From Feeds to DMs: How private chats are becoming India’s new commerce engine

A new phase of internet commerce is taking shape in India, not in the public feed but in private conversations. Discovery is happening through creators. Purchase decisions are being shaped in comments. And final conversions are now happening inside Instagram DMs at a scale that brands did not anticipate even a year ago. The shift was discussed openly by Myntra’s senior leadership, D2C founders and top creators during a panel held on the sidelines of a Meta gathering on December 9.

The gathering introduced InfluenceOS by Wishlink, India’s first creator commerce operating system that allowed deep discussions on the rapid rise of creator-led and DM-driven commerce.

Meta also shared new data showing how deeply its platforms have entered India’s decision-making pipeline. The study finds that 81 percent of consumers use Instagram and WhatsApp during the discovery stage of financial products, 79 percent during evaluation and 83 percent at the purchase stage. Instagram is used by 57 percent of respondents for making informed financial choices and Facebook by 53 percent. Reels has emerged as a primary awareness engine for young users who now treat short videos as research material.

Industry experts say the same pattern has now taken over fashion, beauty, lifestyle and D2C categories, transforming creators from marketing assets into frontline sales channels and turning DMs into high-intent storefronts.

Read On: 3.5M creators rewrite India’s $45B shopping future

Myntra’s Vice President, Deepash Jain, said the signals were impossible to ignore. “Customers tell us they saw a reel, took a screenshot and started searching. Or they were in the comments asking ‘Where is the link.’ That is when we realised our own search engine had to learn the language creators were using,” he said. He recalled the case of a saree that customers began calling a Jimmy Choo saree because creators used that term. “We had to tag it that way because the market had already renamed it,” he said.

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Social commerce now contributes almost 10 percent of Myntra’s monthly revenue. “At our scale, that is huge,” Jain said. “This channel did not exist twelve months ago. Today it is material. Our investments in creators have gone up more than five times because we can now attribute it directly to business.” Attribution, he said, is the real unlock. “Earlier we spoke only about impressions and engagement. Now the commerce plug-in completes the circle. It shows us exactly what is working.”

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Jain added that operational gaps are slowing down the next wave of growth. “Creators often need to block a lakh of their own money to buy products for reviews. In categories like fragrance, electronics or makeup, returns are difficult. Working capital becomes the biggest friction. If creators could produce thirty commerce videos a month instead of ten, the ecosystem could scale exponentially.”

The best proof of the funnel comes from young D2C brands that have grown entirely through creator-led sales. Littlebox India CEO Rimjim Deka said creator commerce changed her business more dramatically than any marketing strategy she had used in a decade. “I was not a believer in community culture,” she said. “I came from the old mindset of product, pricing and performance. But everything changed when we began experimenting with creator-linked sales. In six months, creator-driven revenue went from zero to fifty lakh a month.”

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Deka said the surprises came from creators her brand would never have considered earlier. She recalled a village vlogger from Nagaland who films his daily life with his wife. “We sent them products. In fifteen days, we generated three and a half lakh in sales from that video,” she said. “We are a Gen Z fashion brand. He was not our expected audience. Yet his authenticity sold more than any of our scripted campaigns.” She shared another example of an 80-year-old grandmother whose granddaughter films short reels. “She wore our product and generated similar numbers. It broke every playbook,” Deka said. “Today we do not script anything. Honest trial videos sell better. For us, creators are indispensable.”

The brand’s ROAS on creator partnership ads is now double that of performance marketing. “Naturally we will invest more,” she said. “Consumers trust creators in a way they do not trust ads.”

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Founders in the social commerce space say the market is only at the beginning of its expansion curve. Wishlink CEO Shaurya Gupta told e4m, said DM-led commerce has barely scratched the surface. “There are very few players in the space,” he said. “HYPD, Cuelinks and a handful of others. The market is open and growing fast. DMs will be the next big engine of retail.”

Creators too are adapting to this new behaviour. Lifestyle creator San Kalra said he realised the shift when purchase intent became louder than engagement metrics. “Earlier I got likes and comments. Some bought offline, some online. Nothing big,” he said. “Now my comments are full of ‘link bhaiya, link dedo.’ That is when I understood the power of community-driven commerce.” He now integrates commerce intent across long-form, short-form and YouTube formats. “A three-jacket reel might drive discovery but a single trial reel might go viral and drive sales. So I create multiple pieces for the same product. One of them hits.”

From the platform side, Meta’s Strategic Partner Manager Nayani Nasa urged creators to embrace DMs as the heart of the funnel. “Click to DM is where interest becomes conversation and conversation becomes purchase. We see it across the board. A DM is the new storefront,” she said. Nasa added that signals like “link please” and “price please” were early markers of the shift. “These comments were simple but they showed high-intent behaviour. When they started going viral, we knew creators were becoming the first step in the buying journey.”

Read On: Amazon’s Creator Central to leverage India’s $17 bn social commerce market

Meta is now building tools around this behaviour. “We are committed to making Instagram a safe and powerful space for creators to build businesses. Discovery, evaluation and purchase can now happen inside a single thread. That is where the ecosystem is moving,” she said.

Even consumer psychology has transformed. At one time, people hesitated to open links sent by strangers. Now they freely buy from a single link shared by a creator because the trust equation has shifted from institutions to individuals.

The macro picture supports this optimism. India’s social commerce market is valued at around 8.4 billion dollars in 2025 and is projected to exceed 2.4 trillion dollars by 2033, growing at nearly 47 percent CAGR. The growth is being fuelled by mass smartphone adoption, the rise of Tier 2 and 3 city shoppers, the influencer economy and commerce layers on WhatsApp and Instagram. Together they are turning social platforms into one of India’s most powerful retail forces.

The consumer sees a reel. Asks for a link in the comment. Creator sends a DM. And the customer no longer returns to the traditional search bar. For India’s biggest marketplaces and its youngest D2C brands, this is becoming the dominant growth engine. For creators, it is becoming a business model. And for platforms like Meta, it is a preview of how India will shop through 2030.