Cross-Border Commerce

How Digital-First Companies Sell Across Borders Into India

India’s digital economy is climbing toward a fifth of GDP, and a small company can begin earning from more than 400 million online buyers before it ever opens a local office.

India has become the destination that digital-first companies talk about first. A software studio in Lisbon, a subscription app maker in Austin, a design marketplace in Singapore: each is looking at the same market and arriving at the same conclusion. The demand is real, it is growing, and it is reachable from wherever the company already sits.

The numbers explain the pull. India's digital economy was about 11.7 percent of national income in 2022 and 2023, roughly $402 billion in value, and it is projected to reach close to 20 percent of GDP by 2030. That share is climbing about twice as fast as the overall economy, which is itself the fastest-growing major economy in the world. For a small or mid-size company selling across borders, that combination is rare. A large base, a steep growth curve, and customers who already buy online.

The practical question for a founder is not whether India matters. It is how a company without a local office begins to earn from Indian customers, and how it does so cleanly, in a way that scales when the demand proves out. The good news is that the first step is smaller than most teams expect, and the path forward is well marked.

The market a digital-first seller is actually entering

Start with the buyers. More than 400 million Indians made an online purchase in 2025. That figure alone places India among the largest consumer internet markets anywhere, and it is still expanding as connectivity reaches further into smaller cities and towns. For a company that sells software, media, courses, design assets, or any product that travels as bits rather than boxes, this is a market that can be served from a laptop in another time zone.

The shape of that demand matters as much as its size. Roughly 70 percent of e-commerce transactions in India happen on mobile. Buyers are reaching for phones, not desktops, and they expect a checkout that feels native to a small screen and a fast tap. A digital-first seller that designs for mobile from the first screen meets the Indian customer where the customer already is.

Consider what that mobile-first reality asks of a foreign seller. A pricing page built for a wide desktop browser, a checkout that assumes a physical keyboard, a sign-up flow that wants a credit card typed in full: each of these adds friction for a buyer holding a phone on a crowded train. The companies that win Indian customers tend to be the ones that shorten every step, default to the payment methods a phone already carries, and treat the small screen as the primary canvas rather than an afterthought. This is a design discipline, and it travels well across product categories.

Then there is the broader trajectory. A digital economy heading toward one-fifth of a fast-growing national income is not a niche. It is a structural shift in how a large country transacts, and it rewards companies that arrive early enough to build a reputation before the market gets crowded. The window for a focused entrant is open and wide.

Why localization is the lever, not an afterthought

One fact reshapes the entire entry strategy: about 60 percent of online content in India is consumed in regional languages. The country runs on far more than English. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, and a dozen other major languages carry the daily life of hundreds of millions of people, including their shopping, their entertainment, and their decisions about what to buy.

For a cross-border seller, this is an opportunity rather than an obstacle. Translating a product interface, a marketing site, and a support flow into two or three major Indian languages can widen the addressable audience well beyond the English-fluent segment that most foreign companies reach by default. The same product, presented in a buyer's own language, simply converts better. It signals respect, it lowers friction, and it opens doors in cities where English is the second or third choice.

Where to start with language

A team does not need to localize into every Indian language at once. The sharper move is to pick the languages that match the product and the early customer base, ship those well, and expand from there. A productivity app aimed at small businesses might begin with Hindi and one major southern language. A creative marketplace might follow the languages of the cities where its first Indian users cluster. The point is to treat language as a growth lever that compounds, not a checkbox to clear at the end.

Localization reaches past the interface, too. Support replies, onboarding emails, and the marketing that brings a buyer to the door all perform better in a customer's own language. A company that answers a question in Tamil or runs an offer in Marathi signals that it built for India rather than merely tolerating Indian traffic. That signal compounds into trust, and trust is what turns a curious first-time visitor into a paying, returning customer in a market where word of mouth travels fast.

The first move: earning from India before setting up locally

Here is the question that stalls many teams. A company in the United States, Europe, or another part of Asia wants to sell to Indian customers, but it has no Indian entity, no local bank account, and no plan to build either in its first year. How does the money actually arrive?

The cleanest answer is to accept global card and foreign-currency payments through an international payment gateway built for exactly this case. Razorpay's International Payment Gateway lets a non-Indian business accept payment, settle the proceeds to the merchant in Indian rupees, and have the foreign-exchange rate locked at checkout so the amount is known at the moment of sale. It also auto-generates the inward-remittance certificate, the FIRC, that documents the foreign payment received.

That last detail matters more than it sounds. The FIRC is the standard proof that money came in from abroad, and generating it automatically removes a piece of paperwork that would otherwise sit between a sale and a clean record of it. A founder can begin earning from Indian demand, see real revenue, and build the case for deeper investment, all before committing to a local presence. This is the lowest-friction on-ramp into one of the world's most promising markets.

The strategic value of this first move is that it converts a big decision into a small one. Rather than asking a board to approve a local entity and a multi-quarter build on the strength of a forecast, a team can ask Indian customers directly. The revenue that arrives, the products that sell, and the cities that respond become evidence rather than projection. A founder who has already collected from real Indian buyers walks into the next investment conversation with data, and data is a far stronger argument than ambition alone.

From first sales to scale: the local collection step

When the early signal turns into steady demand, the next stage is to collect the way Indian customers prefer to pay. That means accepting the full domestic mix: the Unified Payments Interface known as UPI, local cards, netbanking, wallets, and pay-later options. UPI in particular has become the default for everyday digital payments across India, and meeting buyers there removes the last bit of hesitation at checkout.

