Local agency or marketplace specialist: which should a D2C brand hire?

A D2C brand that makes most of its sales on Amazon, Flipkart or Meesho should hire a marketplace specialist, even if that agency sits in another city. A brand that sells mainly on its own website can hire a good agency in its own city. The deciding fact is where your orders come from.

The best-rated agency in your city is the wrong filter

Search for an agency in your city and the results are sorted by star rating and review count. Those ratings measure how clients felt about the service: replies, reports, meetings. They do not tell you whether the agency has ever run a marketplace ad account. Ask the agency how many marketplace accounts it runs today. That number tells you more than the rating.

Marketplace ads and website ads are different jobs

On your own site you control the page, the offer and the checkout. On a marketplace the buyer lands on a listing you share with competitors, in a search result you pay to appear in. The levers are different: listing quality, ad placement, fees, returns, and the platform's own tools.

An agency that only runs Meta and Google for websites will learn this on your budget. A marketplace specialist has already paid for those lessons on someone else's.

Hire local when you need people in the room

Local makes sense for shoots, store visits, events and a founder who wants a weekly meeting in person. If your growth depends on those, a city agency is a fair choice. If your growth depends on a listing and an ad account, a call every week does the same job.

One agency or two

Many brands end up with two partners: a specialist for marketplaces and someone local for content. That works if one of them is clearly responsible for the number you care about, which is profit per order after ads, fees and returns. If both claim credit and neither owns that number, the brand pays for the confusion.

Our own model is built around this. The marketplace work, including Amazon, Flipkart, Meesho and other platforms, runs on a fixed fee from ₹25,000/month plus GST (half our usual rate) plus 5% to 10% of marketplace revenue, set per brand and ranging from 5% to 10%. Additional services cost extra. We run ads. We do not run your listings or your inventory, and we say so before you sign.

Five questions to ask before you sign

1. How many marketplace ad accounts do you run right now, and on which platforms?
2. Which number do you report on: ad sales, or profit per order after fees and returns?
3. Who builds and fixes the listing, you or us?
4. Can the same fee cover a platform change if our best channel moves?
5. What do you do if the brand sells better on one marketplace than the one we started with?

An agency that answers these plainly, in numbers, is worth a second call. One that answers with its rating is not.

Read how we run Meesho ads, Zepto ads and our revenue share plan.