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Read articleOrder confirmations, appointment reminders and one-time passwords are some of the most useful messages a business can send. In India, they also come with rules. If your messages are not delivered, the cause is often a gap in DLT registration rather than a technical fault.
What is DLT?
DLT stands for Distributed Ledger Technology. Under TRAI regulations, businesses that send commercial SMS in India must register on a telecom operator's DLT platform. The system records who is sending messages, under which sender name and using which approved templates, and operators use it to filter messages before delivery.
In practice, an unregistered sender or a message that does not match an approved template may simply not be delivered.
What you register
- Principal entity: your business, registered once with supporting documents.
- Headers (sender IDs): the short name that appears as the sender, linked to your brand.
- Templates: the exact text of each message, with placeholders for variable parts such as names, amounts or OTP codes.
- Consent templates: required in some cases to record that customers agreed to receive messages.
Your SMS provider then maps your header and template IDs so every message your system sends can be checked against the registry.
Message categories
Messages fall into broad categories, and each has its own rules:
| Category | Typical use |
|---|---|
| Transactional | OTPs and critical alerts about a customer's own account or transaction |
| Service | Updates related to a service the customer uses, such as order or appointment notifications |
| Promotional | Offers and marketing, subject to customer preferences and permitted sending times |
Classify each template honestly. A promotional message registered as a service template is likely to be rejected, and repeated misuse can affect your sender reputation.
Adding OTP and alerts to your website or app
Once registration is in place, integration is mostly about triggering the right message at the right moment. A typical setup looks like this:
- Your website or app calls the SMS provider's API when an event happens, such as an order or login.
- The message uses an approved template with the variables filled in.
- The provider returns a status, and delivery reports confirm whether it arrived.
For OTPs, the code should be generated and checked on your server, expire after a few minutes and be limited to a small number of attempts. Rate limits on requests help prevent abuse and unnecessary SMS costs.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Changing the wording of a message in code without updating the registered template
- Using an unregistered or unlinked header
- Sending promotional content outside permitted hours
- Not checking delivery reports, so failures go unnoticed
- No rate limit on OTP requests
If you need help with registration, choosing a provider or integrating SMS into your systems, our team handles SMS and OTP integration for websites, apps and custom software.
