Content commerce has become even more crucial for Flipkart and Meesho as they prepare to go public and face pressure to showcase their next big bets, according to analysts and industry experts.
Flipkart Group-owned fashion e-tailer Myntra now receives nearly 10% of its platform revenue from content commerce, with the contribution from the vertical surging 50% over the last four months alone, the company said in a statement in November. It now partners with 3.5 million creators, the majority of whom are Gen Z, to drive sales through shoppable affiliate links. Myntra aims to grow its creator base by 3x, while doubling its contribution to revenue through social commerce over the next 12-18 months.
Such content commerce partnerships with online retailers have turned into a goldmine for social media influencers, as their income has spiked, especially during the festival season, Mint reported earlier. But for companies like Flipkart and Amazon, it’s more than a marketing push.
India’s $125-billion online retail market has slowed with the combined sales of the top three e-commerce players — Amazon India, Flipkart, and Myntra — rising only about 17% between FY23 and FY25, according to estimates by broker Elara Securities. That compares with a 50% annualized growth during FY15–20, and nearly 30% from FY20–23. While rising inflation has impacted consumers’ spending patterns, growing competition and disruption by quick-commerce platforms have only worsened the slowdown.
“Major players are now looking for a new story to tell,” said Satish Meena, analyst at market research firm Datum Intelligence. “As growth plateaus, they are running out of fresh ideas. Quick commerce and AI features are fine – but they eagerly need the next hook to reel in users, especially as competitive intensity grows.”
Meesho is in a quiet period ahead of its IPO.
Flipkart, the country’s largest e-commerce firm, ramped up investments in setting up experiential studios in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Gurugram in June, creating production space worth 18,000 sq ft to scale up its video commerce features. It witnessed an 8x increase in daily live hours (on-app video streams) over the past year, the company said at the time.
“Categories such as fashion, beauty, personal care, and home décor are seeing the highest momentum within Flipkart’s video commerce ecosystem,” said Neha Agrahari, senior director (video commerce) at Flipkart, in response to Mint‘s queries on Tuesday. “We are now expanding video commerce to include electronics, lifestyle essentials, and fitness with tailored content formats.”
Flipkart also launched an in-app platform, Creator Hood, this year. “That continues to empower regional creators from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities with monetization tools, training, and content creation support,” said Agrahari. “The influence of creator-led content is a trust marker, and this reflects in the confidence in buying and the decline in returns or cancellations.”
Meesho, the e-commerce platform that targets small-town India, is also looking to accelerate technology investments, including its proprietary AI-ML models GeoIndia LLM and BharatML Stack, to enhance a variety of features, including delivery coordinates for logistics operators, product cataloguing for sellers, and deeper insights and tools for shoppers and creators, it said in its updated draft papers.
Mint reported earlier, citing IPO filings, that Meesho has enabled 39,618 active content creators who posted 679,466 “order-generating content”. “We generated ₹7.07 billion in net merchandise value (NMV) from our marketplace through content commerce in fiscal 2025, having achieved this growth within 23 months of its launch in May 2023,” the company said in its updated draft prospectus. NMV refers to the value of goods sold.
Limited success
Still, enthusiasm around content commerce is strong, but it’s not easy to win shoppers through this route.
Monetization models are still evolving, measurement frameworks are nascent, and livestream commerce adoption in India remains uneven, according to Datum’s Meena. Converting viewership into high-value transactions at scale remains a challenge, and platforms must carefully balance investments to avoid burning capital without clear payback, he said.
Live commerce has seen several waves of experimentation in India over the past five years, but has failed to scale meaningfully. Platforms found that while early curiosity drove viewership spikes, sustained participation lagged due to low trust in presenters, inconsistent product quality, and a consumer mindset still heavily anchored in discounts rather than discovery.
In contrast, China’s ecosystem continues to thrive on deep influencer-led trust and high product standardisation. Pinduoduo, for instance, built a massive live-led purchase momentum by combining real-time deals, gamified group buying, and hyper-efficient delivery. There, livestreams are not a novelty add-on but a mainstream buying channel with cultural legitimacy.
“India has the audience for entertainment and the audience for commerce, but the overlap between the two is still thin, and behaviour change takes time,” said a growth-stage venture capital investor who closely tracks the online commerce space. Flipkart, Amazon, and Meesho ran such programmes outside metro cities in their early days, but the outcomes are fairly short-lived, the investor said.
Moreover, logistics fragmentation outside major metros limits the immediacy that live commerce depends on.
Meesho acknowledges the downsides.
“Due to our limited operating history, the nascency of content commerce in India and our rapid growth profile, our future operating results may be hard to predict, and our historical results may not be indicative of, or comparable to, our future results,” the company’s updated draft papers said. “We cannot assure you that this business initiative will be successful and that we will be able to attract and retain content creators on our platform, including maintaining relationships with third-party affiliate partners who also provide access to content creators.”
Myntra, on the other hand, is expanding its array of offerings by adding more experimental formats, including talk shows, reality content and gamified podcasts storytelling, according to the company.
Parent Flipkart said in an earlier statement that it has developed an understanding of what works in video commerce over the past few years, and is now using those insights to shape its creator programs into a purpose-built model that addresses the needs of both creators and commerce partners.
Meena is less sanguine about the format. “If we’re being realistic, live commerce in India is unlikely to become the breakout engine platforms hope for,” he said. “It’s far more likely to remain a niche format than a mass-market habit.”
