Legal Metrology Rules for E-Commerce: 10 Label Musts

Pick up any packet sitting on your shelf right now. A 200g agarbatti box. A papad packet. A namkeen pouch.

Turn it over. Somewhere on the back, in small print, there is a block of text: who made it, how much is inside, what it costs, when it was packed, and a phone number to call if something is wrong.

That block is not decoration. It is the law. And when you move that packet from your counter to an online listing, that same block has to travel with it — as data, typed into fields, not as a photo of the pack.

Most sellers do not know this. So they type the product name, the price, upload a photo, and press save. The listing looks perfect on their own screen. And then nothing happens.

This guide is about that gap. What the law asks for, what has to reach the buyer’s screen, and — from what we can see on our own network — what it actually costs when one field is left blank.

📊 The back of a pack — all 10 declarations, numbered

What exactly does the law ask you to print?

The controlling rule is Rule 6 of the Legal Metrology (Packaged Commodities) Rules, 2011. Sub-rule (1) lists the declarations that must appear on every retail package, in a place where a buyer can read them before buying. Put together with the consumer-care and unit-price requirements, that is ten things a retail pack is expected to carry.

Two of these deserve a line of their own, because they are where sellers get into real trouble.

Net quantity must be in standard units. Not “1 dabba”. Not “approx”. And it is the net weight — what the buyer actually gets — not the weight with the packet, the box and the tape.

MRP means maximum. It is a ceiling, not a suggestion. You may sell below it. You may never sell above it, on any channel. More on this below, because online pricing has a specific trap that pushes honest sellers over the MRP without them noticing.

Which of these must show up online?

Here is the part almost nobody explains.

Rule 6(10) of the same Rules speaks directly to e-commerce. It says an e-commerce entity must ensure that the mandatory declarations under Rule 6(1) are displayed on the digital and electronic network used for the transaction — except the month and year in which the commodity was manufactured or packed.

Read that twice. The law gives online listings one carve-out: the packing date does not have to be shown to the buyer on screen.

Now the twist, and this is the piece that decides whether your product sells or sits invisible.

The ONDC Network’s product catalogue carries a data block for exactly these declarations. On the wire it looks like this:

"@ondc/org/statutory_reqs_packaged_commodities": {
  "manufacturer_or_packer_name": "...",
  "manufacturer_or_packer_address": "...",
  "common_or_generic_name_of_commodity": "...",
  "net_quantity_or_measure_of_commodity_in_pkg": "...",
  "month_year_of_manufacture_packing_import": "..."
}

Look at the last field. The catalogue block asks for the packing month and year — the one thing the display rule exempts.

📊 Exempt from display. Still required in your data.

That is not a contradiction. The display rule is about what the buyer’s eyes must see. The catalogue block is a data contract between your Seller App and every Buyer App on the network — and a Buyer App decides what to show from that data.

The practical consequence for you is simple and it is the whole point of this page: fill in the packing month and year anyway. Not because a buyer must see it. Because if it is blank, the entire declaration block cannot be sent, and a half-filled statutory declaration is worse than none.

One recent change worth knowing, because it is new enough that most guides have not caught up. The Legal Metrology (Packaged Commodities) Amendment Rules, 2026 (notified 13 February 2026, in force from 1 July 2026) added a Rule 6(10A): an e-commerce entity selling imported products must let buyers search and sort those listings by country of origin. That obligation sits on the platform, not on you. But it only works if the country of origin is actually filled in on the item, which is your side of it. If you sell any imported goods, put the country in.

What does one missing field actually cost?

The whole item. Silently.

We run a Seller App in the ONDC Network, so we can see both sides of the glass: what a seller typed into the dashboard, and what actually left our system on the wire. Those two are not always the same thing, and the gap between them is where sellers lose months.

Take one real case from a food seller on our platform, anonymised here as Seller A. Twenty-nine products listed. The manufacturer’s name filled in on all twenty-nine. The full address, on all twenty-nine. The packing month and year, on exactly one.

