Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], August 18: For two decades, India’s e-commerce story has been told in gross merchandise value. A quieter statistic has gone largely unexamined: of the millions of Indians who sell online, very few own the customer they sell to.
factori.com, a Bengaluru-based global manufacturing and sourcing platform that supplies bulk apparel and corporate goods to organisations including the Indian Navy, ISRO, Samsung, Decathlon and Amazon, has launched a retailing platform that attempts to invert that arrangement. The service, at retailing.factori.com, lets an individual set up a fully functional e-commerce business with their own domain, their own website, an integrated payment gateway and access to more than 10,000 ready-to-ship products in roughly thirty minutes, without purchasing inventory.
The company describes the model as “truecommerce”: commerce in which the seller, rather than the platform, holds the brand, the customer relationship and the margin.
The economics of renting shelf space
The distinction matters more than it may first appear. In a conventional marketplace, a seller is effectively a tenant. Listing rank determines visibility, commissions of 25 to 40 percent are deducted from each sale, customer data belongs to the platform, and payouts sit in a platform-controlled wallet until released. A seller who spends five years building volume has, in most cases, built the marketplace’s brand rather than their own.
“You can spend a decade selling online in India and end up with nothing that belongs to you, no customer list, no brand recall, no pricing power,” said C S Sudheer, founder of factori.com. “That is not entrepreneurship. That is renting shelf space with extra steps.”
factori.com’s proposition is structural rather than promotional. Sellers on the platform operate from their own domain. Customer data remains with the seller. Payments route through the seller’s own gateway into their own bank account. The company charges no commission on sales; its published pricing lists an annual platform fee of ₹10,000 for stores below ₹1 lakh in annual sales, and nil above that threshold.
The unusual advantage: it already owns the supply
What separates the launch from the long line of store-builder software products is that factori.com did not begin as a technology company. It began as a manufacturing platform.
The company operates a 1.5-acre fulfilment centre in Bengaluru, works with over 600 manufacturing partners across India, ships to more than 130 countries, and manufactures across 38 product categories. That existing infrastructure is what allows the retailing platform to offer what it calls a triple-zero model — zero inventory, zero shipping cost and zero commission. A new seller lists products that physically exist in a warehouse they will never visit; when an order arrives, factori.com picks, packs and ships it.
The effect is to remove the three barriers that have historically kept ordinary Indians out of e-commerce: capital for stock, technical skill to build a store, and logistics capability to fulfil an order.
“We spent years building the hardest part of commerce — the factories, the stock, the fulfillment,” Sudheer said. “It seemed absurd to keep that available only to large buyers. A homemaker in Indore should be able to sell the same product to her neighbourhood that a corporate buyer orders by the container.”
Who is actually signing up
Early adoption suggests the platform has found an audience outside the conventional startup demographic. The company reports over 1 Lakh registered sellers, a base it describes as weighted toward homemakers, students, salaried professionals building a second income, and small-town retailers with no prior online presence.
That profile has shaped the product. Sign-in requires only a mobile number and a one-time password delivered over WhatsApp or a phone call — no password, no email. The platform generates store policies and brand copy using AI. A free academy structured around four stages ‘Dream, Build, Sell, Scale’ teaches product selection, pricing and marketing to sellers who have never run a business.
What is harder to dispute is the direction of the argument. India’s e-commerce infrastructure was built by platforms, for platforms. factori.com is proposing that the next phase belongs to the people who sell.
“Independence is not a date on a calendar,” Sudheer said. “For a business owner, it is the day you stop building someone else’s company.”
Media Contact
contact@factori.com +91 874 707 1444 factori.com Headquarters, Bannerughatta to Jigani Road, Begihalli, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560105
