Flipkart PLA and Big Billion Days Ad Operations

What the PLA auction is really reading: Bid is the smallest input. Across the accounts I run, a listing under 4.0 stars with fewer than fifty ratings needs roughly 1.6 times the bid of a 4.3-star sibling to hold the same slot, and converts worse once it gets there. F-Assured status, price position against the grid and rating count move outcomes more than any bid change available to me. So the standing recommendation on weak listings is to stop advertising them and fix the cause, and the first deliverable of this retainer is that list with the reason on each line. The weekly operating cadence: This is run the way an in-house channel lead runs it, not as a monthly optimisation pass. Product Listing Ads and Product Contextual Ads restructured by margin band rather than by category. Search-term harvesting and negative building weekly. Budget pacing checked daily in the seller panel. Automated campaign types used where they beat manual on the same item set and switched off where they do not, with the comparison written down rather than asserted. Listing quality, price parity against the other national marketplace and F-Assured status are checked in the same pass, because they change what a bid can buy. Big Billion Days: BBD is won in August, not October. Stock is locked with your fulfilment team three weeks out. Price ladders and deal nominations go to your category manager on their timeline rather than yours. The ad plan is built around the days your SKUs are actually slotted for visibility, not around a flat uplift. I do not take event-only engagements, and I will not run event spend for a seller who cannot commit stock: selling out on day two after buying the traffic is worse than sitting the event out. RTO belongs inside ROAS: Cash on delivery in tier-2 and tier-3 pin codes returns to origin often enough to make dashboard ROAS optimistic by a wide margin. Performance is read from your settlement and returns files with RTO removed, and pin-code clusters that consistently lose money get suppressed in delivery settings before spend goes up anywhere. What I will not do: Manage an account where a distributor sets your listed price, because every recommendation I make will be blocked upstream. Buy ratings or run any incentivised review programme. Report ad-attributed GMV or total ad sales as a headline, since both credit advertising with orders your brand was going to get; once a quarter a matched SKU set goes dark and we manage to what that shows. Take Flipkart, Amazon India and Meesho into one retainer at entry scope, because one of them gets run badly and it is usually the one that mattered. Also not included: Catalogue creation and image production. A-plus content build. Seller registration, GST and FSSAI documentation. Warehouse and fulfilment inbound planning. Return claims and seller protection disputes. Influencer work and offsite media outside Flipkart's own inventory. Who this is not for: Sellers at low monthly Flipkart spend, who are better served learning the panel themselves and will. Brands treating Flipkart as a side experiment next to their real channel, where the retainer will outrun the attention you give it. Anyone expecting availability on WhatsApp through the day: I work in scheduled blocks with one weekly call, and event-week cover is agreed in advance and in writing. Reporting: A weekly SKU-level file: spend, orders net of RTO, contribution after commission and fulfilment fee, rating and badge status, and the paused list with reasons.