₹25,000 of ad credit can be sitting in your Blinkit Ads wallet before you’ve sold a single pack. You spend it on Blinkit ads through Brand Central, Blinkit’s self-serve ads platform at brands.blinkit.com. There you choose a campaign type and set a daily budget and bids. Then you pick the cities where your ads show. Blinkit has no fixed minimum budget.
The credit comes from your product requests. Blinkit sorts its sellers into five tiers, from Iron up to Platinum. Iron and Bronze sellers pay ₹25,000 into the Ads wallet for each new product request. Silver, Gold and Platinum sellers pay nothing.
Blinkit holds the money until it approves the product. Then it becomes ad credit for any of your products, valid for a year. In Blinkit’s Seller Hub Guide, the ₹25,000 applies to each product request. The guide doesn’t mention a charge for each city or state.
Say you make ragi cookies in three flavours, and Blinkit has approved all three. As an Iron seller, you now have ₹75,000 of ad credit. Spend it within the year, but only once your stock is in place.
How to log in to Blinkit Ads
If you sell through Seller Hub, you reach Brand Central from Seller Hub itself. Open the Advertise tab and add the email ID of each person who’ll run your ads. That can be someone on your team, or your ad agency.
Each person then gets an email invitation with an activation link. After that, they log in at brands.blinkit.com with that email ID. You can add or remove users later from the same tab.
The Advertise tab also shows your Ads wallet balance, a Recharge button and a link to your ads dashboard. Brand Central runs in your web browser. Blinkit’s public pages don’t mention an ads API for brands.
For questions about ads, Brand Central’s email is brands@blinkit.com. To learn the dashboard, book one of Blinkit’s weekly live sessions from How to Sell in Seller Hub. Blinkit says these sessions cover ads, as well as listings, stock and payouts.
Not selling on Blinkit yet? Start with our guide to selling on Blinkit. For help with anything else in Seller Hub, our guide to Blinkit’s support contacts explains who to ask.
The eight Blinkit ad formats
Brand Central’s page lists eight ad formats:
- Prime Banner
- Product Booster
- Recommendation Ads
- Product Shelf
- Brand Spotlight
- Brand Store
- E-com Shelf
- Listing Spotlight
Blinkit names these formats in public, but it doesn’t describe each one. You choose between them when you create a campaign.
The page sorts Blinkit’s ads into two kinds. Performance ads show your products in search, on category pages and in the cart, while shoppers decide what to buy. Reach ads target groups of shoppers by their behaviour, their interests and what they plan to buy.
For banners and other display ads, you supply the artwork. Brand Central’s terms say Blinkit decides whether your artwork goes live. They also say your ads can’t be misleading. For a food brand, keep every claim on a banner to what’s printed on the pack. Our guide to FSSAI rules for quick commerce lists the claims that get food listings pulled.
For a first campaign, we’d start with search. Brand Central’s terms call this a search campaign. You bid on keywords: the words shoppers type into Blinkit’s search.
What Blinkit ads cost
Blinkit doesn’t publish its ad rates. You set a daily budget and your bids, and you pay for clicks or for impressions, depending on the format. An impression is one view of your ad.
Brand Central’s terms also cap your bill for search campaigns. With a daily budget, a month’s bill can’t go over that budget times the days in the month. With one overall budget, the campaign stops when that budget runs out, or on its end date.
If you sell through Seller Hub, you pay for your ads from the Ads wallet. To add money, click Recharge in the Advertise tab. You pay GST on top of each recharge. Your monthly invoices for ads are in Seller Hub under Billing, then Invoices.
For Iron and Bronze sellers, Seller Hub asks for the ₹25,000 when a product request clears Blinkit’s queue. You have 48 hours to pay, or the request goes back into the queue. Blinkit takes about seven days to approve a product request. While Blinkit reviews the product, or if it rejects the product, the money stays on hold in your Ads wallet.
What to fix before you spend
An ad sends shoppers to your product. It can’t sell stock that isn’t in the dark store near them. So check your stock, your fill rate and your product tile before you spend.
