How To Choose An Amazon Agency: The Practical Checklist Brands Use Before They Commit

Knowing how to choose an Amazon agency might be beneficial for your business yet selecting the wrong agency partner will lead to unnecessary financial costs and operational interruptions.  

Amazon requires constant monitoring because even minor adjustments to advertising campaigns and product listing standards and pricing strategies and inventory status will result in immediate sales effects.  

The common practice of selecting agencies through their appealing presentation materials and their ambiguous commitments leads to disappointment because it lacks understanding of actual work.  

A good agency gives you clear understanding of their complete operational procedure. The agency shows which activities they perform for specific purposes and they determine project success through their chosen metrics.  

The weak agency operates through unclear methods while it adjusts bids and produces circular reports.  

The term Amazon agency has multiple meanings which should be understood from the beginning. Some teams only manage PPC.  

Others manage all aspects of content and creative work while maintaining catalogue organization and solving problems.  

Some people excel at expanding their advertising budget yet they face difficulties when it comes to increasing conversion rates and executing basic functions.  

Ecommerce Intelligence provides Amazon growth and marketplace performance consultancy services from its UK base while helping brands that suffered through bad agency partnerships.  

The brand paid for management services but received no defined strategy or detailed performance updates or anything beyond advertising improvements.  

Setting Expectations: What Do You Actually Need Help With?

Before you shortlist agencies, get clear on what outcome you want. If you don’t, the agency will choose the narrative for you.

Ask yourself:

• Do we need to fix performance or scale performance?
• Are the issues mostly advertising efficiency, or are we struggling with conversion?
• Do we have catalogue issues, suppressed listings, variation problems, or content that is not converting?
• Are we looking for support on Amazon only, or wider marketplace strategy as well?

The clearer you are, the easier it becomes to judge who is genuinely a fit versus who is simply pitching a generic package.

How Amazon Agencies Charge (And Why It Matters)?

Now that you know how to choose an Amazon agency, it is important to know what they charge. Pricing alone is not the issue. Misaligned pricing is. Here are the common structures you’ll see:

Monthly retainer –  A flat monthly fee can work well if it includes a proper scope and you know what you’re getting.

Percentage of ad spend –  Common for PPC management. The risk is that spend can creep up because fees rise with it. If you go this route, insist on clear controls and a profitability conversation.

Percentage of revenue – This can sound “performance-based”, but it can become very expensive if growth happens quickly, and it can punish you for scaling.

Hybrid – Some agencies blend retainer plus performance, or retainer plus ad spend percentage. This can work if the targets are realistic and clearly defined.

The key is to ask: what is included?

If creative, listing improvements, reporting, and strategic work are not in scope, you’re paying for a narrow service. That might still be fine, but you need to know what you are buying.

1. Transparency: The Most Important Thing To Get Right

The fastest way to identify a poor fit is to look for transparency.

A strong agency will:

• Give you access to the account
• Explain their decisions clearly
• Share a change log (what they changed and why)
• Report in plain language

A weak agency will:

• hide behind dashboards
• talk only in vague terms like “optimisation”
• avoid specifics
• keep ownership of assets or logins

You should never be in a position where you cannot clearly explain what is happening in your own Amazon account.

2. What They Focus On First: Ads Or Fundamentals?

If the first thing to know about how to choose an Amazon agency talks about is increasing ad spend, be careful. Scaling spend without fixing conversion is like pouring water into a leaking bucket.

A good agency will look at:

• product page content and structure
• images and creative
• reviews and social proof
• pricing and offer competitiveness
• variation structure and catalogue health
• search visibility and indexing basics
• ad structure and search term quality

Ads matter, but conversion is often the multiplier. If conversion is weak, you will keep paying more for the same results.

3. What A Strong 30 / 60 / 90 Day Plan Looks Like?

You do not need a rigid roadmap, but you do need a clear approach.

First 30 days: Audit, priorities, and quick wins. You should see a clear view on where performance is leaking and what needs fixing.

Days 30–60: Structural improvements. Better campaign structure, better targeting, better listing quality, and the start of conversion work.

Days 60–90: Testing and scaling. Controlled experiments, creative upgrades, stronger reporting, and a plan for growth that is not just “spend more”.

If an agency cannot explain how they work in the first 90 days, it is a red flag.

4. The Questions That Tell You Whether They’re Serious

You do not need to interrogate them. You just need to ask questions that reveal whether they have a process.

Meanwhile, good questions to ask while knowing how to choose an Amazon agency.

• Firstly, what are the first three things you would check in our account, and why?
• Secondly, how do you report, and how often?
• Thirdly, do you provide a change log each month?
• Fourthly, who is doing the work day to day?
• Fifthly, how do you improve conversion beyond PPC?
• Sixthly, what do you need from us to do a good job?
• Finally, how do you define success for a brand like ours?

The answers should sound practical. If everything is “it depends” with no structure, you’ll likely experience the same thing after you sign.

5. Red Flags That Cost Brands Money

Here are the patterns that usually end in wasted spend:

• Firstly, no clear reporting cadence
• Secondly, no accountability for outcomes
• Thirdly, they avoid talking about margin and profitability
• Fourthly, they control Brand Registry or key access
• Fifthly, vague deliverables in the proposal
• Sixthly, they can’t explain what changed and why
• Finally, they promise guaranteed outcomes or fixed dates

The last point matters. Amazon and search performance have too many moving parts for any agency to guarantee specific ranking or sales outcomes responsibly.

How To Tell If the Agency Is Actually Working?

Well, now that you know how to choose an Amazon agency. The easiest mistake is measuring success by one metric.

A better view looks at:

• Firstly, conversion improvements (not just traffic)
• Secondly, waste reduction and cleaner targeting
• Thirdly, better search term quality
• Fourthly, a healthier catalogue structure
• Fifthly, more consistent reporting and clearer actions
• Sixthly, a stronger organic sales contribution over time
• Finally, a plan for scaling that makes commercial sense

Therefore, if your agency can clearly show what changed, why it changed, and what happened as a result, you are in a good place. If you feel like you are paying for an activity without clarity, you are not.