Starting out as a jewellery seller in India is four decisions: what you sell, where the stock comes from, what the law asks of you, and what a photograph costs. This section covers those four, and the money that sits still while you are making them.
Nobody meets them in the same order. A counter shop already knows its stock and has never written a listing. A reseller has a phone full of a supplier’s photographs and no piece in hand. A karigar has the piece and no buyer. Somebody with capital and no trade has the money and none of the other three. The four decisions do not change; which one is already settled and which one will cost you moves with where you started.
One thing is common to all four, and it exists from the first sale: a bill you can produce afterwards. It records what the piece was and what it weighed both ways. On anything where the metal is the cost, it also divides the price between metal and labour, because a single lump figure cannot be checked against either half. What that breakup does not decide is the rate: a finished piece sold ready-made is one supply and carries 3% on the whole value, making included, while 5% is the rate where the making was supplied as a service of its own. Which one you are in follows from what you sold, and it has a guide of its own. Keep the purchase bills beside it. A seller who can show what a piece cost and what it sold for has already answered most of what anyone asks later.
What am I actually deciding before anything is listed?
Four decisions, and each one narrows the one after it. The order they bind in, and what each of them costs to undo once you have started, is worked through in the guide that takes the four in sequence.
What that order cannot tell you is which of the four is your hard one. That is decided by where you stand when you start, and there are four common places to be standing.
| Where you are starting from | Already settled for you | The decision that will hurt | The first money that leaves | What usually goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A counter shop going online | What you sell, and a supplier you have bought from for years | Photographs, and the machine that judges them | The first batch of frames, and packing material | A piece described the way you describe it across a counter, where the buyer can pick it up and look |
| A reseller holding no stock | Very little. The supplier holds the piece and the pictures | Photographs again, because none of them are yours | A paid sample of every design you list, bought so one frame is your own | The same folder of images already sitting on every other reseller’s catalogue |
| A karigar or maker going direct | The piece, and what it costs to the gram | What the law asks, because a bench has never issued a retail bill | Paper, packing, and hours off the bench | Labour priced at bench rates, with nothing in the number for a parcel that comes back |
| Capital, and no trade behind it | Only the money | What you sell — the one decision nobody can hand you | Stock, usually too much of it | A large first order in a category chosen off a screen |
Name yours before you read anything else in this section. The fourth row is usually the one that spends most, and the reason sits in its second column: with nothing settled, every decision feels equally urgent, so the money goes to whichever one is easiest to spend on.
Standing in two rows at once is ordinary. A counter shop whose son runs the online side holds no stock of his own; a karigar can have savings behind him. Where two rows apply to you, work the third column first. The decision that will hurt is the one you have never made before, and your first money belongs behind it.
Which registrations apply to me, and what else is the law asking?
Two separate things, and sellers count only the first. One is the paper: a registration, taken in a name, on facts you can write in three lines. The other is the promise. Every sentence you publish about a piece is a claim you have to stand behind, whoever made the piece and whoever took the photograph.
Take the paper first, because it is finite. Four registrations sit under four separate laws: GST, Udyam, your own state’s Shop and Establishment Act, and BIS. Which of the four binds on your facts, and the order to take them in, is sorted registration by registration.
The promise has no form to fill in, which is why it gets missed. The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 and the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 made under it set what a seller on a marketplace has to disclose and what a description may not do. The text in force is published by the Department of Consumer Affairs. A professional reads that against your own catalogue, and this page does not.
What helps at the start is knowing who checks which claim, because they check at different moments, and the late ones cost the most.
| The claim | Who checks it | When you find out |
|---|---|---|
| The metal word in the title, read against the base-metal field under it | A machine, at upload | Quickly, and before any buyer has seen the listing |
| Purity on gold: 916 reads as 22K, and a hallmarked piece carries a HUID of 6 characters | The buyer, free, in the BIS Care app | Whenever the buyer opens it, which can be a year after the sale |
| Weight, length and size | The buyer, on delivery, against a scale and a ruler | The return, with your own listing quoted back at you |
| Plating, and how long the colour holds | Nobody, until it wears | A message weeks or months later, when the sale is long settled |
| The dispatch date | The marketplace clock, automatically | In your account health, before you have noticed the order |
Read down the last column. A claim checked by a machine costs you an upload. A claim checked by a person costs you a parcel, a refund and a rating, and it is checked long after the money looked like yours. On silver the same claim can be a number instead of a word: 925 is sterling silver, and a title carrying it says something a buyer can hold you to.
A claim also outlives the sale that carried it. Two years on, the supplier has changed, the lot is long gone, and you no longer remember which plating that pair of jhumka carried. The listing is still up, still saying it. File a supplier’s written answers beside your own listing text, because the listing is the half that survives, and the half a buyer quotes back at you.
Every claim has to be attached to something. A listing describes one piece, and with no code on that piece there is nothing holding the description, the photograph and the supplier’s written answer together two years later.
Where does the stock come from, and how much of my money does it hold?
Stock is the only one of the four decisions that holds your money after it is made. A registration costs a fee and some hours. Photographs are paid for up front, and even a reshoot is paid once. Goods sit on a shelf holding your money until somebody buys them.
