How do Meesho ads work, and do they make money after returns?

What you are charged for

Meesho charges from your ad budget when a buyer who saw the ad clicks through to the catalogue page, or taps the share or wishlist icon on it. A view with no action costs nothing.

Nothing is paid when you create the campaign. The budget you actually used is recovered from your Meesho payouts.

That share and wishlist taps count as paid clicks matters more than it looks. In categories where buyers wishlist a lot and buy little, your cost per order runs higher than the click count suggests.

Setting up a campaign, in order

Open Advertisement in the supplier panel. Pick the catalogues to promote, either your own choice or the ones Meesho recommends.

Set a daily or total budget. Meesho's minimum is ₹300, and its own advice is a daily budget with no end date that you check every few days.

Set the cost per click yourself, take Meesho's recommended CPC, or leave it on Auto CPC. The campaign ends on its end date or when the budget runs out.

The ROI on the ads screen is not your profit

The Overview page shows ROI and budget used per campaign. It counts orders placed, and on Meesho a large share of orders in the best-selling categories come back.

Before you raise a budget, take the orders from that campaign, remove the ones returned, and work out the margin on what was actually delivered after product cost, shipping and GST on shipping. If that margin is smaller than the ad spend, the campaign is losing money whatever the ROI says.

Do this per catalogue. One catalogue with low returns often carries two that only look profitable.

Advertise the catalogue that can survive a Meesho price

Meesho buyers expect the lowest price for the item, and the ad looks like a normal listing, so the first image and the price do the selling. An ad cannot fix a price that leaves no margin.

Promote catalogues that are cheap to ship, have a low return rate in their category, and still make money at the price you sell at on Meesho. Keep the others out of the campaign, even if Meesho recommends them.

When to hand Meesho Ads to someone else

Most sellers can run Meesho Ads alone, because the panel sets bids and suggests budgets. Outside help is worth paying for when you sell on Meesho alongside Amazon, Flipkart or your own site and need one view of which products go where, or when you cannot yet see profit per catalogue after returns.

We run Meesho Ads for sellers, measured on margin after returns rather than the ROI figure. We do not manage the rest of the seller account, such as listings, claims or account health.