If your budget is tight, the good news is that e-commerce product photography is the one genre where cheap gear genuinely competes. A listing image on white is a technically easy photograph. What makes it good is control, not equipment.
The cheapest setup that actually works
A used APS-C body, a used 50mm prime, a tripod, and two lights with diffusion. In India that whole kit can be assembled for less than the price of a single new mid range camera body, and it will produce images that pass on any marketplace.
The used market is the key and most people skip it out of nervousness. A camera used for product work sits on a tripod indoors at base ISO. It is the gentlest life a camera can have. Buying used here carries far less risk than buying a used camera for any other kind of work.
Where cutting costs is completely fine
The body. Two or three generations old is fine. Twenty megapixels is fine. You do not need 4K video, in body stabilisation, fast autofocus or a flip screen for a product on a table.
Brand. Canon, Nikon, Sony and Fujifilm all make bodies that will do this. Buy whichever is cheapest in good condition in your city.
The tripod, up to a point. A basic aluminium tripod is fine as long as it holds the camera still and does not creep downward between frames. Test that before you buy, because cheap heads sag.
Backgrounds. A roll of white paper costs very little and outperforms an expensive fabric backdrop, which creases. More on choosing backgrounds.
Where cutting costs never works
Light. This is the one line to protect.
A cheap camera with two properly diffused lights beats an expensive camera with one bare bulb every single time, and the gap is not subtle. Bad light shows up as hard black shadows, blown highlights on the label, and a grey cast on what should be a white background. No amount of editing fixes it, and on a marketplace a grey background can get a listing flagged.
You do not need expensive lights. You need lights that are big relative to the product and diffused. Two softboxes with continuous LED heads are inexpensive in India and are all most brands will ever need. Affordable lighting kits covers what to look for.
What about a phone
For simple opaque packaging, in good light, a recent phone will get you something usable. Be clear about the limits before you commit a catalogue to it.
Phones struggle with anything reflective, anything transparent, dark products on white, and small products that need to fill the frame. They also apply processing you cannot switch off, which quietly changes colour and contrast between shots. Across a range of six flavours that inconsistency is visible, and it is visible in exactly the grid where buyers compare your products against each other.
The workaround if a phone is genuinely all you have: shoot in the manufacturer's pro or manual mode, lock white balance rather than leaving it automatic, lock exposure, use a phone tripod, and never move the light between products in a range.
The honest maths
Before buying anything, work out what you actually need. If you have thirty SKUs and you refresh them once a year, a studio shoot is cheaper than a kit, and cheaper than the days you will spend learning to use it. Our rates run Rs 500 to Rs 1,500 per image, so thirty products at four images each sits well below the cost of a competent setup plus the time to run it.
Buying makes sense when you are shooting continuously: new SKUs every month, frequent packaging changes, or content needs beyond listings. At that volume the kit pays for itself quickly and the control is worth having.
If you buy one thing first
Buy the light. You can shoot on a phone under good light and upgrade the camera later. You cannot shoot on a good camera under bad light and fix it later. That order is the difference between a setup that works and a setup that sits in a cupboard.