Sell direct. Own your customers.

Be clear about what it does and does not do: your own app will not send you new shoppers the way a marketplace search or an ad does. What it changes is what happens to the buyers you already have. On a marketplace you pay a commission on every repeat order and you cannot message the customer directly; in your own app the repeat order carries no platform cut and you can send a restock or launch notification to people who already bought from you. That trade is worth most when a meaningful share of your orders are repeat buyers, and least when almost every order is a first-time shopper who found you through marketplace search. Keep selling on both — most brands do.

Not on physical goods. Apple's and Google's commissions apply to digital purchases made inside an app — subscriptions, courses, in-app content — and both explicitly exclude physical products and real-world services, so a shampoo or a kurta sold through your app is not charged a store fee. Your payment cost is the ordinary Razorpay gateway fee on UPI and cards, the same rate you would pay on a website. We wrote the detail up in our post on what the app stores really take in India.

Through the delivery integration, which is part of the commerce template, and the Growth tier includes one integration — for most sellers this is the one to spend it on, so a confirmed order creates the shipment with your partner instead of you copying addresses by hand. Order tracking then shows the buyer where the parcel is. If you use more than one courier, or a warehouse system as well, flag it during the free blueprint so it is scoped and priced before you commit.

You mark it out of stock in the admin panel and it stops being orderable in the app straight away, so you are not refunding someone for something you cannot ship. The same panel is where you add products, change prices, edit photos and variants, and move an order along as you pack and dispatch it. It is built for someone running the brand, not for a developer — no code, and no waiting on us to change a price.

Yes — coupons and offers are part of the commerce template, so you can create a code, decide what it applies to and turn it off when the sale ends. Combined with push notifications on the Growth tier, that is how most brands use the app: announce a launch or a restock to people who already bought, with a code that only works in the app. What it cannot do is make the discount profitable for you, so work the margin out before you run it.

Honestly, maybe not — and it is better to hear that now. An app earns its money on repeat purchase, so the number to look at is not orders per day but how many of your buyers order a second time, and how often. If most people buy from you once, a store app mainly saves you marketplace commission on a small number of orders, and a good website plus WhatsApp will serve you better this year. If you have a core of buyers who reorder every month or two, the maths changes quickly. The free blueprint is a cheaper place to work that out than an invoice.