Services — Performance & Digital Marketing
Ecommerce Marketing Agency
Ellington & Vale is an ecommerce marketing agency for D2C brands and marketplace sellers in Delhi NCR and across India. We work across a brand's own site and the marketplaces it sells on — Amazon, Flipkart — as one business with one P&L, not as two separate accounts run by two separate teams that never compare notes.
That last part is the whole point of this page.
Why "own-site" and "marketplace" can't be run as separate accounts
Most ecommerce brands in India sell in at least three places: their own website, Amazon, and Flipkart. Most agencies structure the work the same way the brand's internal team usually does — one person or team on the D2C site, a different one on marketplace, rarely a shared view of which channel is actually making money.
That split creates a specific and expensive blind spot. A brand can be bidding against its own marketplace listing with its own site ads, discounting on Amazon in a way that trains customers to wait for a sale, or discovering that its "best" acquisition channel is only cheap because it is cannibalising a channel that converts better. None of that shows up if the two sides are reported separately.
We start from one view of revenue and margin across every channel a brand sells through, and build the marketing plan on top of that — not the other way round.
D2C: brand growth on your own site
Acquisition and retention on a brand's own storefront, treated as one system rather than two budgets. The acquisition side pulls in new customers through paid and organic channels; the retention side decides whether that customer is worth having acquired. Running them separately is how a brand ends up with a growing top line and a flat or shrinking bottom line.
Marketplace: Amazon and Flipkart
Selling on Amazon and Flipkart is a different discipline from running a D2C site, and treating it as an extension of the same playbook is a common and costly mistake. Marketplace visibility runs on its own ranking logic — listing quality, review velocity, fulfilment method, sponsored placement — and the auction dynamics for sponsored ads on Amazon are their own specialism, closer to retail media than to a Google or Meta campaign.
The searches around this are worth naming precisely, because they point at two different things. Amazon marketing services is what people search for when they want Amazon's own advertising product — that is a navigational search for Amazon's platform, not an agency, and this page is not written to chase it. An Amazon marketing agency is a different search entirely: someone looking for a team to run that advertising on their behalf. That is the service this page describes.
Retention, CRM and lifecycle
For most Indian D2C brands, the second purchase is where the actual economics turn. A customer acquired at breakeven or a small loss on the first order only becomes profitable if they come back — and whether they come back is decided by lifecycle marketing: email and WhatsApp flows, post-purchase sequences, win-back campaigns, and a loyalty structure that gives a repeat customer a reason to stay one.
Retention work is less visible than an acquisition campaign and consistently underinvested for exactly that reason. It rarely shows up in a pitch deck. It shows up in the P&L eighteen months later, in whether the brand's CAC is still workable at scale.
Conversion rate optimisation
Traffic that does not convert is spend that did not need to happen. Before adding budget to any acquisition channel, we look at what the site does with the traffic it already gets: product page structure, checkout friction, page speed, mobile experience — mobile carries the majority of ecommerce traffic in India, and a site that performs well on desktop and poorly on mobile is losing a category of customer most brands never audit for.
Paid media for ecommerce
Acquisition spend across Google, Meta and marketplace sponsored placements, run against contribution margin rather than a headline ROAS figure. We go into channel mechanics, testing structure and measurement in more depth on our performance marketing page — this section is specifically about how paid media changes when the product is being sold in more than one place at once, which is the case for nearly every ecommerce brand we would work with.
Reporting: one number, not three dashboards
Blended ROAS is the number most ecommerce brands are handed, and it is the least useful one. It tells you the ratio of ad spend to revenue across every channel combined, which conceals which channel is buying customers the brand would have got anyway and which is genuinely incremental.
Contribution margin — revenue minus cost of goods, shipping, returns, payment fees and ad spend — is the number that tells you whether growth is worth having. It is harder to calculate and slower to report, and it is the only one of the three that answers the question a founder is actually asking.
LTV:CAC tells you whether the model works at all. A brand can have excellent unit economics on the first order and a broken business if the customer never returns for a second one.
We report against contribution margin and LTV:CAC wherever the brand's data supports it, not just the blended figure that is easiest to produce.
FAQ
- What does an ecommerce marketing agency do?
- Runs acquisition, retention and conversion for a brand selling online — across its own site and, where relevant, marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart — as one connected system rather than separate channel-by-channel accounts.
- How much does ecommerce marketing cost in India?
- We don't publish rates, because the range is wide enough that a number would mislead more people than it helped. Cost is driven mainly by monthly media spend under management, how many channels are live (own site alone versus own site plus two marketplaces is a different engagement), how much creative and content production is needed, and whether tracking and attribution are already set up correctly. Tell us the numbers and we'll tell you honestly whether a budget is workable.
- Do you manage Amazon and Flipkart as well as our own site?
- Yes — that combined view is the reason this page exists as one service rather than three. Managing marketplace and D2C separately is the most common structural mistake we see in this category.
- What ROAS should a D2C brand expect?
- There is no honest single number — it depends on category, average order value, margin and repeat rate, and any agency quoting a guaranteed multiple before seeing your numbers is selling a sales instrument, not a forecast. What we can tell you, once we see your margin structure, is whether a target is realistic.
- Do you handle product photography and listings?
- Listing structure and optimisation, yes, as part of marketplace management. Photography and content production scope depends on what you already have — tell us and we'll say what's needed.
Your Next World
Let's create something distinctive.
Tell us what you are building. We will help give it the clarity, character and presence to be recognised.