Selling jewellery online in India begins with four decisions, and which website you list on is not one of them. What you sell, where the stock comes from, what the law asks of you, and what a photograph is going to cost: those four settle everything after them, and they bind in that order.
Any one of them can be settled in an afternoon. Out of order they get expensive: stock bought before you know what you are selling has to be sold at whatever the law and the fees allow, and a piece photographed before it carries a code gets photographed twice.
They are the four that make up what a jewellery seller decides first, and one number runs underneath all of them: what is left of your listing price once everyone else has taken their share.
What do I decide before I list anything, and in what order?
Each one narrows the next. What you sell decides how much money a single piece locks up, and that decides where the stock can come from; those two together decide what the law asks of you, and all three decide what a usable photograph will take. The order is undoability: how much of each decision you can still take back once you have started.
| Decision | What it binds after it | What it costs to change later |
|---|---|---|
| What you are selling | Capital held in one piece, the purity wording on every listing, the photograph a buyer expects | Little, until stock is bought. After that you sell the stock, not the decision |
| Where the stock comes from | Your margin floor, how fast you restock, whether the photographs are yours at all | A supplier can be added any week. Money already in a lot comes back only through sales |
| What the law asks of you | The bill you issue, the fields a marketplace accepts, what your accountant needs monthly | A registration can be taken later. Bills already issued cannot be reissued |
| Photographs | Which surfaces accept the listing at all, and what a buyer believes the piece is worth | The cheapest of the four to redo, and the one most often paid for twice |
Read the third column first. Sellers usually start at the fourth row, because a photograph is the visible part of the job, and meet the first three later, once the money is already committed.
Gold, silver, plated or made to order — what does each one commit me to?
Pick one of the four and let the other three wait. They behave so differently that they are close to four separate businesses, and starting with all four is how you end up with four sets of problems and a clear reading on none of them. Which of them sells in your city is something you will find out in your city.
Gold ties the most money into the fewest pieces, and the rate keeps moving while that stock sits on your shelf. It carries the most paper too: the mark on the piece has to agree with what the listing says. 916 means 22K, and a hallmarked piece carries a HUID, a code of 6 characters, which any buyer can look up free in the BIS Care app.
Silver holds far less money per piece and moves faster, which is why many sellers start there. It tarnishes on the shelf, so old stock is cleaned before it is shot or shipped. Photographing it is the hardest of the four, because polished silver has no colour of its own and gives back whatever is in the room around it. In the title, carry 925, which is sterling silver. That is what a buyer searching for silver types.
Cheapest to get into, and easiest to describe wrongly, is plated and imitation stock. The rule is short: the metal word in your title has to agree with the base-metal and plating fields under it. Sell a brass piece with gold plating as exactly that, with the plating named, because a marketplace reads the field and the title together before a buyer ever sees either.
Made to order carries no dead stock, and nothing to photograph either. What you are selling is a delivery date: an advance, a written agreement on whose rate applies on delivery day, and a karigar who can hold that date in a wedding month. Without a bench you already know, none of that is yours to promise.
Do I buy the stock myself, or sell against a supplier who holds it?
Buy the lot and your money goes in first; in exchange you hold the piece — weigh it, code it, photograph it, dispatch it the hour an order lands. The risk sits on the shelf, where a design that does not move is money you cannot spend until somebody buys it, and where the minimum order quantity decides how much of that you take on at a time.
Sell against someone else’s stock, buying each piece once it is ordered, and your money stays free, but the piece is out of your hands. The dispatch clock is still yours, so their slow week is your late order. Their photographs come with the lot, which is convenient until a marketplace matches your main image against a catalogue that used it first — every other reseller who bought that lot was sent the same folder.
Both are legitimate, and what settles it is whether you can afford to be wrong about a design. With capital and a counter behind you, own the lot and take the shelf risk. If you are still testing whether a category sells at all, carry as little of it as you can and shoot your own frames of whatever you do hold.
Which market is known for what, and the questions that reveal a middleman in a minute, are answered in the wholesale guide under this pillar.
What does the law ask of me, and what does it not?
