In August 2026, Amazon and Flipkart both raised the cost of a cancelled order ahead of the festive season. Meesho did not. Its Zero Penalty policy, launched in March 2022, still says suppliers are not charged for cancelling an order or for an order that auto-cancels. That makes Meesho the odd one out among India’s big three marketplaces this festive season — and it is also why so many sellers are confused about what Meesho actually charges.
What Meesho’s Zero Penalty policy covers
When Meesho launched the policy in March 2022, it said sellers would not be penalised for self or auto cancellation of orders. It launched alongside Seven Day Payments, a seven-day payout cycle. Meesho’s supplier site continues to state zero penalties for supplier cancellations and auto cancellations.
The reasoning Meesho gave is that a supplier who cannot fulfil an order because of stock or an unforeseen problem should not also lose money for it. For small suppliers selling low-priced products, a cancellation penalty can easily be larger than the profit on the order.
How many sellers it applies to
Meesho does not publish how many sellers would have been penalised without the policy, so there is no count of sellers who benefit. What Meesho does report is the size of its seller base: 1.04 million annual transacting sellers as of the quarter ended 30 June 2026, up 81% year on year, serving 274 million annual transacting users. That is the number of sellers the policy applies to, not a count of sellers it has protected from a charge.
The error: guides that say Meesho does charge penalties
Search for Meesho cancellation charges in 2026 and you will find third-party guides quoting a Rs 50 late-dispatch penalty and a Rs 25 seller-cancellation penalty. Meesho’s own pages say the opposite for cancellations. We could not find those amounts in any Meesho publication.
There are a few ways a seller can end up believing a penalty applies:
- Out-of-date or copied guides. Penalty figures get repeated between sites long after the source has changed, or with no source at all.
- Charges that are not cancellation penalties. Return shipping, RTO costs and quality-related deductions still land on the payment sheet, and can be mistaken for penalties.
- Genuine errors. Meesho publishes a learning-hub lesson on handling incorrect penalties, which acknowledges that a deduction can be applied wrongly and needs disputing.
The fix is to trust your own settlement, not a guide — including this one.
How to check what you are actually charged
- Download your payment sheet from the Meesho Supplier Panel for a recent cycle.
- Look for any deduction labelled as a penalty against a cancelled order.
- If you find one on an order that was cancelled or auto-cancelled, dispute it through the supplier panel with the order ID.
- Separate penalties from return shipping and RTO costs, which are a different line and a different problem.
Our free payment-sheet P&L analyzer reads the settlement file and splits deductions order by order, which makes an unexpected penalty easy to spot. How to read the Meesho payment sheet explains each column.
What Zero Penalty does not mean
No penalty is not the same as no consequence. An order that auto-cancels because it was not dispatched is still a lost sale, and dispatch reliability still matters to how Meesho treats an account. Returns and RTO are also unaffected: they are the biggest cost on Meesho for most suppliers, and Meesho RTO and returns explained covers how to bring them down.
Meesho against Amazon and Flipkart
| Platform | Rule since | What a cancellation or late dispatch costs |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon (Easy Ship, Self Ship) | 17 Aug 2026 | 10% of order value below Rs 10,000, falling to 2% above Rs 1 lakh, plus 18% GST |
| Flipkart | 23 Aug 2026 | Rs 30, Rs 60 or Rs 90 per shipment, depending on the breach |
| Meesho | March 2022 | No penalty for seller or auto cancellations, per Meesho’s own Zero Penalty policy |
For a supplier choosing where to push festive volume, the difference is real: an unreliable dispatch week costs money on Amazon and Flipkart, and on Meesho it costs sales. The Flipkart penalty guide and Amazon cancellation fee guide cover the other two in detail.
If you would rather hand the panel over, our Meesho account management agency handles dispatch, returns and settlement checks as a routine.
Sources
Checked on 30 September 2026. Penalty rules change, so confirm the current rule in your seller panel before relying on any figure here.