Beyond GMV: Why Amazon India's Smartest Brands Are Now Competing on Profit

The founder across from me had every reason to feel good. Her brand had just crossed a sales figure on Amazon India she had scribbled on a sticky note as a far-off goal. Revenue was up. Orders were up. The festive season had been her best yet. Yet she had come to Thrise because something did not add up — her bank balance was not growing the way her sales graph was. “I am selling more than I ever have,” she told me, “so why does it not feel like it?”

That conversation has stayed with me, because some version of it now plays out almost every week. For most of the last decade, selling on Amazon India was a growth story — list the catalogue, switch on advertising, watch GMV climb. Today, the brands that will last are asking a harder question. Not how much did we sell, but how much did we actually keep.

When we rebuilt her numbers product by product, the answer was uncomfortable. Her bestselling item — the hero product she was proudest of — was losing money on almost every unit sold. Amazon's economics are quietly complex. A single sale carries referral fees, closing fees, weight-based shipping, storage charges, return handling and advertising cost, all before GST and the cost of the product itself. She had been watching her ACOS, but ACOS only describes the advertising layer. It says nothing about whether the order, once every fee is stripped out, has left anything behind.

Her business showed the same three leaks I find in nearly every first audit. The first was advertising bloat — campaigns that had aged into collecting keywords and placements that no longer worked, with budget flowing to them out of habit. The second was catalogue neglect — thin images, weak titles and no A-plus content, so advertising was paying to cover for pages that could not convert on their own merit. The third was discount dependence — every promotion shaving more off the margin, until the discounts had quietly become the business model itself.

Fixing this was about changing the rhythm of how she ran the business — the approach we follow at Thrise, in three connected stages: Analysis, Assist and Accelerate.

Analysis was the honesty step — building a clear, product-level view of contribution margin so she could finally see where every rupee was going.

Assist was the repair work — rebuilding listings to convert on their own merit, restructuring advertising around profitable search terms, and tightening pricing so margin was protected rather than given away. Accelerate was the growth she had been chasing all along, but now on a base that could carry it. Once unit economics worked, every rupee of ad spend compounded profit instead of multiplying a loss

The conditions that trapped her are only getting sharper. Ad costs on Amazon India are climbing. AI now runs much of campaign management, rewarding sellers who feed their tools clean numbers and clear profit targets, and punishing those who automate guesswork. And festive demand keeps concentrating into a few enormous windows, which means a brand entering them with broken economics loses money faster, at scale.

None of this argues against ambition. It argues for a better scoreboard. GMV measures motion. Margin measures whether that motion is taking the business somewhere worth going. The most useful thing you can do this quarter is not launch another campaign. It is to sit down, the way that founder did, and work out the true, fully loaded profit on your top ten products. Some answers will sting. They are also the honest starting point for every brand I have watched build something that lasts.

A few months on, her revenue graph looks calmer than it once did. Her bank balance, for the first time, is climbing alongside it.

Rajeshkumar is the Founder of Thrise, an Amazon Ads Verified Partner and full-stack growth agency based in Chennai that helps brands scale profitably on Amazon India and global marketplaces. Learn more at www.thrise.agency or write to hello@thrise.agency.