Those fields are required together. So for the other twenty-eight items our catalogue builder did the only honest thing open to it: it left the whole Legal Metrology declaration block out. We will not invent a packing date to fill a statutory declaration. Nobody should.

Buyer apps that enforce Legal Metrology then quietly dropped those twenty-eight products. No error message. No email. No red mark anywhere in the seller’s dashboard. The catalogue went out every night looking complete, and twenty-eight items out of twenty-nine simply were not there for a buyer to find.

One product carried a real packing date. That one product was the only thing anybody could actually reach.

Then came the part that makes this worth writing about.

The missing packing dates were filled in. On the very next incremental catalogue push, that catalogue went from 1 of 29 items complete to 29 of 29. Not a week of work. Not a re-registration. One data-entry session and one push.

📊 Seller A’s catalogue — complete declaration blocks

Why does a missing label hide your product instead of showing an error?

Because on an open network, nobody owes you an error message.

The ONDC Network’s policy expects Buyer Apps to display results from the network without discriminating between sellers. But it also carves out an exception: a Buyer App is not obliged to display a listing where the mandatory statutory information is missing (Chapter 2, rule 2.3.8 of the network policy). That exception exists for a good reason — a Buyer App that shows a packaged food item with no manufacturer declaration is taking on a legal problem it did not create.

So the app filters your item out. It has no channel to tell you why, and it is not required to have one.

📊 How an item disappears without an error

This is why we now show the gap on the seller’s own product list, on the exact item it affects, with a catalogue-wide count. The rule that decides what goes on the wire and the warning the seller sees come from the same piece of code, so the badge cannot disagree with reality.

📊 What the dashboard shows now

If you want the fuller picture of every filter that can hide a listing, we wrote a separate troubleshooter: why your ONDC listing is not showing.

Can I ever sell above the printed MRP?

No. Not by one rupee, not on any channel.

And here is the trap that catches honest sellers, because it is arithmetic, not intent.

Indian retail packs almost always print an MRP that already includes GST. That is what “inclusive of all taxes” means on the label. But an online catalogue system has a setting for whether the price you typed is tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive. Get that setting wrong and the software adds GST a second time, on top of a price that already had it.

We hit this ourselves during pre-launch testing in July 2026. A seller — call them Seller B — had typed a GST-inclusive price of ₹126 into a field the system treated as tax-exclusive. On the live order, 5% GST was added on top: the buyer was quoted ₹132.30 on a pack whose printed MRP was ₹130.

📊 The ₹2.30 that makes it an offence

Two point three rupees. Nobody would have spotted it by eye. It is still selling above MRP, which is still an offence.

We root-fixed it. The form now separates the pre-GST base from the price the buyer will pay, shows the buyer-facing figure while you type, and blocks submission with a red warning when that figure crosses the MRP you entered.

Your checks, before you list anything:

1. Enter the MRP exactly as printed on the pack. Not last year’s MRP, not a rounded number.
2. Know whether the price field you are typing into is tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive. If the screen does not tell you, ask.
3. Read the “buyer will pay ₹___” figure on screen and compare it to the MRP with your own eyes.
4. When a manufacturer reprints a pack with a new MRP, update the listing the same week. Old stock at the old MRP, new stock at the new one — never one price covering both.

What does a food label need on top of this?

Packaged food carries a second layer on top of Legal Metrology: the FSSAI declarations. On the ONDC Network these travel in their own catalogue block, separate from the Legal Metrology one — nutritional information, additives information, and the FSSAI licence number.

The question that confuses almost every kirana seller is whose licence number.

The field is named for the brand owner. If you resell sealed branded packs, a namkeen brand or a biscuit brand, the licence that belongs on that item is the manufacturer’s licence, printed on their pack. Not yours. You did not make the food; you are moving a sealed pack that already carries its maker’s licence.

That has a practical consequence most sellers get backwards: for reselling sealed branded packs, the number you need is on the packet in your hand. Turn it over and read it. It is a 14-digit number, usually printed near the FSSAI logo.

