Something is up with how e-commerce spends on marketing. The budgets haven’t vanished—but they are no longer being poured into expensive, do-everything software. They are now being directed more towards tools that deliver quicker growth.  

Swiggy’s numbers show the shift. The company continues to spend heavily on advertising and promotions—Rs 605.3 crore in Q2 FY25 alone—but that spend hasn’t ballooned indiscriminately year after year. Instead, it has stayed broadly consistent even as Swiggy pushed into newer bets like Instamart—suggesting tighter targeting rather than bigger spends. Even in its IPO filings, where optimism usually runs high, Swiggy avoided the usual brand-heavy language. Marketing spend was described less as a growth-at-any-cost play and more as a tool to drive repeat usage and back businesses that were already proving themselves.

The distinction matters. This isn’t a scorched-earth breakup with legacy systems. It’s e-commerce maturing enough to understand where they can chase growth realistically. 

This shift is landing at an awkward moment for global SaaS. Growth is slowing, and not in a polite, cyclical way. Western enterprise software and bloated marketing platforms are feeling it first: budgets are tighter, sales cycles longer, and patience thinner. An analysis of several publicly listed SaaS companies shows revenue growth falling from a once-comfortable 21% to 12% in 2024. And by the first quarter of 2025, SaaS wasn’t just slowing—it was shrinking, with sector-wide revenue growth at -2%.

This is where customer engagement platform Moengage enters the picture—not as an exception, but as a tell. Companies like Swiggy, Flipkart, Oyo,* Bookmyshow, Domino’s and Bigbasket are shopping for its tools because it sits right on the revenue nerve. Its $280 million Series F raise in December 2025 came from selling the kind of software e-commerce teams use on a Tuesday afternoon: the push notification that pulls you back into an app, the in-app nudge that reminds you an item is still in your cart, the Whatsapp ping that quietly converts a lapsed user into a repeat orderer. 

This SaaS startup lives in the messy middle between an app being built and money being made. As a source at Lenskart told me, “When users stop opening, clicking, or buying, this is the layer teams poke first.”  

This isn’t a David-versus-Goliath story.