AI ad creatives for a small Indian store: offer posters, story ads and price reveals in minutes.

Why the image decides whether the ad works

On a phone, the image is the first thing a buyer sees and often the only thing. Meta cuts the primary text after a line or two. A WhatsApp status has no text at all, only the picture. So the picture has to carry the whole message: what the product is, what the offer is, and what to do next. A plain product photo carries the first part and nothing else.

The second problem is volume. Audiences tire of a creative that keeps showing up, and Meta's own guidance is to refresh creatives when frequency climbs. A designer charges per creative and takes a day; doing it yourself in a design app takes twenty minutes each if you are practised. Either way, a small store ends up running one image for weeks because making the second one is a chore.

The creative studio changes the cost of the second image. You pick a style, pick a product, type the headline, the offer and the call to action, choose a size and a quality, and press Generate. The product in your photo stays exactly as it is; only the scene, the surface, the light and the text around it change. A standard creative costs 12 credits, which is about ₹12.

The six ad and festive styles

The studio has twelve styles in four groups. Six are product photos (Studio packshot, Lifestyle scene, Hand-held (UGC style), Flat lay, Premium editorial, Food hero), covered in AI product photos for a small business. The other six are the ones built for ads and festivals, and they are the ones that render your text on the image.

Every one of these carries the same instruction to the model: use the attached photo as the exact product and keep its shape, colour, label, pattern and proportions identical. Only the scene changes. That instruction is the reason the studio asks you to pick a product rather than describe one: the product's cover photo becomes the reference.

What to type: headline, offer and call to action

The three text boxes are not prompts. What you type is rendered on the image exactly as written, spelling, capitals and rupee sign included, and the model is told to render it crisp and legible and to put no other words on the image. So write like a poster, not like a caption.

• Headline: three to six words that name the product or the moment. "Handloom cotton sarees", "Fresh mango pickle is back", "Gift boxes for Rakhi". Not "Check out our amazing new collection now!!" Long headlines become small text, and small text is unreadable in a feed.
• Offer: the number, and only one number. "Flat 20% off", "₹499", "Buy 2 get 1 free", "Free shipping above ₹999". The offer goes into a bold accent badge on the poster styles and into the big price tag on Price reveal. Type the rupee sign as ₹, not Rs.
• CTA: what the thumb does next. "Order on WhatsApp", "Tap to shop", "Shop the sale". Match it to where the ad actually sends people: a WhatsApp CTA on an ad that lands on your store page confuses the buyer.
• Details box (Festival sale banner, and the product styles): the festival name or the setting. "Eid gifting", "Navratri sale", "on a marble table". Two or three words is enough.

If you set a brand colour in the store, the studio uses it sparingly as the accent: the badge, the tint behind a price reveal, the glow behind a launch. Your store name goes small in a corner on the poster and banner styles, so the creative reads as yours even when it is forwarded.

Sizes: one creative per placement

The studio offers five sizes. Three of them cover almost every ad and WhatsApp use; the other two are for the website and the product page.

Make the 4:5 and the 9:16 version of the same offer. Meta lets you assign a different image per placement inside one ad, so the feed gets the portrait and Stories get the tall one. Using one square image everywhere means a smaller ad in feed and black bars in Stories, and it looks like exactly what it is.

For WhatsApp, use 9:16 for a status and 1:1 for a broadcast message. A 9:16 image in a chat opens as a tall preview the buyer has to scroll; a square one is seen whole.

Quality tiers, credits and models

Every creative has a quality tier, and the tier is what you pay for. One credit is ₹1 of face value, whether it came from the 1,500 included in the plan each month or from a top-up pack, so the credit column below is also the rupee column.

The rule of thumb for ads: Standard for the feed, story and WhatsApp versions you make in bulk; Premium for the one hero creative you will put most of the budget behind; Ultra when the image carries a lot of text, because text rendering is where cheaper tiers slip; Draft when you are not sure which style suits the product and want to see four directions for 8 credits.

The price is shown next to the Generate button before you press it, the balance updates the moment the image lands, and a generation that fails is refunded automatically. The full credit table and three example months are in AI credits explained.

