Choosing an agency
How to choose an Amazon agency: criteria, questions and red flags
A good Amazon agency tells you what it will not do, shows you a sample report before you sign, and leaves the account and the brand on your side. Below: how to judge the scope on offer, four questions to ask before the contract, and the warning signs. Some of them point straight back at us, and we say so.
- Client record month
- EUR 1.5M/mo
- Sales platforms
- 12+
- Years on marketplaces
- 10+
What to demand
What the scope has to cover to be worth paying for
Do not compare offers by the number of bullet points. Check whether someone takes responsibility for the six areas where mistakes cost the most, and whether they can tell you the order they would fix them in.
Product data and catalogue
Identifiers, attributes, variations and images are the foundation everything else sits on. An offer that opens with advertising has skipped a step that always comes back.
Listings written for your category
Titles, bullets, descriptions and A+ content shaped by the rules of your category, not one template for everyone. Ask to see a listing from a category close to yours.
Advertising measured against profit
Campaigns run to a break-even point someone has actually calculated, not to a number in a dashboard. Ask whether a commission is added on top of your ad budget, because it changes the whole sum.
Pricing, Buy Box and margin
A pricing policy and repricing with a floor derived from full unit cost. Without it, revenue growth can eat margin faster than it builds it.
Account health and compliance
Account Health, response to complaints and blocks, VAT and OSS, EPR and GPSR. This is the area where silence on the vendor side gets expensive fastest.
Stock and fulfilment
FBA or FBM, a replenishment plan, storage limits and fees. The best listing in the category still cannot sell stock that is not in the warehouse.
An agency pays off when you are buying a capability you do not have and do not want to build from scratch: entering a new market, cleaning up an account after years of improvisation, or running several platforms in parallel without growing the team.
There are three situations where you should not hire one. Better to hear about them now than after the first invoice.
When the product does not hold up on price and margin against its category. Management can improve visibility and conversion, but it will not rescue unit economics that land on zero.
When nobody on your side has time to receive the work. Without one person who knows the numbers and makes the calls, the relationship turns into an exchange of reports nobody reads.
When you need one specific thing: an appeal against a suspension, a rewrite of twenty listings, a VAT registration. That is usually cheaper as a single project than as a monthly retainer.
There is also a case where your own team beats any external vendor, us included: when the scale supports several people with separate roles, or when a correct product page needs engineering or certification knowledge only your company holds. We ran that comparison separately, in our piece on agency versus in-house.
Finally, three warning signs. Each one is visible before you sign, as long as you ask about it.
The account or brand sits with the agency
The seller account, the trademark and Brand Registry should be registered to your company, with the vendor working on granted user permissions. The reverse means that when you part ways, you lose the channel.
Results promised before any audit
A guaranteed rank, a guaranteed Buy Box or a growth percentage quoted in the first meeting, without anyone looking at your data. Nobody controls the Amazon algorithm or what competitors do next.
No sample report, no margin in the model
A vendor who cannot show a sample monthly report before the contract usually reports completed tasks instead of sales, ad cost and margin. A fee calculated purely on revenue sends the same signal: it rewards growth even when discounts and ads paid for it.
Trusted partner
The numbers behind our work
We do not promise results in a slide deck. We show them in the data of eCommerce brands we have been running on marketplaces for years.
- Over
- €35Min marketplace sales generated
- Over
- 70 brandsmanaged end-to-end
- On average
- +65%sales growth in the first year
- Over
- 20 yearsof experience
- On average
- 98.7%of clients stay with us
With Amazonway we started selling on Amazon from scratch. The team guided us through account registration, FBA and PPC campaigns, and took care of listing optimization. After 18 months of working together our sales exceeded €1.5M a month. Without their support we would never have scaled the channel this fast.
Before you sign
Four questions, in the order worth asking them
What do you see on my account?
Ask it in the first meeting, before price comes up. The answer shows whether anyone looked at your data or is reciting a deck. Ask for the findings in writing.
Who exactly will run the account?
A name, experience in your category, how many accounts one person handles and who covers holidays. The person in the sales meeting is rarely the person doing the work.
What does your reporting look like?
Ask for a sample report, redacted if it belongs to another client. You want sales, ad cost and margin in it, plus last month decisions and what they changed.
What happens when we stop?
Notice period, how access is handed back, and a list of what stays with you: the account, campaigns, content and the history of decisions. After the split it is too late to agree this.
FAQ
Questions from someone comparing offers
What access should an Amazon agency work on?
On permissions granted inside your own seller account, with your company as the owner. Never hand over the main login and never let the account be registered to the vendor.
The setup has a simple test: you can revoke the access yourself, in minutes, without asking anyone for permission.
What belongs in the contract besides the price?
A scope that separates what the agency does from what stays on your side. Ownership of the account, the brand and the content produced. How and how often you are reported to. The named person running the account and the cover arrangement. The exit procedure, including handing access back.
It is worth writing down who makes pricing decisions. That is the one area where the interests of a seller and an agency genuinely diverge.
What notice period is reasonable?
There is no market standard here and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Two things matter more than the length: symmetry, meaning the same period for both sides, and a written handover procedure.
Be careful with fixed-term contracts you cannot exit early and with penalties that only run one way. A short notice period without a handover clause can hurt more than a longer one with it.
How do you compare offers with different fee models?
Convert them to the same period and the same scope. Count every component: the fixed fee, the commission on sales and its thresholds, any commission on the ad budget, per listing charges and the cost of adding the next market.
A pure commission model looks safe at the start and often turns out to be the most expensive at volume. A pure retainer is predictable but ties nothing to your result. A combination usually beats either on its own.
What can no Amazon agency honestly promise?
A rank in Amazon search, the Buy Box, a specific growth percentage or a date for reinstating a suspended account. Those depend on Amazon, on competitors and on your product.
What an agency can commit to is scope, launch pace, reporting and response time on incidents. An offer heavy on outcome guarantees and thin on process guarantees has it the wrong way round.
How does Amazonway answer these questions?
We start with a free audit of the account, product data, competitors and margins, and it ends with a diagnosis of what blocks sales rather than with a contract. We work on a retainer plus success fee, the rates are published on our pricing page, and we add no commission on top of your ad budget. The cadence is monthly.
The fair caveat: our success fee is calculated on revenue, not on margin, so the question about who guards the price floor applies to us as well. And if the audit shows that your scale supports an in-house team, or that a narrow, heavily regulated category needs one industry specialist, we will say so.
Put the same questions to us
The free audit ends with a diagnosis and a concrete scope, not a pitch. Use it to ask the four questions from this page and compare our answers with the other offers on the table.