A Namkeen Maker in Noida, Week One
He sent his documents at 11 on a Sunday night, all in one blurry photo. GST certificate folded in half, a cancelled cheque with a coffee ring on it, and a food licence that had expired three weeks earlier. He didn't know about the licence. I only caught it because the date was sitting right there in the corner.
That one date cost him nine days. The renewal had to go through before any platform would look at his application, and every day of waiting was a day his competitor's bhujia sat on the shelf in a dark store three kilometres from his factory.
I mention it because people ask me about the listing screens first. The screens are the easy part. The paperwork decides whether you ever see them.
How to List Products on Blinkit and Zepto Without Losing the First Month
The honest answer is that you apply to both separately and they don't talk to each other. Each one wants its own forms, its own catalogue format and its own bank verification. A brand that finishes with one and assumes the other will be a copy-paste job usually loses two weeks finding out otherwise.
Something like 60 to 70 percent of the rejections I've seen came from mismatched names. The GST certificate says one thing, the brand label says another and the bank account holds a third. Whoever reviews it at the other end isn't going to guess that Sharma Foods Pvt Ltd and "Sharma's Crunch" are the same people. Nobody there has the time.
I now ask clients to put all three names on one sheet before anything gets uploaded. It takes ten minutes. It has saved weeks.
Blinkit Seller Onboarding and the Documents Behind It
A tiled-grout brand I worked with last winter went in expecting a quick form. The form was quick. What came after was a request for the brand authorisation letter, because they were reselling a product made by someone else under a distribution agreement. Nobody on the team had that letter in a state they could send.
The agreement existed. It was in the managing partner's email from 2022, attached to a thread about something else entirely. Finding it took two days and a phone call to an accountant who had moved cities.
Packaged food has its own wrinkle with shelf life. The dark stores want stock that arrives with a good chunk of its life left, and a manufacturer who dispatches a batch with only half the shelf life remaining will see it bounced at the gate. We had a protein bar client in Gurugram lose a full pallet that way, around 400 cartons, I think. They'd produced it for a regular retailer who didn't care about dates, and the quick commerce receiving team did.
GST, bank details and the small things that stall everything
The cancelled cheque has to be legible. That sounds trivial until you've seen a phone photo taken under a ceiling fan with the cheque half in shadow. Rejections for this are common and the email telling you about it often arrives four days later.
What Zepto Seller Registration Looked Like for a Candle Brand
Here's one job I can walk through properly, because it went sideways in an instructive way.
A candle maker in Jaipur, three people in a rented unit, wanted to be in the city dark stores before Diwali. It was early September. I told her it was tight and she said she'd already printed 5,000 labels. Fine.
Registration itself took about two days. The catalogue took eleven. Her candles came in four scents and three sizes, so twelve variants, and each needed its own barcode, its own weight, its own MRP and its own set of photos. She had barcodes for six of them. The other six had been printed with a single shared code because her earlier retailer never asked.
So she reprinted. Not all 5,000 labels, thank God, just the ones for the six variants, but still something like 2,500 stickers and a courier run to a printer in Delhi. The cost was maybe 9,000 rupees plus the delay. It would have been a few hundred if someone had checked the barcode sheet in week one.
The part nobody tells you is that the platform will often accept a duplicate code on upload and reject it later, at the receiving stage. By then the stock is already in a truck. She found out when the first consignment came back with a note and a lot of apology.
She made it before Diwali, barely. Her gift hampers sold out in two of the four stores she was listed in, and she'd have sold more if she'd had a second batch ready, which she didn't because the reprint ate her cash.
Catalogue Photos and the Barcode Problem
Photos on a white background, shot straight on, with the pack front clearly legible. That's what gets approved. What gets sent is usually a lifestyle shot with a plant in the corner and a wooden table.
I've watched a perfectly good spice brand get three rounds of photo rejection because the net weight on the pack was angled away from the camera. Each round took a couple of days to come back. They lost most of a week on a thing that took thirty seconds to fix once someone said what was wrong.
If the brand has the volume to justify it, I'd get a proper packshot done by someone who does this daily. A decent studio in most cities charges a few thousand rupees for a batch, and a freelancer with a lightbox can do reasonably well for less. What I'd skip is the expensive creative shoot, the one with models and props. The quick commerce screen is small and nobody reads it slowly.
Barcodes deserve their own paragraph, and I've already given one. Each variant gets its own, and the numbers have to match what's printed. Seems obvious. Isn't.
Weights, units and descriptions
One client listed a 250 gram pack and typed the weight as 0.25 in a field that expected grams. The product appeared on the app as a quarter of a gram of tea for a hundred and eighty rupees. It was live for about an hour before a friend texted a screenshot with three laughing faces.
Pricing, Margin and the Credit Note Surprise
The commission is never the whole cost. A cosmetics founder I know did her sums on the percentage and felt fine about it. Then came the return handling charges, the damaged stock deductions and a promotional contribution she'd agreed to without reading the line properly. Her real margin was something like half of what she'd planned.
She wasn't being careless. The agreement was fourteen pages and written for lawyers. I'd say most brands I've dealt with read the first two pages and the last one.
My own view, and I'll say it plainly, is that quick commerce onboarding in India rewards the brand that does its pricing homework before the call, not after it. A founder who walks in knowing their landed cost per unit, including packaging and the courier to the warehouse, can negotiate. A founder who doesn't will accept whatever number gets said first.
Credit notes are the other surprise. When a platform runs a discount and asks you to fund part of it, the money comes off your next payment as a credit note. It shows up in your books weeks later. If your accountant isn't expecting it, the month-end reconciliation turns into a long afternoon with a lot of sighing.
The Mistake I See Almost Every Time
Brands go live and then leave. They get the listing approved, ship a first consignment, and move on to the next thing. Three weeks later the product is out of stock in half the stores and the search ranking has slipped, because nobody was watching availability.
Stock-outs on these platforms get punished quietly. The listing sinks. Customers who searched for you see a competitor first, and by the time you've restocked the ranking has to be earned again. I had a tea brand in Lucknow who went out of stock for a long weekend and took about five weeks to climb back, and they never quite got their old spot.
The fix is dull. Someone checks the inventory dashboard every morning, and someone else gets the replenishment orders out the same week. A single person doing both is fine as long as they actually do it, which in a small company usually means nobody does.
This is where ecommerce management support starts earning its fee. We don't pitch it hard because it isn't glamorous work. It's catalogue fixes, stock alerts, chasing a receiving team about a rejected carton and reading the agreement properly. But the brands that keep a person on it tend to hold their shelf position, and the ones that don't tend to write to me in month three asking what happened.
When Doing It Yourself Is Fine and When It Isn't
A single-SKU brand with one founder and a clean set of documents can do this alone. I'd say go ahead. The forms are tedious but manageable, and learning the platform from the inside has value.
Past ten or fifteen SKUs it changes. Variants multiply, photo rounds multiply and the rejection emails start arriving faster than anyone can answer them. A clothing brand I worked with had around forty listings across two platforms and was losing most of an afternoon every day just keeping them in sync.
That is the point where TIS Nexus usually gets a call. Sometimes the call comes sooner, after a first rejection that nobody can decode. We've read enough of those emails to know what the vague ones mean.
Back to the Namkeen Maker
He did get listed. Renewed licence, matching names on everything, a barcode sheet I made him check twice. Eleven days from the second submission to the first live SKU.
His first month's reorders surprised him. He'd budgeted for a slow start, and instead he was running his packing line an extra shift. He called me about a courier problem and I told him to speak to someone who could handle the listings day to day while he sorted out the factory side. He went quiet, then said he'd think about it. That was two weeks ago.