How Cashfree Payments' One Click Checkout helped Sepoy & Co. crack the D2C conversion code

India's mixer culture has unlikely roots in colonial history. British Indian soldiers once mixed bitter quinine with sugar and soda, inadvertently inventing tonic water. Sepoy & Co.'s name is a tribute to those soldiers, the sepoys credited with the invention. Centuries later, Founder Angad Soni spotted a different gap: India had world-class craft gin, but no premium mixer worthy of it.

Founded in 2018, Sepoy & Co. set out to build mixers that could compete with any international brand. Its recipes, developed by botanists and mixologists in London and India, use 100% natural ingredients. The brand went on to become the first Indian company to win an international taste award three years in a row, a three-time winner at the International Taste Institute in Brussels, and a featured brand on Shark Tank India Season 5.

Today, Sepoy & Co. sits at the premium end of India's fast-growing beverage market, stocked in leading hotels, bars, and restaurants, and exported to markets including London, Singapore, and the Maldives.

The D2C imperative

Sepoy & Co.'s journey reflects one of the biggest shifts under way in Indian commerce. For years, brands invested heavily in product and marketing, only to see margins shrink once retailers and marketplaces took their cut. D2C changed that equation, giving brands a way to sell directly to customers and own the entire journey, from discovery to delivery to repeat purchase.

For premium brands, the stakes are even higher. Marketplaces are increasingly used as acquisition channels, while owned ecommerce platforms have become the focus for retention and brand building. For Sepoy & Co., the website is more than a sales channel. It is where new products are launched first, where customer feedback is gathered directly, and where the brand learns about consumption patterns, preferences, and repeat behavior. As the brand has scaled, owning this customer data and these insights has become increasingly important to decisions across the business, from product development to marketing.

"Our website is where Sepoy gets to be experienced completely on our terms," Soni explains. "We wanted that experience to be seamless and premium, all the way through to the moment of purchase. The checkout was the last step to close."

But owning the channel is only half the equation. The other half is making it convert.

The challenge: premium brand, mediocre checkout

Sepoy & Co. had built strong volume through marketplaces, quick commerce, and retail. This presence translated into healthy traffic on its D2C site. Conversion, however, wasn't keeping pace.

The checkout itself was the bottleneck. A 7 to 8-step flow required customers to re-enter their address and payment details from scratch on every visit, even if they had purchased before. For a brand built on premium positioning, this created a jarring disconnect: a polished product experience followed by a clunky, repetitive checkout. High-intent shoppers were reaching checkout and dropping off midway, not completing purchases they had clearly intended to make.

Compounding this was a heavy reliance on cash on delivery. While COD kept the door open for price-sensitive customers, it brought higher return-to-origin (RTO) rates, weighing down order quality and adding fulfillment risk.

The solution: rebuilding checkout around speed, prepaid, and smarter COD

Sepoy & Co. moved to Cashfree Payments' One Click Checkout and restructured its purchase experience across three levers that worked together.

The first was a friction-free flow for returning shoppers. One Click Checkout replaced the multi-step process with a near-seamless single-click experience. Drawing on Cashfree's network of over 120 million pre-filled addresses and 50 million saved payment records, returning customers could move from cart to confirmation without retyping a single detail.

The second was prepaid offers built directly into checkout. Sepoy & Co. introduced prepaid incentives across payment modes, custom-designed for both new and returning customers, surfacing them at the exact moment of payment, so prepaid became the easier, more rewarding choice.

The third was a COD nudge rather than a COD block. Instead of removing the option entirely, the brand introduced a Rs 90 charge collected at delivery for COD orders. This small fee nudged price-sensitive shoppers toward prepaid while keeping COD available for those who genuinely needed it, improving both conversion and order quality at once.

The impact

The results came quickly. Within three to four months of going live, Sepoy & Co. saw a 15% improvement in checkout conversion, turning existing traffic into completed orders more effectively than before. Prepaid share rose by 78%, driven by the combination of targeted offers and smarter COD handling.

Beyond the headline numbers, the shift revealed something about customer behavior: shoppers were willing to move to prepaid when the experience was convenient, and the value proposition was clear. Returning customers, in particular, could now complete purchases far more quickly, contributing to a smoother overall customer journey and a checkout experience that finally matched the premium positioning of the brand.

D2C as a growth engine, not just a sales channel

For Sepoy & Co., D2C continues to be more than a revenue stream. It remains a primary channel for brand building and learning, offering insights that shape product development, marketing, and retention strategies across the business. It is also where the brand tests new ideas before wider rollout, and where it can directly observe how customers behave and what they value.

Looking ahead, Sepoy & Co.'s priorities include expanding its presence in high-growth beverage categories and continuing to build products aligned with the shift toward mindful, guilt-free consumption. The brand plans to keep launching products that elevate the drinking experience while staying true to its quality standards, growing its customer base across both online and offline channels, and strengthening retention and repeat purchase behavior.

Internationally, Sepoy & Co. is looking to deepen its footprint while continuing to expand distribution within India. Underpinning all of this is a continued investment in technology and customer experience at every touchpoint, with the D2C checkout experience as a foundation on which the brand can keep building.

"This isn't a one-time fix; it's a standard we're holding ourselves to going forward. As we grow into new markets and categories, the experience has to scale with the same care we put into the product, "says Soni.

For a company that set out to prove India could make a world-class mixer, the lesson from this chapter is just as much about commerce as it is about craft: a great product still needs a checkout experience that lives up to it.