Nykaa

Nykaa pays up to 9% on new-customer orders and around 3.25% on repeat buyers, with a 30-day cookie. The gap between those two numbers is the whole strategy for this program.

The retailer

Nykaa is India's dominant beauty and personal care retailer, selling makeup, skincare, haircare and fragrance across its own labels and hundreds of international brands. It also runs Nykaa Fashion for clothing and accessories, which sits on a separate commission schedule.

This is an India-first program. Your traffic needs to be Indian, or it will not convert regardless of how well the content performs.

New customers are worth three times as much

Commission on a new-user conversion runs roughly 6.5% to 9% depending on category. An existing Nykaa customer buying through your link earns you about 3.25%. Given how much of the Indian beauty market already shops there, a large share of your clicks will fall into the lower band.

That reality should shape what you write. Content aimed at first-time buyers, gift shoppers and people entering a new category converts into the high band. Restock and repurchase content, which is easy to rank for, mostly pays the low one.

Who converts

Indian readers researching a purchase rather than browsing. Product comparison posts, shade and skin-type guides, festive and wedding gifting content, and "dupes" articles all convert well. Sale-period content around Nykaa's Pink Friday and Hot Pink Sale events produces the sharpest spikes of the year, and planning content around those dates is the single highest-leverage thing you can do here.

What doesn't work: international traffic, which cannot buy; and men's grooming content, which converts at a fraction of the rate despite ranking easily.

How it compares in Indian ecommerce

Nykaa pays several times what Amazon India pays in beauty and gives you 30 days of attribution against Amazon's 24 hours. For any Indian beauty content, Nykaa is the obvious primary and Amazon the fallback for items Nykaa doesn't stock.

Getting approved

Apply through the Nykaa affiliate portal. Approval is straightforward for content sites with Indian traffic. The program is also available through several Indian affiliate networks, which can be worth using if you want consolidated reporting across multiple retailers.

Verdict

The strongest beauty program available for Indian audiences, held back only by the new-versus-repeat split that quietly caps most affiliates' earnings. Write for first-time buyers, build your calendar around the two big sale events, and don't bother with traffic outside India.