Indian Internet has entered the loyalty era. Lenskart’s loyalty program is so successful that it generated about ₹200 crore just in subscription fees during FY26, with its 8.8 million members contributing to 35-40% of overall sales (largely repeat users).
The program’s scale signals that the Indian internet’s land-grab mode may be coming to an end. For two decades, it competed on acquisition, the cheapest customer, the biggest discount, and the most downloads.
We can finally stop asking how many users you can buy and start asking how much of a single user you can own, and whether they'll pay you for the privilege of staying.
Right now, the market splits into two structural models: free, spend-triggered loyalty tiers and paid memberships.
Paid memberships work when a platform is confident enough in its value to charge for loyalty, typically because an interconnected ecosystem of services (1st- and 3rd-party benefits) around the core product raises engagement, increases switching costs, and makes membership benefits genuinely recurring. Differentiation + platformization advantages make a membership work.
Not frequency alone. Prime example is Zepto, which shut down its membership program a few months ago (and recently started a new experiment in pockets). Whereas Flipkart is scaling its new paid Black program.
Members exhibit meaningfully higher repeat purchase rates and a higher lifetime value than regular customers. Because loyalty programs act as a powerful retention engine, they significantly reduce the cost of driving repeat purchases for the platform. That’s the most significant second-order impact of these programs.