Guide

Your own store vs Meesho, Myntra and Amazon

8 min read · Updated 13 September 2026

Marketplaces are not a rip-off. They bring you buyers you would never have reached, and for some sellers that is worth almost any commission. But the number you keep per sale is a lot smaller than the commission rate suggests, and most boutiques have never sat down and worked it out.

The costs that are easy to miss

The headline commission is the part everyone sees. Underneath it are four more deductions, and they compound:

• Commission on the sale price — typically in the mid-teens to around 30% for apparel, varying by platform, category and price band.
• Shipping and fulfilment fees, charged by weight and zone whether or not the parcel is kept.
• Returns. Apparel return rates are high, and on many platforms you absorb the shipping both ways on a returned item — so a return costs you more than a sale that never happened.
• Advertising. Organic visibility inside a marketplace erodes over time; sooner or later you are buying placement against your own competitors.
• Payment cycles. Settlement runs on the platform’s schedule, so your working capital sits with them, not you.

Work it through on a ₹2,000 kurta and the take-home after commission, fulfilment, a share of returns and any ad spend is frequently under half the sticker price — before your fabric and tailoring costs. That can still be a good trade if the volume is genuinely incremental. It is a bad trade if you are paying it on customers who already know your name.

The cost that isn’t on the invoice

On a marketplace you do not get the customer. You get an order. You cannot email them, you cannot see them, and the next time they want something like what you make, the platform will show them whoever is cheapest that week. You are renting an audience per transaction, permanently.

A marketplace sale is revenue. A sale on your own store is revenue plus a customer you can sell to again for free.

You also cannot build a brand there. Your listing sits in a grid, in the platform’s template, next to four near-identical products sorted by price. For a commodity that is fine. For a boutique whose whole proposition is that the work is distinctive, it is actively working against you.

What your own store costs instead

Being equally honest about the other side — your own store has real costs, they are just different in kind:

• Setup. Someone has to build it, photograph the catalogue and write the listings.
• A monthly platform cost, fixed rather than proportional to sales.
• Payment gateway fees — a low single-digit percentage, which you would pay on a marketplace too.
• Shipping, at your own negotiated rates.
• Traffic. This is the real one. Nobody arrives on your store by accident. Your Instagram following, your WhatsApp list and word of mouth are the traffic, and if you do not have any of those, a store will sit empty.

The structural difference is that these are mostly fixed. A marketplace takes more rupees from you every time you grow; your own store costs roughly the same at ₹50,000 a month as at ₹5,00,000. That is why the marketplace looks cheap early and expensive later.

So which one

A marketplace makes sense when you have no audience of your own, when your product is price-competitive rather than distinctive, when you can absorb high return rates, and when you want volume without doing marketing.

Your own store makes sense when people already come to you by name, when you sell above roughly ₹1,500 a piece so the margin is worth protecting, when you do made-to-order or custom sizing that a marketplace template cannot express, and when the brand is the reason people buy.

For most Indian boutiques the answer is both, in a specific order. Keep the marketplace for discovery if it is already working. Send everyone who finds you through Instagram, WhatsApp or word of mouth to your own store. You are then paying commission only on customers you genuinely could not have reached yourself — which is what commission is actually for.

A test worth running

For one month, put your store link in your bio and send it to every person who DMs you asking to buy, while leaving your marketplace listings exactly as they are. At the end of the month, compare take-home per order between the two channels — not order count, take-home. Most boutique owners are surprised by the gap, and it turns the decision into arithmetic instead of a guess.

If you have not made the move from DMs yet, the practical version of it is in from Instagram boutique to your own online store, and the wider setup — payments, GST, packaging, returns — is covered in how to sell clothes online in India.