Four separate things get collapsed into the single word registration: a GST registration, a business-name registration such as Udyam, a local trade or shop licence, and hallmarking, which is not a registration of yours at all. Holding one of the four does nothing about the other three.
On GST two rules run at once. The law sets a turnover threshold above which registration is required, and that figure is changed by notification and published on the GST portal, so the number to work from is the one on the portal the day you read it. Separately, a marketplace states in its own supplier panel what it asks of a seller in your category, and it may want a GSTIN whether or not the threshold applies to you. The law decides whether you must register; the panel decides whether you may list.
A professional signs your return — none of this is tax advice — and the registrations question has its own guide under this pillar.
The bill does not change either way, and every sale needs one you can produce afterwards. A jewellery bill is not a shop bill: an HSN code on every row, 7113 for articles of precious metal and 7117 for imitation, gross and net weight kept apart, and a rate that follows what you actually supplied. A finished piece sold ready-made is one supply, so 3% runs on the whole value with the making inside it; 5% belongs to making supplied as a service in its own right, billed apart. Showing a making line for the customer’s comfort does not turn one sale into two, and which of the two you are in is worked through in the making-charge tax line half the internet gets wrong. The Jewellery GST Invoice Maker lays those lines out; your accountant confirms the code for what you actually sell.
Hallmarking attaches to the article and to the trade in it, whichever counter or screen it finally sells across. BIS publishes the list of what must be hallmarked, with every exemption, and changes it by notification, so read the list there before you buy gold stock; a forwarded message carries no date of its own.
Which photographs can I take myself, and which do I have to buy?
Before any buyer sees your listing image, a machine has already looked at it, and what it checks are things a camera has no opinion about, which is why your own phone can take nearly every frame a marketplace listing needs.
The ground has to read as white, and on the main seat white means RGB 255,255,255, which a pale grey cloth never reaches. Keep the frame square, fill most of it with the piece — ~85% is the share Amazon asks for — and bring the file in under the size cap. What those checks read, and what a duplicate-image flag means, is set out in the guide to a blocked catalogue.
Before any of that you need the count. How many frames a piece needs is set by the piece and by the seats a listing fills, and every quote you take is multiplied against it.
A window, white paper and a steady hand clear the flat frames, the angles, the clasp and the scale shot, which are most of a listing. Do them yourself and you keep doing them yourself, every week, for nothing.
The frame a table cannot reach is the worn one. A bust stand, a hanger or a rolled cloth stands in for a body and answers the two things a flat frame cannot: how the piece hangs and how big it is. That is why every on-body row in the shot list comes with a stand-in. A person is the one thing no stand-in gives you: the piece on skin, at a distance, at the length a buyer keeps asking about. Booking a model day for a first month of stock is rarely the answer either.
A photoshoot in India has no market rate, and any figure printed on a page is last season’s. One number does compare a studio, a photographer, a model day and your own corner: cost per usable image, the whole cost of the shoot divided by the frames you can publish. That worksheet is the photoshoot-cost guide under this pillar.
One exception: where a piece is expensive and its photographs will carry the shop for a year, a phone in a corner will not get there. Book a photographer for a day and stand beside them while they work.
Where should I sell — marketplace, Instagram, my own site or in person?
Open on one marketplace and one social surface, and no more. The argument about which of the four is best is really an argument about who brings the buyer, and each of them charges for that differently.
| Surface | What it costs to be there | Who brings the buyer | What it demands of a photograph | When the money reaches you |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketplace — Meesho, Amazon, Flipkart | A fixed or closing fee on every order, plus commission where the category carries one, at your own rate card in the panel | The platform | That it passes a machine check before a buyer sees it | On the settlement cycle, after fees, taxes and recoveries |
| Instagram and WhatsApp | Your time, every week, without a break | You do | That it holds attention in a feed | Whenever the buyer pays, which is the risk you carry |
| Your own site | The site, the payment set-up and the traffic | You do | A full set, plus the words around it | Direct, less the payment gateway’s cut |
| In person — counter, exhibition, a friend’s shop | Rent, a stall, travel, stock out of your tray | Footfall | Almost nothing | The same day |
Where nobody brings the buyer for you, you go and find them yourself, and those hours are a cost even though no one sends you a bill for them.
