How to sell online in India without a website

Everyone tells you to build a website first. Then they tell you about domains, hosting, a payment gateway, KYC documents, a company, a current account, and by the time you've finished the list you haven't sold anything and you've spent ₹15,000.

You don't need any of it to start.

Three things take an order in India: a way for people to see what you sell and what it costs, a UPI ID they can pay, and a plan for getting the thing to them. All three can exist by this evening. A UPI transfer to a plain UPI ID needs no gateway, no merchant application, no setup fee, no monthly charge and no website. Your buyer opens an app they already have and pushes money to a string that looks like yourname@bank. That's the whole rail. It is genuinely the best consumer payment infrastructure in the world for someone selling twelve things a week, and it costs you nothing.

What you're actually missing, and it isn't a website

Most people selling on Instagram in India are stuck in the same loop. Someone comments "price?" You reply "DM". They DM. You send four photos and a price. They ask about size. You answer at 11pm. They read it at 8am and by then they've forgotten why they wanted it.

That's not a website problem. It's a catalogue problem and a memory problem. The buyer needed to see the price, the sizes and the delivery time without asking a human, and you needed the order to exist somewhere other than in a chat thread.

A website solves that. So does one page with your products and prices on it, which is a much smaller thing to own. The website is the expensive way to fix a cheap problem.

UPI: the part India already solved

Get this bit right and everything else is easier.

You have a UPI ID. If you don't, you get one from any UPI app in about four minutes with a bank account and a debit card. Put that ID, plus a QR code screenshot, in front of the buyer along with the exact amount, and most Indian buyers will pay it without hesitating. There is no gateway sitting in the middle taking a cut, because there is no gateway.

Two things people get wrong.

Don't send a collect request. UPI lets you push a "request money" notification at a buyer. Fraud in India has trained people to decline anything that arrives unasked, and half the time your legitimate request looks exactly like the scam. Give them the ID or the QR and let them push the money to you. Push, not pull. It converts better and it stops you looking like a stranger asking for a PIN.

Don't accept a screenshot as proof. A screenshot proves that a screen existed. Ask for the UPI transaction reference, the twelve-digit number your app might call a UTR, and check it against your own app before you dispatch anything. This takes eleven seconds and it is the difference between a business and a hobby that occasionally gets robbed.

A payment screenshot is a picture. Your bank app is the truth. Never confuse the two, especially at 10pm when the buyer is being very friendly and slightly impatient.

The awkward part of UPI is the same as the awkward part of any bank transfer: the money arrives with no idea what it's for. Your app shows ₹1,150 from a VPA you don't recognise. You have three ₹1,150 orders this week. Which one is this? The fix is boring and it works: give every order a short reference, ask the buyer to put it in the UPI note field, and if they forget, match on time and the last four characters of their VPA. Write both down at the moment of dispatch, not on Sunday. The full method, including partial payments and the buyer who paid twice, is in how to know a bank transfer actually arrived.

Cash on delivery, and the number that should decide it

Cash on delivery isn't a fallback in India. In a lot of the country it's the default expectation, and a shop that doesn't offer it reads as a shop that might not exist.

It also converts. It removes the buyer's real fear, which is not card fraud but paying a stranger and receiving nothing. That fear is rational and COD deletes it.

Then it hands you the bill. GoKwik, an Indian checkout company, puts India's average return-to-origin rate around 23% across its own data from more than 180 million shoppers, with COD orders near 26% against under 2% on prepaid, and fashion and footwear touching 40% (their figures, read August 2026). One in four parcels going out and coming straight back, with you paying freight both ways and repacking a kurta that's been in a van for nine days.

So the number that decides whether you offer COD is your margin against your two-way freight cost. If you sell a ₹1,150 kurta with ₹400 of cost in it and two-way shipping is ₹160, one refused parcel wipes out most of the profit on the next one. If you sell a ₹280 phone stand, COD is close to unrunnable and you should say so.

Middle path that a lot of Indian sellers land on: offer COD, but ask for a small prepaid advance on anything made to order or above a threshold you pick. ₹200 on a ₹1,500 order is enough to make a casual buyer either commit or disappear before you've packed anything. The ones who disappear were going to refuse the parcel.

Delivery without a warehouse

You have three realistic options and you'll probably use two of them.

Local, by hand or by bike. Under 15km, for food, cakes, plants, anything fragile. Cheapest, fastest, and the customer experience is unbeatable. It doesn't scale past your own city and that's fine.

A courier aggregator. You book pickups online, they hand off to whichever carrier is cheapest to that pincode, and you get one dashboard. Weight bands and volumetric weight will surprise you the first time. A light, bulky parcel is charged on its size, not its mass, which is why a box of cushion covers costs more to ship than a box of books.

India Post. Slower, cheaper, reaches pincodes couriers refuse, and genuinely useful for tier-three towns where a private courier will quietly return your parcel undelivered.

Check every pincode you say you deliver to before you promise it. A courier's serviceability map and a courier's actual behaviour in a specific pincode are different documents. The way you find out is a refused pickup and an angry buyer.

Worked example: Priya, block-printed kurtas, Jaipur

Priya sells cotton kurtas she gets block-printed in Sanganer. ₹1,150 each, four designs, sizes S to XXL. She sells through Instagram, about 30 to 40 orders a month, mostly to women in Delhi, Bengaluru and Pune who found her through a reel.

