Most people who decide to sell online in India start by picking a platform. That is the wrong first step. The platform takes an afternoon. The paperwork behind it is what decides whether you are live in a week or stuck for a month, and almost every delay we see at onboarding comes from the same four or five things.
Here is what you actually need, in the order it matters.
1. A GST registration — with one exception worth knowing
You will read everywhere that GST registration is compulsory for every marketplace seller, no matter how small. That was true, and for most sellers it still is. But it is no longer the whole picture, and the exception is the single most useful thing a small seller can know.
The general rule. Under Section 24 of the CGST Act, anyone making taxable supplies through an e-commerce operator must register for GST — the ₹40 lakh threshold that protects an ordinary shop does not protect you. Marketplaces enforce this at signup: no GSTIN, no seller account.
The exception. Since 1 October 2023, Notification 34/2023-Central Tax allows a small seller of goods to sell through a marketplace without full GST registration, using an enrolment number instead. To qualify you must meet every one of these conditions:
- you sell goods, not services
- your turnover is below the normal threshold (₹40 lakh in most states)
- you make no inter-state supplies at all — every sale ships within your own state
- you hold a PAN, declare it along with your business address and state on the GST portal, and get it validated
- you obtain your enrolment number before you start selling
- you hold only one enrolment number per state
That third condition is what disqualifies most people. Selling within Maharashtra only is a real business model — a Nagpur seller shipping to Nagpur, Pune and Mumbai — but the moment one order goes to Gujarat you are outside the exemption and must register properly. Marketplaces that ship nationally by default will put you there quickly.
So the honest advice: if you intend to sell across India, and nearly everyone does, get a proper GST registration. Treat the enrolment route as a real option only if you have a deliberate single-state plan.
One more thing about GST you should expect. Marketplaces deduct 1% TCS under Section 52 on your sales before paying you. That is not a fee and not lost money — it sits against your GST liability and you claim it when you file. But it does mean your payout will never match your sales figure, and sellers who have not been told this spend their first month convinced the platform is short-paying them.
2. A bank account in exactly the right name
This sounds trivial. It causes more onboarding delays than anything else on this list.
The name on your bank account must match the name on your GST registration. Not "close enough" — matching. A proprietorship registered as "Sharma Traders" cannot be paid into a savings account in the proprietor's personal name at most platforms, and a private limited company cannot be paid into the director's account at any of them.
If you are setting up fresh, open a current account in the registered business name at the same time you apply for GST, not after. Waiting until the platform rejects your bank details costs you a week.
3. Your category's licence, if it has one
Several categories will not let you list a single product without the relevant licence uploaded and verified:
- Food, beverages, supplements, packaged edibles — FSSAI licence. This includes things people forget are food, like flavoured syrups or health drinks.
- Electronics and many appliances — BIS registration for products under the mandatory certification order.
- Cosmetics, ayurvedic and personal care — depending on what it is, a manufacturing or import licence, plus correct labelling.
- Drugs, medical devices and anything therapeutic — heavily restricted, with platform-specific approvals on top of the statutory ones.
Check this before you buy stock. We have onboarded clients who had thirty thousand rupees of inventory in a warehouse and no legal route to list it for six weeks.
4. Category approval on the platform itself
Separate from any licence, most marketplaces gate certain categories behind their own approval process. Amazon calls it category approval; others handle it through seller support or an account manager. Fashion, beauty, groceries, and anything involving safety or authenticity typically need it.
Approval usually wants invoices from your supplier, images of your product with branding visible, and sometimes a brand authorisation letter. Gather these before you apply rather than in response to a rejection, because a rejected application often locks the category for a cooling-off period.
5. Brand documentation, if you are selling your own brand
If you are reselling someone else's products you need authorisation from the brand or a distributor invoice chain. If you are building your own brand, you will eventually need a trademark — not to sell, but to unlock the brand-protection and content tools that make a listing competitive. That is a longer subject and we have written about it separately in our guide to trademarks and Brand Registry.
A realistic timeline
Assuming nothing goes wrong and you start from zero:
| Step | Realistic time |
|---|---|
| GST registration | 7–15 working days |
| Current account in business name | 3–7 working days |
| FSSAI or BIS, where needed | 2–6 weeks |
| Marketplace seller account | 1–3 days once documents are ready |
| Category approval | 2–10 days |
| First listings live | 1–5 days depending on catalogue size |
The sequence matters more than any individual duration. GST and the bank account can run in parallel. Almost nothing else can start until GST is done.
The mistake that costs the most
It is not any single missing document. It is doing these one at a time, discovering each requirement only when a platform rejects the previous step. A seller who gathers everything first is live in two to three weeks. A seller who discovers requirements reactively takes two months and usually starts with stock already sitting in a warehouse.
We handle this end to end for our clients — across Amazon, Flipkart, Meesho, JioMart, Myntra, Ajio, Nykaa, Snapdeal, the quick-commerce platforms and the rest — because the documents are largely the same everywhere and the platform-specific quirks are where the time goes. If you would rather not learn those quirks by hitting each one, that is what our onboarding service is for.