📊 Whose FSSAI number goes on the listing?

If you manufacture or pack the food yourself — papad, masala, pickle, a bachat gat product — then the licence or registration is yours to hold, and you should have it before the pack is sold anywhere. Which one you need (basic registration, state licence, or central licence) depends on your turnover and where you sell. That is a question for the FoSCoS portal and, if your case is close to a threshold, for a consultant. See our seller documents page for what a first-time online seller typically needs to keep ready.

I resell sealed branded packs — whose details go on the listing?

This deserves its own answer, because it is the single most common real-world case in a kirana shop and the guides all skip it.

You are not the manufacturer. You are not the packer. So on a sealed branded pack:

Every single one of these is readable off the packet. You do not need to research anything, call anyone, or wait for a document. You need the packet and ten minutes.

If a supplier gives you loose goods that you pack yourself into pouches for sale — then you are the packer, all of those declarations become yours, and you need to print a compliant label before you sell. That is a genuine change in your legal position, not a formality.

What is the penalty if I get it wrong?

Under Section 36 of the Legal Metrology Act, 2009, selling, distributing or offering a non-standard package attracts a fine of up to ₹25,000 for a first offence, up to ₹50,000 for a second, and for later offences a fine of ₹50,000 to ₹1,00,000, or imprisonment up to one year, or both.

We are not writing this to frighten you. We are writing it because the effort gap is absurd: filling a packing date takes about fifteen seconds per product, and this is the risk sitting on the other side of not doing it.

And read that list again with a shopkeeper’s eyes. These are not amounts a small seller absorbs. This is why we will not fabricate a declaration to make a listing go through, even when a seller asks us to.

The 20-minute fix: what to do this evening

Do not open a spreadsheet. Open your shelf.

Two things worth knowing before you start.

The packing date field is where you will stall. For sealed branded packs it is on the pack — find it. For your own production, use the month you actually packed the batch; a packing date can only be on or before the day you list it, never in the future.

The reversal is fast. Nothing here needs a re-registration or a support ticket. Complete the data, and the next catalogue push carries the full declaration block. That is what took Seller A from 1 of 29 items complete to 29 of 29 in a single push.

If you are still choosing a platform, the question worth asking is whether it will tell you when a declaration is missing, on the item it affects, before you lose a month wondering why nothing sells. Ours does now — it did not back when those items were vanishing without a word, and that is exactly why it does.

Common questions

Read next

Sources & official links

• The Legal Metrology (Packaged Commodities) Rules, 2011 — Rule 3 (application and exemptions), Rule 6(1) (mandatory declarations), Rule 6(10) (declarations on e-commerce platforms). Official text via indiacode.nic.in and your state Legal Metrology department.
• The Legal Metrology Act, 2009 — Section 36 (penalty for non-standard packages).
• Legal Metrology (Packaged Commodities) Amendment Rules, 2026 — G.S.R. 128(E) dated 13 February 2026, in force 1 July 2026; inserts Rule 6(10A) requiring e-commerce platforms selling imported products to offer a searchable and sortable country-of-origin filter.
• Food licensing and label requirements: fssai.gov.in and the FoSCoS portal at foscos.fssai.gov.in.
• ONDC Network Policy, Chapter 2 (rule 2.3.8 — display exception where mandatory statutory information is missing): resources.ondc.org.
• Catalogue and label-completeness behaviour — how our own catalogue builder and seller dashboard work, August 2026. Seller identities withheld.
• ⚠️ Watch out for fake sites. Legal Metrology, FSSAI and GST work is done only on .gov.in and .nic.in portals. Any site asking for a fee to “get your FSSAI number in one day” or to “register your MRP” is not a government site. Check the address bar before you pay anyone.

Written by Tejas, founder of Kaarobari (NEXSOL INFOTECH PVT LTD, Dhule, Maharashtra) — a Seller App in the ONDC Network. The catalogue-completeness figures come from our own production catalogue builder, August 2026; seller identities are withheld deliberately. This page is information, not legal advice.