To collect that local mix at full scale, a company sets up an Indian subsidiary and runs its checkout on a domestic payment gateway. On Razorpay's Payment Gateway, that single integration covers UPI, cards, netbanking, wallets, and EMI, while the RazorpayX business-banking layer handles the operational side: current accounts through partner banks, payouts, vendor payments, payroll, corporate cards, and the inbound-investment and forex transfers that fund a local operation. One integration operationalizes the entire entry, which is exactly what a lean team needs.

The sequencing is the strategy. Begin with cross-border collection to prove the market with minimal commitment. Graduate to local collection once the demand justifies a deeper footing. Each step is concrete, and each builds on the one before it, so a company is never forced to make its biggest bet first.

For the smaller team, the value of a single integration is hard to overstate. A company with a handful of engineers cannot afford to wire up one vendor for collection, another for payouts, a third for payroll, and a fourth for the transfers that fund the local entity. When one platform carries the checkout and the business banking together, those engineers stay focused on the product that wins customers rather than on the plumbing that moves money. The operational layer becomes something the team configures rather than builds, and that is the difference between a market entry that takes months and one that drags into next year. Razorpay is one of the larger payments groups in India.

The payments stack that grows with the business

A digital-first company rarely sells just once to a customer. It sells subscriptions, renewals, and add-ons, and it needs the plumbing to support recurring revenue without manual chasing. Razorpay supports subscriptions and UPI Autopay, so a recurring charge can run on the rails Indian customers already use every day. For one-off and ad hoc collection, Payment Links, Payment Pages, Buttons, Invoices, and Smart Collect give a seller several ways to request and receive money without building each flow from scratch.

There is also the matter of getting paid reliably. For a cross-border seller, a higher share of completed payments is found revenue, money that would otherwise have been lost to a failed transaction at the final step. At scale, that difference compounds into something a finance team notices.

The company sits at the leading edge of where payments are heading, too. For a software-native seller building toward automated and AI-driven commerce, a payments partner already experimenting in that direction is a useful one to grow with.

The fintech tailwind behind the opportunity

None of this happens in isolation. India's fintech market is large and expanding quickly, commonly estimated in the range of roughly $50 billion in 2026 and projected to roughly double by the early 2030s. That growth is the engine underneath the buying behavior. As payment rails, lending, and digital banking deepen, more people transact online more often, and the friction that once kept cross-border sellers out keeps falling.

For a small or mid-size company, the practical read is that the infrastructure is being built faster than most foreign teams realize. Cross-border UPI is now live in about seven countries and expanding, a sign that India's payment rails are reaching outward as well as deepening at home. The seller who arrives now is building on rails that are getting stronger every quarter, not waiting for them to be laid.

It helps to know the scale of the partner carrying those rails. For a small company, choosing infrastructure that already carries that much of India's digital commerce means the rails are proven long before the company's own volume tests them. The seller grows into capacity that is already there rather than waiting for a partner to build it.

Getting discovered in a digital-first market

Collecting payments cleanly is only useful once buyers know the product exists, and India rewards a particular style of discovery. This is a market where word of mouth moves fast, where short video and messaging apps shape what people try, and where a recommendation in a buyer's own language carries real weight. A cross-border seller does not need a large paid-media budget to be found. It needs to show up where Indian buyers already spend their attention, in the languages they already use.

The practical channels favor a digital-first entrant. App stores reach a mobile-first audience directly. Organic content, tutorials, and community presence build credibility with buyers who research before they pay. Partnerships with Indian creators and small businesses put a foreign product in front of audiences that trust the messenger. Each of these scales without a local sales force, which is exactly what a lean team needs in its first year. A company that pairs frictionless collection with discovery built for Indian habits gives itself two of the three things a market entry requires, and the third, a product worth buying, is the part the team already controls.

Distribution also compounds with localization. Content produced in Hindi or a major southern language reaches further than the same content in English, and it signals that the company built for India rather than merely accepting Indian traffic. The seller that treats discovery and language as one effort tends to find its first thousand customers faster, and those early customers become the proof that justifies the deeper local step.

A sequenced plan for the next two quarters

The opportunity rewards a clear sequence rather than a single leap. The first quarter is about proof. Stand up cross-border collection through an international gateway, price in the buyer's currency, settle in rupees, and watch which products and which cities respond. Localize the highest-intent pages and flows into one or two major Indian languages, and design every screen for a mobile-first buyer.

The second quarter is about depth. If the signal holds, plan the local collection step so Indian customers can pay with UPI and the domestic methods they prefer, and line up the business-banking layer that will support payroll, payouts, and the inbound transfers that fund a local operation. Layer in subscriptions and recurring billing where the model calls for it, and lean on routing intelligence to capture the payments that would otherwise slip away.

What makes this market unusual is that the size and the growth point the same direction at the same time. A digital economy heading toward a fifth of a fast-growing GDP, more than 400 million online buyers, a mobile-first habit, and a population that wants to be sold to in its own languages: each of those is a reason to move, and together they are a strong one. The companies that treat India as a near-term market rather than a someday market are the ones positioned to win as that curve keeps climbing. The on-ramp is open, the rails are improving, and the first step is smaller than it looks.

Jason Kumpf, Head of US Revenue at Razorpay, on the cleanest on-ramp into one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets. He is Head of US Revenue at Razorpay, one of the larger payments groups in India, and an advisor to technology and AI companies expanding across borders. More about Jason.

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