Beyond Shipping: Shiprocket’s Emerging Bets Gather Pace

Gurugram-based ecommerce enablement platform Shiprocket is starting to reap the benefits of business bets it began placing well before its stock market listing earlier this year.

Its core business has traditionally involved helping online merchants ship orders by connecting them with multiple logistics providers. Over the years, however, Shiprocket has added checkout, omnichannel commerce, cross-border logistics, and marketing technology (martech) offerings to generate revenue from more stages of every order. 

The early results are beginning to show in its financials. Shiprocket’s revenue from operations rose 34% YoY to ₹592.1 Cr in Q1 FY27 from ₹442 Cr in the year-ago quarter.

While its core shipping business grew 22% YoY to ₹411.7 Cr, its emerging business, comprising omnichannel, cross-border, and martech offerings, grew 70% to ₹180.4 Cr. Consequently, its contribution to overall revenue increased to 30% from 24% a year earlier. 

Within this portfolio, martech emerged as the fastest-growing business, with revenue surging 193% YoY. Omnichannel revenue jumped 92%, while cross-border revenue declined marginally amid global volatility. 

However, the rising share of emerging offerings has lowered Shiprocket’s overall revenue per transaction because these businesses currently generate lower realisation than core shipping. The company is initially focusing on increasing transaction volumes and subsequently monetising them through its broader product stack. 

Monetising The Entire Order Journey

Shiprocket is betting that a single ecommerce order creates monetisation opportunities across customer acquisition, checkout, fulfilment, shipping, returns, and repeat purchases. Martech, including checkout and advertising tools, has emerged as a key part of this strategy.

During its Q1 post-earnings call, Shiprocket’s management said the company can use data on purchases, customer behaviour, product catalogues, locations, and repurchase patterns to help merchants improve their marketing outcomes. 

Instead of relying entirely on external sources, Shiprocket can use commerce data from its shipping operations and monetise it through a separate product. It claims to have more than a decade of consumer behaviour data covering 15 Cr consumers, while 93% of checkout addresses are auto-filled through its platform.

At its core, Shiprocket is trying to monetise the same transaction across multiple touchpoints. A merchant that initially comes to the platform for shipping could eventually also spend on checkout, advertising, omnichannel, and other tools for the same order.

The strategy is part of a broader trend among digital platforms to monetise data generated through their core businesses. IPO-bound PhonePe, for instance, recently launched PulsePro, an enterprise intelligence platform built using aggregated and anonymised transaction data from its payments network. 

Existing Merchant Opportunity

Shiprocket’s martech play also allows it to extract more business from its existing merchant network instead of relying primarily on new customer acquisition to grow its top line.

This has become more important as CAC for its core shipping business increased 13.5% YoY to ₹3,560 in Q1 FY27, while overall CAC rose 9.2% to ₹6,429. The management attributed the increase to experiments across acquisition channels. 

Shiprocket’s merchant network stood at around 2.22 Lakh in Q1 FY27, including 10,170 “power merchants”, or higher-value sellers, compared with 10,282 a year earlier. However, average revenue per power merchant increased to ₹18.7 Lakh from ₹15 Lakh, underscoring the opportunity to generate more from existing sellers.

The proportion of core merchants using Shiprocket’s emerging products increased to 8.8% from 7.3% in a year. Meanwhile, the number of merchants served by the emerging business jumped 57% YoY to 48,406.

These numbers indicate that more merchants are moving beyond Shiprocket’s core shipping offering. However, adoption among core merchants remains relatively limited, while the emerging business is yet to demonstrate that rapid revenue growth can translate into profitability.

Will Merchants Pay More?

Despite growing 70% YoY, Shiprocket’s emerging segment remains loss-making. Its adjusted EBITDA margin improved to negative 24.3% in Q1 FY27 from negative 38.1% a year earlier, while its contribution margin expanded to 15.3% from 9.3%.

Shiprocket attributed the improvement to operating leverage and a better product mix, with martech growing considerably faster than the rest of the emerging portfolio. It is also investing in product and technology as it looks to increase the share of relatively higher-margin martech offerings. 

Shiprocket’s stable core business gives it room to continue these investments. The segment’s adjusted EBITDA rose 50% YoY to ₹52.7 Cr, while its margin improved to 12.8%. 

At the consolidated level, adjusted EBITDA increased more than ninefold to ₹8.9 Cr, while net loss narrowed 24% to ₹13.7 Cr from ₹18 Cr in the year-ago quarter.

The company will now have to get more merchants to use its checkout, advertising, omnichannel, and cross-border offerings. In doing so, it will compete not only with logistics platforms but also with a wider universe of ecommerce, advertising, and SaaS players.

Other listed logistics companies are also widening their revenue pools, albeit through different routes. Shadowfax, for instance, is expanding across D2C, hyperlocal, and quick commerce while building higher-value offerings such as Prime Large for shipments weighing more than 15 kg. Its D2C business grew around 2.7X in Q1 FY27. 

Unlike Shadowfax’s expansion into adjacent delivery categories, Shiprocket is betting on selling a wider set of commerce tools to the same merchant base. Its emerging business is already growing much faster than its core operations, with martech becoming its most aggressive bet. 

However, the next phase of Shiprocket’s growth will depend on whether more merchants follow it beyond shipping and whether the company can turn its commerce data into products they are willing to pay for. 

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