A testing plan: 3 hooks × 2 formats

Do not make one creative and hope. Make six: three hooks (the reason someone stops scrolling) in two formats (feed 4:5 and story 9:16). Run them for three or four days, switch off the ones nobody clicks, and put the budget behind the winner. This is the plan the campaign planner writes for you; the studio is where you render it.

1. Pick three hooks. One price hook ("₹499, free shipping"), one benefit hook ("Pure cotton, no itch"), one occasion hook ("Diwali gift box, ships in 2 days"). Each must be true of the product as sold. The campaign planner proposes five hook angles from your real best-sellers for 5 credits if you would rather not start from a blank page.
2. Draft first. Render each hook once as a Draft on the Offer poster style: 3 × 2 credits = 6 credits. This is for the layout and the mood, not for posting. Adjust the headline wording if it wraps badly.
3. Render the six. Offer poster at 4:5 and Story / Reel cover at 9:16 for each hook, at Standard: 6 × 12 = 72 credits, about ₹72. If one is the hero you expect to scale, render that one again at Premium for 25 more.
4. Set them up in Ads Manager. One campaign, one ad set, three ads. In each ad, assign the 4:5 image to feed placements and the 9:16 to Stories and Reels. The walk-through is in how to run your first Instagram ad for your store.
5. Read the numbers after three days. Click-through rate tells you which hook stops people; cost per checkout tells you which one sells. Ledger, the co-founder agent, reads the visits and orders your store actually recorded and reports only what it read. Kill the two losers, move the budget to the winner, and render two fresh variations of the winning hook for the following week.

Honesty rules

AI images are cheap to make and easy to over-trust. Five rules keep you out of trouble with buyers, with Meta's ad review and with the ASCI guidelines that apply to advertising in India.

• The product stays identical, and you check. Every style instructs the model to keep the shape, colour, label, pattern and proportions of your photo and change only the scene. That is an instruction, not a guarantee. Look at every image before it goes anywhere. If a label reads wrong or a stitch moved, regenerate. A generation that errors out is refunded; an image you approve with a wrong product in it is your ad.
• No invented claims. The studio's prompts forbid fake logos and certification marks in the image; you must do the same in the text. No "100% organic" without a certificate, no "doctor recommended", no struck-through MRP that never existed.
• The price on the image is the price at checkout. If the poster says ₹499, the product page must say ₹499. Meta compares ads to their landing pages, and buyers screenshot.
• No real people. No celebrity likeness, and no face at all in the hand-held UGC style. A creative that looks like a testimonial from a person who does not exist is a fake testimonial.
• Read every word. Text rendering in image models has improved a great deal but still slips on long strings. Keep text short, use Ultra for text-heavy creatives, and read the image the way a buyer would before you post it.

What a creative costs in rupees

SitesPlaced AI Co-founder is ₹1,499 a month and includes 1,500 credits, plus everything in the ₹499 Growth plan. Top-up packs are 500 credits for ₹499, 1,000 for ₹999 and 2,500 for ₹2,499, and top-ups never expire while you are subscribed. Because a credit is ₹1 at face value, the arithmetic is simple.

The point is not that an AI creative is cheaper than a designer per image. It is that the second, third and sixth creative cost ₹12 each, so you can afford to test six and let the numbers choose, instead of committing the whole budget to the one image you had.

Doing it in the dashboard (3 minutes)

1. Open your store dashboard → AI Co-founder → Creative studio.
2. Choose the Ad creatives or Festive group, then a style. The card shows its default size and tier.
3. Pick the product. Its cover photo is the reference; if the product has no photo yet, the studio warns you and renders from the name and description, which is less faithful. Add a phone photo first.
4. Type the headline, offer and CTA exactly as you want them on the image.
5. Choose the size and the quality. The credit price sits next to the button.
6. Press Generate. Download the result, or press Add to gallery or Set as cover to attach it to the product on the live store.

Any SitesPlaced store owner can subscribe from the pricing page or from the AI Co-founder tab in the dashboard; the upgrade pays in place, through Razorpay in India and Dodo elsewhere. Growth plan sellers who upgrade keep everything they have.

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