Marketplace fees also fall unevenly across one catalogue. A flat per-order fee is a large share of a cheap pair of jhumka and a small share of a bridal set, so one rate card can be light on a piece and heavy on the piece beside it. Run your own pieces through it band by band before deciding a platform is expensive.
The marketplace teaches you what a listing has to survive; Instagram and WhatsApp teach you what a buyer asks before she pays, and those questions become your descriptions for the next two years.
What comes out of my price after a sale, and how do I price for it?
Of the three kinds of money that leave between the order and the bank credit, only the fees are the platform’s own. They are a fixed or closing fee, commission where your category carries one, the shipping you pay, and the 18% GST that rides on those fee lines. Three of the four come off your own rate card in the panel, where a published average is no use to you; the fourth is set by law, the same for every seller, with nothing in it to negotiate.
A marketplace also holds back a collection under section 52 of the CGST Act and a deduction under section 194-O of the Income-tax Act, and it deposits both against your own GSTIN and PAN, so neither is a cost the way a fee is. Both rates move by notification, so the figure to price on is the one published on the portal the day you price. Telling a fee from a tax from a recovery on one settlement report is a guide of its own.
Third comes freight and returns, the pile new sellers guess low on, and it is billed on the higher of what a parcel weighs and what its box measures, so a large box around a small pendant is priced as a large parcel. The rule a carrier uses to turn box size into weight is printed on its own rate sheet, and the Courier Rate Comparator reads it against your parcel. An order refused at the door costs both legs of the courier, the packing, and the days the piece spent in transit.
All of it belongs inside your listing price before the first order. Start from the profit you want left in hand and work the price backwards through every line above. If the price that comes out will not sell, the piece is wrong for that surface, and better photographs will not rescue it.
What should I do in the first month, and in what order?
Give the first month one job: replacing every estimate above with a figure of your own. Revenue can wait for the second.
- Buy one small lot, in one category, from one supplier, paying for a sample first if you have never met them.
- Code every piece the day it lands, before it is photographed or put away.
- Photograph three pieces properly, and list nothing until those three are done.
- Work each price backwards from the profit you want in hand, on the fees your own panel shows you.
- List on one surface, and pack and ship the first orders yourself.
- Write down what each order actually cost — packing, freight, the one that came back — and let those numbers set the next price.
Step two is the one that gets skipped, and it costs the most later. A piece with no code cannot be matched to its photograph, counted in a stock register, named in a claim when the wrong item comes back, or reordered without sending a picture and hoping.
By the end of that month you hold three numbers nobody could have given you: what a piece costs to land, what a sale actually leaves you, and what one return takes back out.
In what order should I read the other nineteen guides?
Read them in the order your own decisions bind. None of the nineteen sits under this page: this guide is a guide like them, filed under what a jewellery seller decides first, and the nineteen are spread across that section and the four beside it.
Start with the three closest to this one: which registrations actually apply to you, where imitation and silver stock is really bought, and what a photoshoot costs, route by route.
Then the listing side, before you upload anything: why a catalogue comes back rejected, what each platform allows in a model photo you did not shoot, and the festival calendar, whose enrolment windows close months before the festival.
Then the money that leaves after a sale: why a settlement lands short, packing so a claim is winnable, and what to do when the wrong piece comes back.
Then the photography faults, in the order they usually appear: colour that changes between your phone and the listing, stones that photograph black, and the reflection of your own room curved across a bangle.
The last seven are for anyone selling real metal, and they can wait until you sell it. The first four: who decides today’s rate, how purity is tested at a counter, whether wastage sits on gross or net weight, and the making-charge tax line half the internet gets wrong. Then the words on a karigar’s slip, selling gold that carries no hallmark, and every word on an Indian jewellery bill.
Before you read any of them, take the three pieces you already own, or the three you were about to buy. Put each one through the fee calculator at the top of this page at the price you were going to list at, and read the line that says what stays with you. If that line is thin, you have learned it this afternoon, with a season of orders still ahead of you.