Here's her actual setup, and it costs her nothing per order.

One link in her bio, going to a page with all four designs, the size chart, the price and the delivery time. Payment: UPI ID printed on the page with a note saying "put your order number in the UPI message". COD offered on everything, with ₹250 taken upfront on XXL and on the two designs she has printed to order. Shipping via a courier aggregator at roughly ₹75 within Rajasthan and ₹110 to the south, folded into the price so the page says ₹1,150 delivered.

Her month looks like this. 34 orders. 21 paid by UPI, 13 COD. Of the 13, two came back refused, which cost her about ₹220 in return freight plus a kurta that needed re-ironing. Zero payment gateway fees, because she doesn't have a payment gateway. Her actual monthly cost of taking money is ₹0.

The thing she got wrong in month one, and the reason this section exists: she wrote her UPI ID by hand into 40 separate DMs and typed it wrong twice. Two women paid ₹1,150 to a stranger's VPA that happened to exist. She refunded both out of her own pocket because it was her mistake, and it cost her ₹2,300 and a very bad Tuesday. Put the ID on a page. Never type it again.

Registering, GST and the honest answer about tax

This is where most articles either scare you or lie to you. The honest version:

You can sell as an individual. Lots of people do, at small volume, and the ones who get into trouble are the ones who ignore it after volume arrives rather than the ones who started without a company.

Two obligations exist in different shapes. There's income tax on what you earn, which applies to you as a person whether or not you register anything. And there's GST, where registration is triggered by turnover thresholds that differ for goods and services and by state, and by certain kinds of activity regardless of turnover, including selling through some e-commerce operators.

I'm not going to print a threshold figure here, because these change and an out-of-date number in an article could cost you money. Check the current thresholds and the current rules on the official GST portal at gst.gov.in, or spend ₹1,500 on an hour with a CA in your own city before you cross what you think the line is. That hour is the cheapest insurance you'll buy this year.

What you can do today without any of that: sell, keep a record of every order with date, amount and buyer, and keep the money separate from your personal spending. Whatever you eventually register as, that record is the thing you'll wish you had. Keeping records when you hate paperwork is the low-effort version of this.

What a link-with-a-catalogue actually buys you

You can run all of the above with a WhatsApp Business catalogue and a notebook. Plenty of people do and it works up to a point.

The point where it stops working is usually around order 25 in a month, when you can no longer remember which of the four Kavithas ordered the maroon one. That's when a shop link starts paying for itself: the products, the prices, the sizes and the order all live in one place, and the buyer's message arrives already written out rather than as "hi is this available".

That's what Sailo does. You get a link like sailo.store/yourname live the moment you sign up, put your products and prices on it, and a buyer tapping "order" sends you a WhatsApp message with the item, the options, the address and the total already filled in. Free plan is $0 and caps at 10 products.

Now the part that matters more for you than for a seller in London.

Sailo has no UPI rail. None. The full list of payment rails is card, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, email, phone, bank transfer and cash on delivery, and UPI isn't on it. What you can do is put your UPI ID and your QR into the bank transfer instructions field, tell the buyer exactly what to send and what reference to use, and confirm it yourself in your own UPI app. That works, and it's what Indian sellers on Sailo actually do. Be clear about what it is, though: Sailo is holding your catalogue and your order record, and your phone is holding the money. Sailo cannot tell you a payment arrived. Only your bank can.

Card payments may not be available to you at all. Sailo's card rail runs on Stripe and only Stripe, and Stripe's own global availability page listed India as "preview" when I checked it in August 2026. Cards also carry 3% on the free plan, which at ₹1,150 an order is a fraction of Priya's revenue every month for a rail her buyers weren't asking for. If someone tells you that you need card payments to sell in India, work through do you need card payments to sell online before you believe them. For most Indian sellers at this size the answer is no, and UPI is the reason.

The order of operations that actually works

Do these in this order. It takes an evening.

1. Photograph six products properly. Daylight, one surface, no ceiling lights. Six good photos will carry a shop for a year.
2. Write the prices down and make them final. Delivered price, so nobody argues about shipping later. Indian buyers will still ask for a discount. Decide your answer now rather than at 11pm.
3. Put both on one page with a link. Bio link, WhatsApp status, wherever people already find you.
4. Put your UPI ID on that page, in text, plus a QR. Never type it into a DM again.
5. Decide your COD rule and write it on the page. Which pincodes, how many days, what advance you take, what happens if the parcel is refused.
6. Pick one courier and ship one parcel to yourself. You will learn more from that one parcel than from a week of reading.

That's it. No domain, no hosting, no gateway, no GST number to make the first sale, no ₹15,000.

What to do next

Open a note on your phone and write down the last ten people who asked you "price?" and didn't buy. For each one, write the single sentence you had to type manually. Sizes. Delivery time to their city. Whether COD is available. Whether you have it in navy.

Every sentence on that list is something that should have been on a page. Put them there this week, then send the link to the next person who asks, and see how many stop asking and just order.

If most of your business runs through DMs, how to take orders on WhatsApp covers the handoff in detail. And if you're still deciding which rail to build on before you build anything, start with how to take payment as a small seller.