Your stock in each city
A new product starts in trial. Before you list it, you choose a primary cluster: one Blinkit warehouse and its 10 to 15 best-performing dark stores. The product reaches more dark stores only as it passes Blinkit’s reviews, which come every 30 days.
So the cookie brand’s first ads should run only in its trial cluster’s city. Anywhere else, there are no cookies to buy.
Ads can help a product pass trial, because Blinkit checks its daily sales in each dark store. But Blinkit also wants the product in stock in at least half of those dark stores. If your ads sell out the dark stores faster than you refill them, the product fails that test.
Before you choose cities in Brand Central, open the Expansion tab in Seller Hub. Its detailed report shows where your product is live. It also shows your availability by city and by dark store, with the reasons wherever the product is missing.
Your fill rate
Fill rate is the share of the stock on your ROs that reaches Blinkit’s warehouse. An RO is the order you create in Seller Hub to send stock to a Blinkit warehouse.
When less stock arrives than your RO promised, the dark stores run out sooner. Your ads can’t sell what isn’t there.
Blinkit told sellers in October 2026 that fill rate now counts towards their tier. And your tier decides whether you pay ₹25,000 for each new product request. Our guide to Blinkit’s fill rate and seller tiers explains both.
Before you raise a budget, check the fill rate on your recent ROs. It’s in Seller Hub’s Inventory tab, under Scheduled Inventory.
Your product on a small tile
Shoppers on Blinkit choose from small tiles, in search and on category pages. An ad puts your tile in front of more shoppers. It doesn’t make the tile any easier to read.
Blinkit’s visual guidelines set the rules for your main image. It needs a transparent background, with the product in the centre and a clear margin around it. The text on the pack must be readable. Blinkit doesn’t allow extra tags or logo strips on this image.
Then test it yourself. Look at your main image on a phone, at the size of a tile. Can someone who doesn’t know your brand read the flavour and the pack size? If not, fix the image or the front of the pack before you pay for clicks.
Your first campaign
For the cookie brand, we’d start small: one search campaign, in the trial city only. Blinkit’s own page says most brands start small to test, then scale.
To choose keywords, open Keyword Analytics in Seller Hub, under How to Sell. It shows what shoppers search for in each city, month by month. It also shows how often a search ends in an add-to-cart, and which products shoppers buy most after that search.
Pick the keywords that describe your product, such as “ragi cookies” and “millet biscuits”. Start with the ones that already lead to add-to-carts. Then set a daily budget, and a bid for each keyword.
Brand Central also lets you aim your ads at groups of shoppers and at times of day. Leave those for later, once you know which keywords sell.
Each week, check the campaign and your stock together. Brand Central shows impressions, clicks, conversions, ROAS and brand search lift. A conversion is a sale that came from your ad. ROAS is your return on ad spend: the sales your ads brought in, divided by what they cost. Brand search lift is the rise in searches for your brand name.
Blinkit also lets you compare the sales from your ads with the sales you made without them. If a city’s dark stores are running low, pause your ads there until your next RO arrives.
Ads outside the Blinkit app
Blinkit runs a second ads platform, MediaMax. With it, you run Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram that send shoppers to your products on Blinkit. Blinkit says Google ads are coming soon. MediaMax uses Blinkit’s own shopper groups, and it shows ads only where your product is in stock.
Blinkit charges no fee for MediaMax itself. You pay Meta or Google for the ads. But Blinkit suggests a budget of 3% to 5% of your brand’s monthly sales, or ₹3 lakh, whichever is higher. For a brand still in trial, we’d start with Brand Central.
Selling on Zepto or Swiggy Instamart too? Our guide to Zepto and Instamart ads covers their platforms.
Where we come in
We onboard brands on Blinkit and run their ads, so we know where first-timers get stuck. Often it’s ads aimed at cities where the stock has run out. Sometimes the main image doesn’t show the flavour clearly on a small tile. Or the fill rate drops as the ads start to work.
We can plan your keywords and cities, set up your campaigns in Brand Central, and check them every week against your stock. It all runs in your own account: you add us as a user, and you keep the login. See our marketplace ads work and our Blinkit page.
