Open an incognito tab. Search your best selling product by its exact name.
Now count how many of the top five results are your own product, listed on somebody else’s website.
Most Indian D2C founders doing this for the first time find four. Amazon.in, Flipkart, maybe Myntra or Nykaa depending on the category, and a reseller nobody authorised. Their own site is somewhere on the second page, below a price comparison aggregator that scraped them.
Here’s the thing to accept before you spend another rupee on this. You are not going to outrank Amazon.in for your own product name, and the effort to try is the single most wasted line in Indian ecommerce SEO budgets.
What you can win is different, and there are three of them. The research query that happens before anybody knows your brand. The comparison query. And the product that only exists on your own website, which is a merchandising decision rather than an SEO task.
Why you lose that query, and why it matters less than it feels
This is domain authority arithmetic, not a failure of your product page.
A marketplace has millions of pages, decades of links and a crawl relationship with Google that your store will never have. When the same SKU sits on both, Google is choosing between a page on a domain it trusts enormously and a page on a domain it barely knows. That is not a close contest and no amount of copywriting changes it.
And a sale through a marketplace is still a sale. The problem was never the ranking. The problem is that the margin goes somewhere else and you learn nothing about who bought.
So the useful move is not to fight for that position. It is to make sure the listing that wins it is one you actually control.
Go and check that now, while you have the tab open. Is the top result your official listing, or a reseller’s? Are the images yours, current and complete? Is the title the one you would have written? A reseller outranking you for your own product with a photograph from 2024 is a real and common problem in Indian categories, and fixing it is a brand registry and enforcement job rather than an SEO one.
The queries you can actually win
Three kinds, in the order I would work them.
The research query, before the brand exists in the shopper’s head. Which oil actually helps a dry scalp. How to work out your size when the chart is in inches and you buy in Indian sizes. Whether a particular fabric survives a Chennai summer. Marketplaces are structurally bad at these because they have no editorial surface, only listings. This is the ground that is genuinely yours.
The comparison and selection query. Including comparisons against yourself, which founders resist and which works. If somebody is choosing between your two products, you want to be the page that helps them choose, because the alternative is a content farm doing it badly with an affiliate link.
Your brand plus a category or a modifier. Not your brand alone, which you already own, and not a product name, which the marketplace has. The space in between, where somebody half remembers you and is looking for the specific thing.
One distinction worth making while you are here. Amazon is largely search led, so listing keywords and titles do real work there. Flipkart is more browse led, with a larger share of purchases coming through category navigation than through a search box. Running the same optimisation playbook on both is a common and expensive mistake, and it is not the same work as the SEO on your own site either.
The product that only exists on your site
This is the part I would actually act on this week, and it is not a content task.
Your most defensible search asset is a SKU your marketplaces do not have.
A bundle. A refill pack. A subscription with a different quantity. A colour or size you hold back. A customisation or an engraving. Anything where the thing a person searches for does not exist on Amazon, because then there is no marketplace listing to lose to and the authority gap stops mattering.
I have watched stores spend a year trying to win product name queries they had already given away, while the obvious answer sat with whoever owns the catalogue. Create three products that exist nowhere else, give each a proper page, and you have built search ground nobody can take.
That is a conversation with your merchandising and operations people, not with an SEO agency.
Out of stock, which is the quiet leak
Nobody budgets for this and it costs more than most technical fixes return.
Do not delete an out of stock product page. Do not let it 404. The page has whatever ranking and links it accumulated and deleting it throws those away, then you rebuild from nothing when the stock returns.
Keep the URL live. Mark the availability honestly in your structured data rather than leaving it saying in stock. Put two or three genuine alternatives above the fold, not at the bottom. And offer a notify option that captures a phone number, because in India that gives you a WhatsApp conversation rather than an email nobody opens.
The wrinkle that catches most Indian stores is variant level. One size gone, not the whole product. Most themes handle this by quietly hiding the variant, which can take the page down with it if the variant was the thing people searched for. Check what your theme actually does when a single size sells out, because the answer is usually worse than you expect.
What not to copy from your marketplace listings
The same forty words of product description on Amazon, on Flipkart and on your own site.
On the marketplaces that duplication is survivable, because the domain carries it. On your own site it is the only thing you had, and it is identical to a page Google already trusts more.
So the version on your site has to be the different one. The specifics a buyer asks before buying. The questions your support team answers daily. What it does not do and who it is not for, which converts better than people expect because it reads as honest.
The platform side of this, the duplicate URLs and parameter handling that themes generate on their own, I have written up separately as a Shopify SEO checklist. This post is about the problem sitting above that one.
Before lunch
Forty minutes, four steps.
Run the incognito search for your top five products by revenue and note which marketplace wins each one.
For each, check whether the winning listing is your official one, with your current images.
Then open your catalogue and pick one bundle or variant that exists only on your site. If there isn’t one, that is the finding.
Finally, find a product that went out of stock last month and see what your site did with the page.
If you’d like help working out which queries your own store could realistically win, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on SEO cover the rest. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.