Retail media
Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart — where most quick-commerce budget is wasted
Ads that never run in a pin code the nearest dark store can't serve, and RoAS recomputed on what you earned.
- Blinkit
- Zepto
- Swiggy Instamart
- BigBasket
- BB Now
- Amazon Now
- JioMart
Two things break quick commerce and neither shows on the dashboard.
First, Blinkit only serves ads where stock physically sits in the nearest dark store. So money spent advertising to areas they cannot ship to buys adverts that were never going to convert.
Second, Zepto and Instamart commonly report RoAS against MRP, not net realised price, so the number you are optimising against is not the number you earned.
Neither of these appears as a line on any dashboard. Both are large.
The work itself
What a month on the account looks like.
Blinkit
Product Booster, Listing Spotlight, Sponsored Brand Banner, category takeovers and push placements; keyword, city, pin-code and dark-store cluster targeting; dayparting.
Zepto
Sponsored Products, browse placements, Swap and Save conquesting, banners and carousels; Zepto Atom for Live Monitor, Geo Insights and share of voice.
Swiggy Instamart
Homepage, Search, Browse, Post-Order and Seasonal campaigns; Item Boost across Browse Boost, Go-To-Items and Last-Minute Add-Ons; SILB and push.
BigBasket, BB Now and Amazon Now
Assortment and placement management on the platforms that behave more like scheduled grocery than instant delivery.
Inventory-gated ad delivery
Auto-pause on out-of-stock, bid throttling on low days-of-cover, and stopping spend in areas the nearest store cannot ship to. This is the single most valuable automation on the channel.
Net-value RoAS recalculation
Every platform that reports against MRP gets recomputed on net realised price, so decisions get made on a real number.
Dark-store media planning
SKU-to-store coverage expansion, DRR and fill-rate monitoring, and serviceability sweeps at pin-code level.
Category-manager relationships
Joint business plans, listing-fee and ad-credit negotiation — the commercial layer that decides what the media even has to work with.
What comrAD does on this channel
This is the page where comrAD earns its keep. It gates every bid on live availability before the auction, not after the report.
It recomputes RoAS on net realised value, so the optimisation target is the money you actually kept.
It reallocates city by city as stock moves, without waiting for a weekly review.
Deliverables and cadence
- Named account manager and commerce lead
- Pin-code serviceability sweep, refreshed continuously
- Net-value RoAS reporting alongside the platform-reported figure
- Share of shelf tracking by city and dark-store cluster
- DRR and fill-rate monitoring with out-of-stock alerting
- Joint business plan support with category managers
What we report against
Not impressions. These are the figures that decide whether the spend paid for itself.
- Net-value RoAS
- TACoS
- In-stock % by pin code
- Fill rate
- Share of shelf
- DRR per store
- Spend where you can't deliver (target: zero)
Asked before signing
Several quick-commerce platforms calculate RoAS on MRP, not on the price the customer paid after platform-funded and brand-funded discounts. If your MRP is ₹200 and the customer paid ₹150, a platform-reported RoAS of 4.0 is closer to 3.0 on net realised price, and lower again after commission and fulfilment. We recompute every figure on net realised value and report both, so you can see the size of the gap.
Thirty minutes on your account. No deck.
We'll look at what you're running and come back with two or three specific things we'd change — whether or not you work with us.