims off:

Illustrative — actual slabs vary by marketplace, category and price band as of 2026. Shipping excluded on all rows.

₹1.8 lakh a year at the 20% line is a salary, a year of ads, or your entire margin — and it recurs on every repeat order from the same customer. Whether that price is worth paying for discovery is a real question, and we’ve answered it honestly in marketplace vs your own website. This post is the playbook for the sales that shouldn’t owe anyone 20%.

Part 1 — your own store, with social as the traffic engine

The standard objection to leaving marketplaces is traffic: “nobody will find my website.” For small stores, the data says the traffic mostly wasn’t coming from being findable anyway — in our study of real SitesPlaced builds and store analytics, social (Instagram + Facebook) sends about 4.6× more visitorsto small stores than search does. Your first hundred customers come from your bio link, stories, reels and WhatsApp status — channels where a marketplace listing earns you nothing extra, but a 20% cut still applies if that’s where the link points.

So the first move is simply repointing your links: publish your own store, put it in your Instagram bio, and share it where your buyers already follow you. If you’re starting from zero, a generated store is the easiest way to start selling online — and an online store builder made for small businesses handles orders, stock and invoices so DMs don’t have to.

Part 2 — payment rails with no middleman

• Direct UPI — 0%. The customer pays your UPI ID at checkout and the full amount lands in your account. No commission, no settlement delay, no platform between you and your money.
• Cash on delivery — 0% at sale. Still how a large share of Indian ecommerce pays. No platform fee; your courier may charge a small COD handling fee on delivery.
• WhatsApp orders — 0%. The order arrives as a structured message — items, address, amount — and you close payment however suits you. It keeps the personal touch of DM selling without the chaos.
• Online card/UPI checkout — ~2%. A gateway like Razorpay charges a payment-processing fee of roughly 2%. Be clear-eyed: that fee exists on every selling channel, including marketplaces — it’s the cost of card rails, not a commission.

All four are built into a SitesPlaced store — including the free one — at 0% platform commission.

Part 3 — the honest costs that remain

Commission-free is not cost-free, and pretending otherwise is how sellers get surprised. What stays on your bill: shipping (courier rates per order, or your own delivery runs), the ~2% gateway fee on online card payments, and your time — without a marketplace, discovery is your job, which in practice means consistently showing up on the social channels that drive that 4.6× traffic.

On the platform side: a free SitesPlaced store publishes at ₹0 on a yourname.sitesplaced.com address with a small badge, and the 0% commission is permanent — it applies on free and paid plans alike. Upgrading to ₹499/month is only about your own custom domain and removing the branding, never about unlocking the right to keep your own money.

Frequently asked questions