For brands selling on Amazon, Flipkart or quick-commerce platforms, getting noticed is often half the battle. A product can be well priced, well reviewed and backed by a strong campaign, but if it does not appear where shoppers are looking, it can easily get lost among thousands of competing products.
The brands now face yet another challenge with the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Amendment Rules, 2026 from January 1, 2027. The new amendment prohibits manipulative search results, requires clear disclosure of ranking parameters in descending order of importance, and demands prominent labeling for sponsored or paid listings.
While the amendment will bring greater transparency around paid product placements, search rankings and promotional pricing, Tarun Joshi, Founder and CEO of IGP says, “greater disclosure could make shoppers more aware of the difference between paid and organic results. Sponsored listings will continue to play a role but brands will now have to look beyond premium placements,” he says. Search optimisation, product relevance, reviews, pricing and the overall customer experience are all equally important, he says, as consumers discover and compare products across marketplaces, organic search and AI-led tools.
For advertisers, one other notable change brought in by the amendment is the definition of ‘prior price’, with advertised reductions required to be referenced against the lowest price at which a product was offered during the preceding 30 days.
This comes when the stakes are at an all-time high in the market itself. According to Redseer Strategy Consultants’ India Online Retail 2026 report, India’s online retail market grew around 25% year-on-year in H1 2026 and is expected to cross USD 90 billion in 2026. WPP Media’s June 2026 forecast puts India’s commerce advertising revenue at USD 3.9 billion, or around ₹34,700 crore, this year, up 29% year-on-year.
The rules may not make sponsored advertising less important but could force marketers to ask: what did paying for that visibility actually deliver?
The problem with taking credit for every sale
That question becomes more complicated when brands measure retail media primarily through clicks, conversions and ROAS. A campaign can appear successful on paper without proving that advertising actually created additional demand.
Rishiraj Kalra, Founder at D4 Commerce, points to a simple example. A brand may already rank organically for an important Amazon keyword while continuing to bid aggressively on the same term through Sponsored Products. If a shopper clicks the ad and buys the product, the sale may be attributed to advertising. But the bigger question is whether that shopper would have purchased anyway after seeing the organic result.
For Kalra, brands need to move from simply buying visibility to understanding whether that visibility is creating incremental sales. Paid and organic rankings need to be assessed together to identify where advertising is genuinely adding value.
That is where Vishal Pundir, VP, Strategy & Operations, Electronics Mart India Limited, sees an opportunity to make retail media more measurable and accountable. Rather than judging paid visibility on placement alone, retailers could look at incremental conversion, customer acquisition cost and category-level profitability. He explains, “In electronics, where brands already compete intensely for digital shelf space, retail media will become more data-led and outcome-oriented rather than purely placement-driven.”
The shift also changes the way brands think about ROAS. Joshi believes metrics such as new customer acquisition, repeat purchases, brand-search growth and customer lifetime value will become more important. At IGP, around 70% of revenue comes from existing customers, making repeat behaviour an important part of understanding the value of acquiring a customer.
Where will the money go?
If brands become more selective about sponsored search, some marketplace budgets could move towards formats that allow them to communicate more than a product’s position in a search result. Shobhit Singh, Managing Director and CEO of Stone Sapphire India Pvt. Ltd., expects sponsored search to remain important, but sees greater scope for display, video, brand stores and content-led campaigns. These formats give marketers more room to communicate product value rather than relying solely on a position at the top of a search page.
The same thinking could apply to discount-led selling. As brands face greater scrutiny around how promotional prices are presented, the emphasis could move towards genuine product value rather than making a headline discount the primary reason to buy. For electronics retailers, Pundir expects promotions to become more calendar-driven, with greater attention to price history, vendor funding, bank offers and promotional depth. He describes the focus as moving towards ‘net consumer value’, taking the final price together with bank offers, exchange benefits, cashback and bundled benefits into account.
This could also force brands to look at marketplace economics beyond media metrics. A campaign may appear to deliver a strong return when viewed through advertising performance alone, but marketplace fees, discounts, fulfilment costs, cancellations and returns can change the actual profitability of a sale. For Singh, marketplace ROI therefore needs to be judged against the complete cost of selling, not simply the media investment.
Discovery is getting harder to measure
The measurement challenge is becoming more complicated as consumers discover products in more places. Marketplace search is no longer the only route to purchase, with AI entering both product discovery and advertising. Amazon India’s seller base has crossed 2 million, while the platform says the share of its advertisers using AI-powered advertising tools has risen 77% year-on-year. The implication for brands is that being discoverable means appearing across multiple decision-making environments rather than simply winning a marketplace search.
That makes the relationship between paid visibility, organic discovery and AI-led recommendations more important. Brands may have to understand not only whether an ad generated a sale, but whether it created demand, strengthened organic visibility or simply captured a customer who was already close to purchasing.
The regulatory push, therefore, is not simply about where an advertisement appears or how a discount is displayed. It could influence how brands think about the value of marketplace advertising itself. The basics may matter more too: a good product, credible reviews, accurate information, competitive pricing and strong organic visibility.
Advertising can put a product in front of a shopper. But it cannot guarantee that the shopper will trust it, buy it or return. The next phase of marketplace advertising could therefore be less about asking “How high did we rank?” and more about asking “What did that ranking actually deliver?”
