The Highprime blog

Notes on selling things.

2026-08-31 Eight questions to ask an Amazon agency before you sign Every agency pitch sounds the same by the third one. These eight questions do not, and the answers separate the people who will run your account from the people who will run a template on it. 2026-08-31 Amazon and Flipkart are not the same buyer The most common Flipkart brief we get is an Amazon account with the platform swapped. Different buyer, different ad products, and a year decided in a handful of weeks. What transfers and what does not. 2026-08-31 Your Amazon listing is the leak, not your ads Conversion rate and cost per click do exactly the same thing to your ACoS. Only one of them is free. The arithmetic for why listing work beats bid work, and what actually moves the number. 2026-08-31 Your break-even ACoS is about half what you think it is Every ACoS calculator tells you break-even equals your margin. None of them subtract returns. Put an Indian RTO rate into the arithmetic and the real number drops by nearly half. 2026-08-31 What Amazon marketing agencies in India actually charge Indian Amazon agencies charge between 25,000 and 2 lakh a month, on one of three fee models. The model matters more than the number, because each one pays us to do something different. 2026-08-14 How to start a skincare brand in India the right way Six steps for entering India's skincare market without burning money. Find a niche, build a concept, test 100 units, and sell them before you touch an ad. 2026-08-11 Should you start a skincare brand in India? What the numbers say Most Indian skincare brands lose money. So why does a new one launch every week? The revenue PR, the manufacturer's maths, and the costs nobody mentions. 2026-08-10 Six of India's ten biggest skincare brands lost money last year Nykaa kept 2 paise per rupee. Pilgrim put 57% of revenue into ads. I read the FY25 filings of India's ten biggest skincare brands. Six lost money. 2026-07-09 A 4.99-star property in Manali was losing money. The fix wasn't more marketing. A beautiful Manali property with a 4.99 rating was running at a loss with a crore of debt on the owner. The problem wasn't the product or the marketing. It was the audience the discounts were buying. 2026-07-09 A coffee shop in Nepal taught me more about offers than any marketing course Buy one get one free, said the board outside. Inside, the offer had conditions nobody could parse. The customer walks out and never returns. Why simple offers sell and clever offers backfire. 2026-07-09 Buying followers with Meta ads is slow poison Follower campaigns can add 50,000 followers in a month. They can also cap your reach permanently. What actually happens inside Meta's algorithm when you buy your audience. 2026-07-09 The Milestone Number: the only math you need before paying an influencer Before you pay an influencer ₹50,000, calculate one number: how many products this collaboration must sell to break even. Most founders never do. The math takes five minutes. 2026-07-09 We told a founder not to market online. Here's why. A fruit juice brand with a ₹99 product asked us to run their marketing. We refused. Six months and one agency later, the business shut down. The 30% margin rule explained. 2026-07-09 Your ₹400 serum is losing money on every order. Here's the math. MRP ₹400, product cost ₹150, shipping ₹100, CAC up to ₹300, then COD charges, RTO and GST. The full unit economics of why new D2C brands bleed on every single order.