Business EconomyPosted at: Sep 22 2026 2:39PM


Indian app-commerce moves from discounts to profitable growth

Bengaluru, Sep 22 (UNI) India’s app-commerce industry is entering a post-discount phase, with brands increasingly moving away from the pursuit of user acquisition at any cost and turning their attention to customer retention, lifetime value and profitability, AppsFlyer General Manager India Sanjay Trishal said on Tuesday.
The shift marks a change from the high-growth years when deep discounts, promotional offers and aggressive customer acquisition were widely used to build scale, with companies now increasingly asking whether those acquired users remain valuable after the incentives disappear.
“The real test is what happens after the incentive disappears,” Sanjay said, stressing that an app install or a discounted purchase should not automatically be treated as genuine customer engagement.
“If the customer only returns when there is a Rs 100 coupon, then you have bought a transaction, not necessarily built a relationship,” he said.
He said companies were increasingly measuring whether customers returned after promotional campaigns, increased their purchase frequency and average order value, and remained engaged over longer periods.
The change comes after years in which “grow at any cost” was a dominant approach across India's digital economy, particularly during and immediately after the COVID-19 period, when substantial amounts of capital were deployed to acquire users and expand businesses.
“That era has gone past,” Sanjay said, adding that companies were now becoming more focused on profitability rather than continuing to burn venture capital simply to achieve growth.
The focus is consequently shifting towards incremental customer value — how much additional value a company can extract from an existing customer through purchases, subscriptions or advertising — rather than merely counting downloads or new users.
India's increasingly crowded app ecosystem is also forcing this change. Sanjay said the explosion in the number of apps had made consumers considerably harder to capture, with hundreds or even thousands of apps competing for attention in some categories.
“Consumers have become harder to capture because discoverability has exploded,” he said, citing quick commerce as an example where numerous companies are competing for the same consumer.
He, however, said the changing consumer did not mean marketers had become ineffective, but that marketing itself was undergoing a paradigm shift.
“Marketers will have to use new techniques and new tools to reach out to the market,” he said, adding that retention was becoming as important as acquisition.
AppsFlyer Global Industry Lead Igal Frid said the intense competition was also creating opportunities for new user-acquisition channels and partners, with industries such as gaming increasingly using multiple channels to acquire, engage and retarget users.
Sanjay said the Indian market's next challenge was to convert its large domestic digital base into globally competitive businesses.
Frid said Indian e-commerce companies remained largely focused on the domestic market despite having the resources and capabilities to compete internationally.
Sanjay said the revenue opportunity from an individual consumer could be substantially higher in markets such as the US than in India, raising questions over why more Indian gaming, e-commerce and OTT companies were not building products specifically for international markets.
“Many companies are still focused on solving for India first because they see so much more expansion and growth within India,” he said.
He said the question was therefore not necessarily whether Indian digital companies would go global, but when they would make that transition.
The next phase of India's app-commerce story, therefore, could be less about how many users a company can acquire and more about how many it can retain, monetise and turn into profitable long-term customers.
UNI BDN
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