A fast-read primer on India's retail and e-commerce sector — the backdrop against which we benchmark every company's cost structure in this category.
Overall retail is set to more than double by 2035, with e-commerce growing even faster.
2025 → 2035 forecast
2024 → 2030 forecast
Massive market scale, accelerating e-commerce, and strong investment define retailing in India.
A sample of the industry-wide and policy moves shaping the sector through early 2026.
Listed Indian Retailing companies in tDoBe's cost-benchmarking coverage.
The market facts above are public background. What follows is tDoBe's own work: every "Other Expenses" line from these companies' own financial records, read by hand and sorted into one clear set of categories — not a keyword search, not each company's own way of reporting it.
Each mark is one company's total Other Expenses as % of net revenue. No company is named here.
Ranked from biggest to smallest.
Advertising & Sales Promotion dominates at 9.4% of revenue — by far the largest and most consistent category in this sector — reflecting how customer-acquisition-intensive digital retail and marketplace businesses really are. IT/Software (2.3%) and Freight/Distribution & Logistics (2.2%) follow, both signatures of delivery-and-platform-dependent business models.
This peer set is weighted toward asset-light digital platforms rather than large physical-footprint retailers, and spans companies still investing heavily in growth alongside established, profitable operators — the widest spread we've measured in this project, at 40.9x.
All ten companies collected for this sector have genuine current-year operating revenue and are used in every ratio, with no exclusions.
This is the free, sector-wide view. It tells you where Retailing stands as a whole — not where your own company stands against it, category by category, in rupees.
A below-average number is a reason to call too — the benchmark keeps improving as we go.