Which centre makes what you sell, and how to tell a maker from an agent inside one phone call, is answered market by market in the guide to where imitation and silver stock is really bought.
The question that comes before the market is how much of your money the buying keeps. New sellers size a first order against the price of the lot, and then run short while the pieces are still selling. The lot is the smaller half of it.
| Where the money is sitting | What put it there | What brings it back | How long it stays there |
|---|---|---|---|
| The lot on the shelf | The supplier’s minimum, per design or per order | A sale, design by design | Until each design sells; the slowest ones set the number |
| Packing, tags and inward freight | Paid before any buyer has paid you | Only the price of the piece, if you put it in there | Spent |
| Orders already dispatched | The platform holds the money until its own cycle completes | The settlement, less fees, taxes and recoveries | Whatever cycle your own seller panel states |
| A parcel on its way back | A refusal at the door, or a return | The piece, if it comes back sellable | The return leg, plus the days it waits in a warehouse |
| The photographs | Paid up front, whichever route you took | Nothing; shot to the strictest seat, they carry to the looser ones | Spent |
Put the third and fourth rows together. Your money has left the shelf and has not reached the bank, and while it sits there you cannot restock the design that earned it. That gap is why the second order is harder than the first, and why a seller who is selling well can still be short of cash on a Tuesday.
So size the first order against the cycle. How many of these can be in the air at once while you still pay for the next lot? The supplier’s minimum answers most of that for you, which makes the minimum a capital question before it is a stock question.
The cycle cannot be sized until you know what one sale actually returns, and on a marketplace a sale returns less than the price.
No tool on this site tells you whether a design will sell. They work out what a sale leaves you and what a return takes back out; the landed cost you add up yourself, and the judgement about the piece stays yours. Stock that moved is the only evidence anybody has, so buy small enough that being wrong costs you a week of learning.
One way of shortening the cycle is worth naming, because a maker often has it and never uses it: sell the first lot to other shops instead of to end customers. Ten counters taking a dozen pieces each is one round of collection, with no marketplace cycle sitting between you and the money. What they ask for is a line sheet: one style a row, carrying the style number, the wholesale price, the minimum and the terms. The B2B Line Sheet Maker prints those columns. A counter that takes your stock on credit can hold the money longer than any platform would, so put the payment date in writing before the tray leaves your hands.
What do photographs cost me, and when do I have to buy them?
The four ways of getting a piece photographed are quoted in four different units: a photo, a day, a day with a licence on it, and a rig you own. No two of those quotes compare until you convert them to one scale, and the scale is cost per usable photo. The worksheet that totals every route is a guide of its own.
A second figure matters just as much in the first month, and no quote carries it: how many weeks pass before you have frames you can publish. Stock earns nothing while it waits to be photographed. A studio’s turnaround plus a courier both ways can put your tray in somebody else’s building for a fortnight, and a fortnight lost inside a festival enrolment window can cost more than the whole quote. Ask for the turnaround in days, in writing, before you ask the price.
Which route suits you is decided by the table at the top of this page more than by any price list.
A counter shop holds the stock and has the least free time, and its own hours are worth what they earn across the counter, so buying the first batch of frames buys the weeks back. The reseller has the hardest version of the problem: the pieces he lists are never in his hands, so the only frames of his own are of the sample he paid for. His is the one starting position where the photograph decision arrives first and everything else queues behind it.
A karigar has something none of the other three can buy: the making. Frames of a piece halfway through, filed, set and polished, cost nothing to take and cannot turn up on anybody else’s catalogue. And the fourth position, capital with no trade, buys the most expensive photographs of the least tested stock. Shoot three pieces, list those three, and leave the rest of the lot in the box until those three have sold.
Whichever route you take, one frame stays yours to take: the piece that is going into the parcel, photographed on the day it is in your hands.
In what order should I read this section, and where does it stop?
Read it in the order your own money binds. Settle what you are selling, then who you are buying it from, then what you have to hold and what you have to promise, then the photographs. Whichever of the four guides under this page you open first, each of them starts where this page leaves it, so begin with the decision you have not made yet.
This section stops at the first listing, and the boundary is worth knowing, because everything past it is held by one of the other four. What happens to a catalogue once it is uploaded — the checks it passes, the reason codes it comes back with, the field a title contradicts — belongs to getting listed and staying listed.
Everything that leaves between the order value and the bank credit, and the difference between a fee you can price and a tax you cannot, belongs to the money that leaves after the sale. Rate, purity, wastage, hallmarks and the words on a karigar’s slip belong to metal, purity and the bench. And the faults inside the frame itself — colour that shifts on upload, a stone that photographs black, your own room curved across a bangle — belong to photographing your stock.
Write four lines on one sheet of paper before you spend anything else. Which of the four starting positions is yours. The one category you are going to sell. The name of a supplier you have spoken to yourself, on a call you made. And the date you want the first listing live. Pin the sheet where you keep the stock, because in week three, when a second category starts to look easy, that sheet is the thing that says no.