Own store or marketplace — who issues the GST invoice?
If you sell through your own online store, you are the supplier and you issue the GST invoice yourself. Your storefront or invoicing tool has to produce a tax invoice carrying your GSTIN, your buyer's state, the HSN code, the taxable value, and the correct split of CGST and SGST for a same-state sale or IGST for an interstate sale. Nobody generates it for you. This is the case where an ecommerce platform with GST invoicing built in — such as HOD Media's hosted online stores — saves real work, because the invoice is produced from the order data at the moment the order is placed.
If you sell through a marketplace, the marketplace is an e-commerce operator under GST and you are still the supplier of the goods. You remain responsible for the tax invoice on each sale, but the marketplace collects Tax Collected at Source (TCS) on your behalf and reports your sales to the GST portal. That changes your problem from "generate invoices" to "reconcile". Your books, the marketplace's settlement reports, and the TCS credit shown on the portal have to agree before you file. So a marketplace seller needs accounting and reconciliation software more than a storefront invoicing feature, and an own-store seller needs the opposite. Most small Indian businesses end up doing both, which is the honest answer: you need invoicing where you control the sale and reconciliation where somebody else does.
What does a GST-compliant ecommerce invoice actually have to contain?
A GST tax invoice for a B2C ecommerce order is not just a receipt. It needs a unique, sequential invoice number for the financial year, the date, your name, address and GSTIN, the buyer's name and delivery address, the HSN code for each item, quantity, taxable value, the tax rate, and the tax amount shown separately.
The place of supply drives the tax split. For goods, the place of supply is where the goods are delivered. A Maharashtra seller shipping to a Maharashtra pincode charges CGST plus SGST. The same seller shipping to a Karnataka pincode charges IGST at the same combined rate. Getting this wrong is the single most common invoicing error on own-website sales, because the seller sets one tax rate globally and never splits it by destination state.
B2B orders add one more field. If your buyer gives you a GSTIN, it has to appear on the invoice for them to claim input tax credit. If your store has no field to capture a buyer GSTIN, you will be reissuing invoices by email later.
What about e-invoicing and IRN?
E-invoicing — the system where an invoice is uploaded to the Invoice Registration Portal and gets an Invoice Reference Number (IRN) and QR code — applies above a turnover threshold set by the GST Council, and that threshold has been revised downward several times. It does not apply to every small business, and it does not apply to B2C supplies in the same way it applies to B2B. Check your current turnover against the notified threshold with your CA rather than assuming; the number changes and I am not going to quote one at you.
The practical point for a small seller: if you are below the threshold, a clean GST tax invoice generated by your store is sufficient. If you cross it, you need a route to IRN generation, and that is usually an accounting package or a GST Suvidha Provider rather than a storefront feature.
When is a marketplace the right place to be?
A marketplace is the right answer when you do not yet know whether people want your product. It brings its own traffic. You list, you get orders, you learn what sells. You pay for that with commission, with rules you do not control, and with a customer who belongs to the marketplace and not to you.
A marketplace is also reasonable when your catalogue is small and undifferentiated and price is the only lever you have. In that situation, being where the shoppers already are matters more than owning the relationship.
The GST cost of that choice is reconciliation work. Every settlement report has commission, shipping deductions, returns, and TCS in it. You have to map that back to individual invoices. Sellers who skip this discover the gap at filing time, usually as a mismatch between the sales they reported and the sales the operator reported.
When does your own store make more sense?
Your own store makes sense when you already have demand you are currently servicing over WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, or phone calls. You are not looking for discovery. You are looking to stop manually writing down orders, chasing addresses, and typing invoices.
It also makes sense when your margin cannot absorb marketplace commission, when you sell something that needs explanation, or when repeat purchase is your business — because a repeat customer on your own domain costs you nothing to reach a second time.
On your own store, you control the invoice completely. HOD Media's hosted stores come with a custom domain, COD along with UPI and card payments, GST invoicing, courier integrations that work off Indian pincodes, and WhatsApp and email order automation so the order confirmation and the invoice go out without you typing anything. There is also a white-label option if you build and resell stores for other businesses.
How do you choose between them, concretely?
Ask where your orders come from today. If the honest answer is "people who already found me", the storefront is the cheaper path and the invoicing problem is solvable inside the store. If the honest answer is "nowhere yet", a marketplace buys you discovery while you learn.
Ask what a customer is worth over a year. High repeat value justifies owning the channel. One-off, low-value purchases often do not.
Ask who does your GST filing. If you have a CA who works from your accounting software, your storefront only needs to export clean invoice data in a form they can import. If you file yourself, fewer moving parts wins, and a store that issues the invoice at order time is fewer moving parts than a spreadsheet.
Ask whether you sell B2B at all. If you do, capturing buyer GSTIN at checkout is not optional, and a marketplace listing designed for consumers may not give you that.
What usually goes wrong
Invoice numbering breaks first. Sellers who issue invoices from a store and also from a manual book end up with duplicate or non-sequential numbers across a financial year. Pick one issuing system per series.
The second failure is tax split by state, as above — a flat rate applied to every order regardless of destination pincode.
The third is treating shipping charges as tax-free. Shipping recovered from the customer is generally part of the value of supply and attracts tax at the rate of the goods. If your store shows shipping as a separate untaxed line, your invoice understates tax.
The fourth is returns. An RTO (return to origin) or a customer return needs a credit note, not a deleted invoice. Deleting an invoice you have already reported creates a mismatch that surfaces at filing.
The short version
Running both channels is normal, and the tooling for each is different rather than competing. Your own store needs invoice generation at the point of order, with correct place-of-supply logic and a GSTIN field for business buyers. Your marketplace sales need reconciliation against settlement reports and TCS credits. Neither tool does the other's job well, and choosing based on which channel you actually sell through — rather than which software has the longer feature list — is what keeps filing simple.