Why open your Diwali 2026 store on SitesPlaced? 8 reasons, and when not to

TL;DR

• • Cost to start: ₹0, with no end date and no cut of your sales.
• • Time to start: the same day. The importer takes about a minute; a template takes 10 to 20 minutes.
• • How buyers pay: UPI and cards through your own gateway, cash on delivery, or an order sent to your WhatsApp.
• • Diwali tools, free: hamper page, coupons with an expiry date, free-delivery bar, announcement bar, pause ordering.
• • Worth paying for: pages that answer about 4× faster (Starter and up) and Buy X Get Y with the sales boosters (Growth).
• • The only offer: FREE7, 7 days free with autopay. There is no Diwali discount.

The eight reasons at a glance

Plans and prices as listed on our pricing page on 28 September 2026.

1. It is free to open and sell, with 0% commission

Commission is a cut of each sale that a platform keeps for itself. SitesPlaced keeps none, on any plan. The free plan is ₹0 with no end date, and it has no limit on products or orders.

This matters more in a festive season than at any other time. You don’t yet know if you will get ten orders or two hundred. A monthly bill you pay before the first order is a bet. A free store is not.

What the free plan does not have: your store lives on a free address such as yourbrand.sitesplaced.site (a subdomain, which is an address under our name instead of your own), it shows a small SitesPlaced badge, and it has 500 MB for photos. One cost is outside our control: your payment gateway charges its own fee on each online payment. That fee goes to the gateway, not to us. If you want to see every cost of a Diwali season side by side, read do you need a paid builder for a Diwali sale.

2. Your store can be live the same day

There are two ways to start, and both are free. The importer builds a store from what you already have: your Instagram handle, an existing website, or a PDF catalogue. It takes about a minute. Or pick one of the 16 store templates and fill it in yourself, which takes about 10 to 20 minutes with your own text and photos. For Diwali, the Gifts & Lifestyle, Food, Jewellery, Home & Decor and Clothing templates are the usual fits.

Two honest warnings. The importer cannot fully read a private Instagram profile, and a post with no price in the caption comes in at ₹0, so check every price before you publish. And choose your template with care: changing template later means making a new store.

3. UPI, COD and WhatsApp checkout, on your own accounts

A payment gateway is the service that collects online payments for you. On SitesPlaced you connect your own Razorpay, PhonePe or Cashfree account, so UPI, card and net banking payments go to your account and never pass through ours.

A gateway checks your documents before it approves you, and that takes as long as the gateway takes. Apply now. Until it is approved, your store can still take orders three ways, all free:

• • Cash on delivery (COD): the buyer pays when the parcel arrives. You can add an extra COD charge so that paying online is cheaper.
• • WhatsApp checkout: the buyer’s cart is sent to your WhatsApp as an order. It is saved in your Orders tab before the chat opens, so nothing depends on you reading the message in time.
• • UPI or bank transfer: the buyer places the order and pays to the UPI ID or bank details you have saved.

Every order gets a PDF invoice, and you can book couriers through Shiprocket or Shipmozo from the order. Setting up the payment side step by step is in how to accept UPI payments on your website.

4. The hamper page

Diwali buying is gift buying, and gift buyers like to choose. Under Settings → Sales boosters, switch on Build your own hamper. Your store gets a page where a buyer picks items from the categories you allow, within the limits you set (three to eight items unless you change it).

You can price a hamper by the number of items, for example four items for ₹999, and choose a packaging product (the box, ribbon and card) that is added to every hamper. The buyer can add a photo and a note. The hamper reaches you as one order with its contents listed. It is on the free plan.

Single products can be personalised too: a text note, a photo upload and paid extras such as gift wrapping. The items, price tiers and packaging are covered in how to sell Diwali gift hampers online.

