E-commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart, and quick-commerce firms like Zepto and Blinkit, over the last couple of years, have evolved into much more than just convenient shopping destinations. They’re also rapidly becoming the fastest growing advertising media platforms. According to dentsu’s Digital Advertising Report, advertising spends on e-retail platforms grew by 55.8% in 2025, which is more than double the growth rate of 23.4% recorded in 2024. Ad spending on these platforms accounted for 24.5% of all digital media spends in 2025, reaching Rs 17,601 crore.
Media to money model
Industry observers describe the advertiser shift towards e-retail as a ‘media-to-money’ model where the advertisement and the point of purchase exist in the same environment. “E-retail has moved beyond performance advertising into a full-funnel channel. Many platforms now offer first-party shopper data that lets brands target based on actual purchase behaviour and directly attribute spends to verified transactions,” explains Tejas Maha, associate director for media, White Rivers Media. He notes that on an average, brands are devoting 15-25% of their digital ad budgets to e-retail.
Quick commerce alone surged by nearly 200% to reach an estimated `6,000 crore, with D2C brands shifting budgets from digital giants like Google and Meta, citing at least 1.5 times better returns on ad spending.
The growth of e-retail advertising is being fuelled by its increasingly algorithmic and hyperlocal nature. Pooja Dhamdhere, AVP, ecommerce at Starcom India, points out that brands can now tap into real-time demand signals. These include tracking time-of-day consumption spikes and identifying high-conversion micro-markets down to the pin-code level. “This enables a degree of precision, personalisation and agility that traditional media channels cannot match,” says Dhamdhere, adding that close to 40% of category sales in metro markets are driven through these platforms today.
E-retail advertising
Relying on e-retail advertising heavily, however, does present certain challenges. Experts say that most platforms operate as walled gardens with different measurement metrics, making cross-platform measurement complex. Further, the many available e-retail channels present a fragmentation challenge. Says Chetan Asher, founder & CEO, Tonic Worldwide, “You’ve got Amazon Ads, Flipkart Ads, Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and Zepto, each with its own ad stack, data format and measurement framework. There’s no unified view,” he observes.
Asher adds that strategically what works best for brands is a layered approach that features broad reach channels like YouTube and social to build mental availability, and thereafter the use of retail media and platform-specific activations to capture demand at the point of purchase. The agency recently launched its marketing intelligence platform Groth, which gives clients a unified performance view across platforms.
According to Kartik Mehta, CBO & head of Asia at Channel Factory, the biggest risk with relying on e-retail is brand-building erosion. “Too much conversion focus weakens long-term equity. Additionally, there is the concern of platform dependency and rising costs per click. Brands should treat e-retail as a complement to upper-funnel media, not a replacement,” he recommends.