Simpl Launches Elevate To Turbo Charge The ROAS Equation For India’s D2C Startups

As India gears up for the festive season, jitters are already creeping up the spines of D2C brands across the country. What should be the most lucrative sales period of the year has evolved into an increasingly expensive battleground where customer acquisition costs (CAC) gnaw profit margins off. 

This is particularly dire for early stage D2C brands, whose ad expenses during this period keep climbing, but conversions don’t always follow, resulting in poor return on ad spend (ROAS) and strained margins.

It is this very problem that Simpl, a provider of a cardless buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) service, has set out to solve. 

With the festive season around the corner, the fintech player, with its newest solution Simpl Elevate, aims to help brands counter soaring CACs and ensure healthier returns on every rupee spent.

The Simpl Elevate programme solves one of the most persistent pain points for India’s D2C brands — low conversion rates despite heavy CACs.

Behind the idea is the Simpl team, which spotted a recurring challenge among hundreds of D2C brands — while they manage to drive traffic, many visitors abandon their carts before checkout. 

“Clients repeatedly asked us how to lift conversion rates without increasing ad spends. Elevate is a direct response to this problem,” said Simpl cofounder and CEO Nitya Sharma. 

Through Elevate, Simpl has built a step-by-step guide to equip D2C brands with payment innovations and ready-to-use marketing assets to lift conversions, trim drop-offs and reduce cash on delivery (COD) return risk. Together, these drive higher returns from existing traffic and improve RoI.

“Built for speed and ease, the programme is fully self-serve and takes less than 24 hours to set up,” he shared.

Core Offering For D2C Brands

At its core, Simpl Elevate integrates Simpl Pay Later that provides users with convenience of one tap payment to make online purchases with Simpl Pay-in-3, a budgeting tool that allows users to pay in three interest-free instalments during the checkout process.

Simultaneously, it offers a complete plug-and-play conversion engine that more than pays for itself through higher conversions, larger basket sizes and reduced cash-on-delivery (COD) returns. 

Brands can sign up on the Elevate microsite, complete a quick KYC and subscription activation, and instantly gain access to the right integration path — a one-click Shopify app. 

The onboarding guide walks them through every step with screenshots and short explainer videos, including running a test transaction to confirm setup. Once live, the brand receives Simpl’s Growth Kit with all the marketing assets. The process is so seamless that brands can announce the launch to their customers the very same day.

Priced at INR 21,000 per month in addition to the standard merchant discount rate (MDR), the subscription includes:                  

1. Marketing & Conversion Assets: This includes homepage banners, product discovery page trust widgets, checkout badges, sample Meta ad creatives, email and SMS launch templates and Instagram-ready launch creatives. 
2. Best Practices Starter Kit: This includes placement guides, launch checklists, recommendations for ad strategies and a step-by-step integration manual with video walkthroughs.
3. Analytics & Learning: The subscription also offers monthly performance reports, RoI calculators, webinar access and a peer-founder community to exchange growth insights. 

“Together, these tools give brands an out-of-the-box engine that captures more revenue from their existing traffic while reducing dependency on high-cost acquisition campaigns,” Sharma said. 

Elevating D2C Brands From Traffic To Profitable Growth

As per Simpl, early results from brands using Elevate show measurable revenue growth within the first 30 days of going live, without any change to ad budgets. Simpl highlights the following performance gains among participating brands: 

1. 20-30% Lift In Conversions: A higher proportion of site visitors completed their checkout.
2. 30-40% Increase In AOV: Driven by its ‘Pay-in-3’ feature, Elevate encourages customers to buy higher-ticket baskets.
3. 15-25% Reduction In COD Orders: Reducing return to origin (RTO) risks and improving cash flow stability. 

Simpl projects D2C brands on Elevate to see a 10-15% lift in checkout conversions, a 25-30% rise in AOV and a 5-10% decline in COD orders in the next six months. 

This could translate into sustainable revenue gains, with cumulative RoI expected to reach 15-20X the subscription fee. 

On Simpl’s roadmap, as per Sharma, Elevate is the another step toward positioning the company as a long-term growth partner for India’s D2C brands. 

The company aims to onboard 5,000 high-intent brands in the coming months while building category benchmarks that define growth enablement standards. 

By making customer acquisition more efficient and ensuring every rupee spent delivers higher returns, Elevate is designed as a strategic growth lever to help D2C brands scale sustainably and profitably.