5. Coupons, the free-delivery bar, the announcement bar and pause ordering

A festive season has a start, a peak and a hard stop. Four free controls cover it:

• Coupons with an expiry date. Percent or flat off, with a minimum order if you want one. Give the code an end date and it stops working by itself.
• Free delivery above an order value. A bar in the cart shows how much more the buyer needs to add, such as “Add ₹200 more for free delivery”.
• The announcement bar. The strip at the top of every page. Use it for your last order date. You change it by hand; announcements that switch on and off at a set time are part of the AI Co-founder plan at ₹1,499/month.
• Pause ordering. When you stop shipping, pause the store with your own message. Shoppers can still browse, but nobody can place an order you cannot send.

Your last order date comes from your courier, not from us. Ask them for their last pickup that still arrives before Diwali. The full week-by-week list is in the Diwali 2026 checklist, and offers that protect your margin are in Diwali sale ideas for small businesses.

6. Store pages that answer about 4× faster on paid plans

On every paid plan, from Starter at ₹199/month, a store’s pages answer about 4× faster than on the free plan. In our measurements on live paid stores on 28 September 2026, a page answered in about 75 ms instead of about 330 ms.

“Answer” is the moment the page starts arriving on the shopper’s phone, before the photos load. It is not the full page load, and it does not make a heavy photo arrive sooner. Paid stores are kept ready close to shoppers, and every edit, price change or stock change clears the ready copy, so changes still show at once. Cart, account and order-tracking pages are never kept.

In Diwali weeks, most of your visitors tap a link in a story or a WhatsApp message, on a phone, often on mobile data. That first moment is where this helps. Starter also gives you your own domain (yourbrand.com), removes the badge, adds store analytics and Meta Pixel with the Conversions API, and comes with a dedicated setup person. The measurements are in paid stores now answer about 4× faster.

7. Growth boosters for bigger orders

A Diwali buyer is rarely buying for one person. The Growth plan at ₹499/month has the tools that help one gift become three:

• • Buy X Get Y offers, such as Buy 2 Get 1 free, priced on the server at checkout.
• • A slide-out cart with upsells, which suggests an add-on when something goes into the cart.
• • Frequently bought together on the product page.
• • A post-purchase upsell, offered right after the order is placed.
• • Popups, product reviews with Google star ratings, and the loyalty programme.

None of these is a promise of sales. They put a sensible second item in front of someone who is already buying. Do the margin sum before you run any offer. More in sales boosters and how to increase average order value.

8. FREE7: try a paid plan for 7 days

Enter the code FREE7 at checkout and you get 7 days free on Starter or Growth, monthly or yearly, when you set up autopay. Autopay is a standing instruction to charge your card or UPI on the billing date. Cancel before the first charge and you pay nothing.

To be plain about it: FREE7 is the only offer. There is no Diwali discount, and there is no trial without autopay. Yearly plans cost ten months’ price. If you would rather not set up autopay at all, the free plan runs the whole season.

When SitesPlaced is not the right choice

• You have no audience and need strangers to find you this season. A store does not bring visitors by itself. A marketplace has shoppers already searching, and for that its commission can be worth paying. We compare the two in marketplace or your own store this Diwali.
• You need delivery charges by pincode or by weight. SitesPlaced has one flat delivery charge per store, free delivery above a value you set, an express option at an extra charge, and a checkbox that removes the charge for local customers. It has no rate table.
• You need to block orders from outside your area. There is no pincode restriction at checkout. You state your delivery area and check the address before you confirm.
• You want offers that switch on and off by themselves, on a low plan. A coupon’s expiry date is free. Timed announcements and scheduled promotions are on AI Co-founder only.
• You depend on a specific app. A paid builder with a large app store suits a shop that cannot run without one particular app.

How to open it today

• 1. Open a free store at /start, or let the importer build it from your Instagram.
• 2. Add your festive range, check every price, and put a stock number on every product.
• 3. Switch on cash on delivery and WhatsApp checkout, and apply to a payment gateway.
• 4. Set one offer, the free-delivery bar and your last order date.
• 5. Place a test order from your own phone, then share the link.

The week-by-week plan for the season is on the Diwali hub. Still choosing between options? Read the five ways to sell this Diwali, compared.

Frequently asked questions