Performance Marketing
2026-10-22 · 8 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
Instagram and Facebook remain valuable for retail, but less as a polished catalog and more as a place where customers discover products through genuine, slightly imperfect content - a staff member showing new stock arriving, a quick video of a product in use, customers tagging the shop in their own posts. This kind of content tends to outperform studio product shots for driving actual foot traffic and messages.
User-generated content - reposting what real customers post about your shop - is particularly underused by small Nepali retailers and tends to build trust faster than anything the shop produces itself, because it comes from someone with no incentive to exaggerate.
Festival season drives a disproportionate share of annual retail revenue in Nepal, and the shops that plan their ad spend, inventory, and content calendar around Dashain and Tihar weeks ahead of time consistently outperform those that react once the season has already started. Costs on both Meta and Google tend to rise during this period as every retailer competes for the same attention, so budgets planned in advance stretch further than budgets scrambled together at the last minute.
Off-season months are often the better time to test new creative and offers at a lower cost, building a playbook that is ready to scale once the festival rush begins.
Many small and mid-size retail shops in Nepal do not need a full ecommerce website to sell online - a well-organized WhatsApp Business catalog or a Viber broadcast list, paired with eSewa or Khalti for payment, covers a large share of what customers actually want: see the product, ask a quick question, pay, arrange delivery or pickup.
This approach is dramatically cheaper than building and maintaining a full ecommerce site, and for many shops it is genuinely the right tool for their current size, not a lesser substitute for a "real" website.
Retail marketing budgets in Nepal are usually smaller than B2B or consultancy budgets, and that is appropriate given typical margins. A small shop can realistically start testing Meta ads with NPR 10,000 to 20,000 a month in ad spend, with a management fee - if using outside help rather than running it in-house - typically in the NPR 15,000 to 30,000 range for basic social media management.
The signal to move beyond WhatsApp and social selling is usually volume - once order management over WhatsApp becomes genuinely hard to track, once delivery across a wider area becomes a regular request, or once a catalog grows too large to browse comfortably in a chat thread. At that point, a proper ecommerce site with eSewa or Khalti integration starts paying for itself. Arcetis builds both ends of this - simple WhatsApp and catalog setups for shops that are not there yet, and full ecommerce sites for those that are - because pushing a shop into a bigger website before it needs one is usually just an unnecessary cost.
Not always, at least not at first. A well-maintained Google Business Profile, an active Instagram or Facebook page, and a WhatsApp Business catalog cover most of what a small shop needs. A full website becomes worth it once order volume or delivery complexity outgrows what a chat-based catalog can handle.
It depends heavily on the category and typical order value, but many small shops roughly double their normal monthly ad spend for the festival period, planned and budgeted in advance rather than decided on the fly once competition and costs have already risen.
There is no universal answer, but for most shops with a physical location, a complete Google Business Profile combined with Instagram or Facebook for visual content covers the majority of what drives customers in. WhatsApp handles the conversation and transaction once someone is interested.