Is Social Commerce Actually Working In India?
Social commerce in India has been about to be enormous for several years. The forecasts are confident, numerous, and disagree with each other so severely that they are worth reading as a group rather than individually.
Published projections for the size of the Indian market in the same year differ by roughly a factor of four, with compound growth rates quoted anywhere from ten per cent to fifty. That spread is not a rounding difference. It means the analysts cannot agree on what counts as social commerce, which is the actual story.
What social commerce means depends on who is counting
The narrow definition is a transaction completed inside a social platform: checkout without leaving the app. On that reading the Indian market is small, because the checkout integrations have repeatedly been launched, wound down and relaunched.
The broad definition counts any purchase that began with social discovery, which sweeps in most of Indian e-commerce, since most of it now begins with a Reel, a review or a group recommendation. On that reading the market is vast and the number is close to meaningless.
What is genuinely working
Discovery, unambiguously. The part of the funnel where somebody encounters a product they were not looking for has moved decisively onto social, and this is now the normal way category entry happens for a large share of Indian consumers.
Live selling works too, but in a narrower band than the forecasts imply: categories with visible variation and a persuasion problem. Apparel, jewellery, cosmetics and home goods sell live because a demonstration answers a question a product page cannot.
What is not working
In-app checkout, repeatedly. The friction it removes is real but small, and it is competing against payment habits that are already extremely low-friction in India. UPI removed most of the reason to complete a purchase without leaving the app.
Returns are the harder, quieter problem. Impulse purchases made inside a video have higher return rates than considered ones, and in categories where returns are expensive that erodes the economics faster than the incremental sales improve them.
Why the numbers keep being wrong
Because they are forecasting a behaviour rather than a technology, and behaviours here are being shaped by quick commerce more than by social platforms. A consumer who can have a product in ten minutes from an app they already have is a different proposition from one deciding whether to buy inside a livestream.
Anyone planning against these projections should discount them heavily. A market whose credible estimates vary by four times is a market nobody has measured; it is a market people are selling into.
What a brand should actually do
Treat social as the top of the funnel it demonstrably is, and be sceptical about moving the transaction there. The evidence for social as the place where demand is created is overwhelming. The evidence for it as the place where demand is settled remains thin, and no amount of forecast confidence changes that.
The brands doing this well are not running social storefronts. They are making content good enough that the product is searched for by name afterwards, which is a slower claim and a considerably better-supported one.
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