Tech, data, and financial foresight: Transforming e-commerce for Bharat’s next billion

India stands at an inflexion point in its digital commerce journey. As the nation moves from an $80 billion e-commerce market in 2025 toward a projected $1 trillion by 2040, the story is not about chasing scale for its own sake. It is about restructuring how commerce operates in the world’s most populous democracy and how financial and technological leadership must evolve to serve millions of small businesses that make up 90% of India’s enterprises and will increasingly determine the country’s economic trajectory. Scale will result from building the right financial, technological, and data foundations for millions of small businesses.

For years, the narrative has been dominated by consumer-facing stories: convenience, choice, and the rise of quick commerce. But beneath the visible layer lies the fundamental transformation: the invisible infrastructure of technology, data intelligence, and financial architecture. This enables a brassware craftsperson in Moradabad or a textile merchant in Tiruppur to compete, grow, and directly impact their customers’ experience. To understand this transformation, we must first look beneath the surface at the invisible infrastructure powering it.

The Invisible Infrastructure of Growth

Having spent years at the intersection of finance and technology, I’ve learned that the many consequential innovations are often the least visible. Consumers celebrate faster deliveries; sellers focus on customer acquisition. Yet the revolution is happening beneath the surface; in data pipelines, in algorithmic decision-making, and in the new-age financial structures that support modern commerce.

Consider UPI. In August 2025 alone, it processed over 20 billion transactions worth ₹24.85 lakh crore. This is far beyond a payments story. It is the emergence of a trust infrastructure that enables a seller in a tier-3 city to receive instant settlements and manage their cash flows more effectively.  

Technology has not just become available; it has become accessible and financially viable for businesses operating on razor-thin margins. That is the real democratisation of commerce. This shift makes one thing clear: India’s economic acceleration will depend less on front-end innovation and far more on the depth, quality, and accessibility of the digital infrastructure that powers its MSMEs.

From Information Asymmetry to Data Democracy & Financial Intelligence

UPI showed that when infrastructure makes data accessible, small businesses can make better financial decisions instantly; the same principle now applies across logistics, marketing, and commerce.

For decades, financial and operational intelligence belonged to large enterprises with deep systems and analytics teams. MSMEs, which contribute nearly 30% of India’s GDP and employ over 110 million people, operate on intuition and fragmented information.

A 2025 SIDBI survey highlights the gap: over 90% of MSMEs now accept digital payments, yet only 13% actively use digital marketing or e-commerce platforms. The challenge is not technological adoption; it is the absence of an ecosystem that converts data into usable financial and business intelligence.

The shift underway today is powerful: we don’t just need to give small businesses access to data; we must provide them with access to intelligence. For instance, generative AI could boost productivity in India’s retail sector by 35-37% over the next five years. 

When a manufacturer can predict festive-season demand patterns, optimise working capital by understanding payment cycles across courier partners, or reduce return-to-origin rates by analysing pin code-level delivery performance, we’re not just improving efficiency. We’re fundamentally altering the economics of running a small business in India.

As Atul Dhawan, President of TiE Delhi-NCR and former Chairman of Deloitte South Asia, notes: “Startup CFOs are no longer just custodians of finance; they are architects of scale, innovation, and resilience.” This evolution also means finance leaders must increasingly think like system designers, shaping the economic architecture, risk models, and operating leverage that enable millions of MSMEs to scale sustainably.

But intelligence alone does not create scale; scale emerges when intelligence meets financial architecture.

The Financial Architecture Behind India’s New Scale

One of the most misunderstood aspects of India’s e-commerce rise is the belief that scale is driven purely by capital. In reality, sustainable scale is created at the intersection of three forces: technological leverage, data-driven decision-making, and intelligent capital allocation.

The real transformation occurs when a business that previously made shipping decisions based on limited options suddenly has access to a competitive logistics marketplace: 25+ courier partners, dynamic rate optimisation, and predictive analytics across 19,000+ pin codes.

When machine learning algorithms optimise logistics decisions on millions of shipments, the gains go far beyond freight savings. They reflect in working capital cycles, cash flow predictability, and improved unit economics, all of which make small businesses more investable and sustainable.

Earlier, financial models assumed linear relationships between volume and cost. In a technology-enabled ecosystem, these relationships become non-linear; the marginal cost of serving the next merchant drops sharply, while the value created for each merchant compounds. This is the new operational leverage of digital commerce.

Nowhere is this new operational leverage more visible than in India’s smaller cities.

The Financial Rethinking Bharat’s Commerce Cities Demand

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of India’s e-commerce evolution is its geographic spread. Tier-2 and tier-3 cities accounted for 38% of order volumes during the 2025 summer sales, with tier-3 cities alone registering 21% YoY growth. Online shoppers from these regions will grow from 260 million in 2024 to around 300 million by 2030.

These businesses operate with different unit economics: lower overheads, stronger community connections, and authentic product storytelling. With the right enabling infrastructure, many of them achieve profitability faster than metropolitan brands.

For financial leadership, this means rethinking pricing, payment terms, risk models, and even the definition of customer success. Supporting this long tail is not just an opportunity; it is the defining competitive advantage for the ecosystem.

These shifts set the stage for a very different next decade of digital commerce.

The Road Ahead: Building for Billion-User Scale

If there is one discipline that will differentiate winners from the rest, it is a relentless focus on unit economics. In a high-volume, low-margin market like India, sustainable unit economics is not just a financial metric; it is the flywheel that powers long-term growth.

As India enters the next phase of digital commerce, three shifts will define the future:

1. Competition will move from customer acquisition to sustainable unit economics. Brands will win not by spending more, but by operating more intelligently.

2. Technology will become more powerful yet more accessible. Small businesses won’t have to build complex systems; well-designed platforms will abstract the complexity.

3. Data intelligence will move from descriptive to predictive and prescriptive. Financial planning will become more real-time, integrated with operational and customer metrics.

The role of the financial leaders will evolve even further, from managing resources to designing economic models, building data foundations, and enabling ecosystem-wide transformations. 

The One Principle That Will Define India’s Digital Commerce Future

Taken together, these shifts show that India’s economic future rests on a simple equation: empower MSMEs with the right infrastructure, amplify their intelligence with data, and support their scale with a financial architecture built for unit-economic resilience.

Sustainable growth will be about making small businesses successful at scale, not just scaling businesses that are already successful.

What India needs now is the patience, vision, and discipline to build capability-first infrastructure, the kind that creates compounding advantages over time.

A handful of large companies will not write the next decade of Indian e-commerce. It will be authored by millions of small businesses empowered by technology, guided by data intelligence, and supported by a financial architecture that makes their ambitions achievable.

That is how emerging economies like ours will not merely participate in global commerce but fundamentally reshape how it works. The real question is whether we can align capital, data, and infrastructure to compound value across millions of small businesses. And the real test of leadership will be whether we can align capital, data, and infrastructure to compound value across millions of small businesses.

(Views are personal; the author is Chief Financial Officer, Shiprocket)