Consumers in India no longer follow a predictable path to purchase. Discovery, evaluation, and conversion now happen across marketplaces, quick-commerce apps, social platforms, review ecosystems, and emerging AI tools – often in parallel, and frequently outside traditional retail environments.

Yet most brand and retail strategies are still structured around channel silos. Budgets sit separately across brand, performance, and trade. Measurement is often anchored to platform-specific outcomes. Visibility across the full journey remains partial.

The Ecosystm India Shopper & Platform Insights Study (January 2026), conducted across 573 consumers, 68 retail platforms, and 74 brands in collaboration with Criteo, examines this disconnect. It explores how commerce intelligence and AI-driven engagement can reconnect fragmented interactions into measurable, full-funnel outcomes — from early discovery through to purchase.

The findings point to a clear shift in where value is being created and lost: not within individual channels, but in the gaps between them.