What does an Amazon agency cost in the UK?

What are the actual price ranges in 2026?

Retainers cluster into three bands. The figures below are what UK sellers are quoted; our own published tiers sit inside them, which is the point of publishing them.

Anything materially below £500 a month is usually one junior person managing many accounts to a template. Anything above £6,000 is normally a team of specialists, which some catalogues genuinely need.

For comparison, our own retainers are $999, $1,999 and $3,499 a month, published in full with what is in each tier. UK clients are invoiced the GBP figure set in their written scope.

How do agencies actually charge — retainer, percentage or project?

Four models are common in the UK, and they behave very differently once your revenue moves.

A flat retainer is the only model where the agency's incentive and yours point the same way. A percentage of ad spend rewards spending; a percentage of revenue charges you for your own baseline. If you are offered a percentage model, ask what happens in a month where the right decision is to spend less.

What is never included in the fee?

Four costs sit outside almost every retainer. If a quote does not mention them, ask.

• Advertising spend. Paid to Amazon from your own account. It should never be invoiced by the agency and never marked up.
• Amazon Vine fees. Paid to Amazon per enrolled parent ASIN under its own Vine programme terms.
• Photography and design production. Most agencies brief and direct; the shoot is quoted separately.
• Translation for EU marketplaces. Priced per marketplace when you expand.

What contract terms should you check before signing?

Five terms decide what a retainer really costs you: the initial term, the notice period, whether it auto-renews, who owns the work, and what happens to your advertising account if you leave. The monthly fee is the number people negotiate; these are the terms that cost them.

Two of these are worth insisting on regardless of who you hire. Keep your own Amazon Ads account in your company's name, and keep Brand Registry enrolled to your business rather than to an agency's. Both are free, both are yours, and both are painful to unpick afterwards. Brand Registry needs a registered or pending trade mark, which you apply for through the UK Intellectual Property Office — in your own name, not your agency's.

Ask for the contract before the proposal call, not after it. An agency that will not send terms until you have agreed a price has told you something about how the rest of the relationship will go.

What makes the price go up or down?

Five things move a quote more than anything else:

1. Catalogue size. The jump from 20 ASINs to 200 is the single biggest driver, because listing work scales with SKU count.
2. Number of marketplaces. Adding Amazon.de or Amazon.fr adds translation, VAT and a separate advertising account.
3. Whether advertising is included. PPC management is the most labour-intensive part of a retainer.
4. Account health risk. A suspended or flagged account needs specialist time, usually priced per case.
5. Brand Registry status. Without it there is no A+ Content, no Vine and no Sponsored Brands, so there is less work to do — and less that can be done.

Is an agency worth it at your revenue?

The arithmetic is simple enough to do yourself. A £1,200 monthly retainer needs to produce roughly £4,000 to £6,000 of additional monthly revenue to pay for itself at a typical 20–30% contribution margin. Below about £10,000 a month in Amazon revenue, that is a large ask.

Under roughly £10k a month, a one-off listing project or a few hours of consulting usually returns more than a retainer. Above £30k a month, the maths generally works, because the same percentage improvement is applied to a bigger base.

Our profit and break-even ACoS calculator will do the margin part for you in about thirty seconds.

How do you compare two quotes that are not like for like?

Put both quotes on the same basis before you compare the numbers: total twelve-month cost, scope written as deliverables rather than adjectives, and who does the work. Two quotes for “full Amazon management” can differ by a factor of three and still both be honest, because the phrase means nothing on its own.

Normalise four things:

1. Total cost over twelve months, including setup. A £900 retainer with a £2,000 onboarding fee is £12,800 a year, not £10,800 — more than a £1,000 retainer with no setup charge.
2. Scope as a list of deliverables. “Listing optimisation” should read as a number of ASINs, a number of revisions, and whether images and A+ Content are included or briefed.
3. Advertising treatment. Is media spend included, excluded, or charged as a percentage? Percentage-of-spend quotes get more expensive precisely when you scale.
4. Named people and hours. Ask who works on the account and roughly how many hours a month it gets. An agency that will not answer is quoting a template.

Then ask both agencies the same three questions and compare the answers rather than the decks: what would you do in the first thirty days, what would you refuse to do, and what does your monthly report actually look like. The CMA's guidance on unfair commercial practices is a useful yardstick for the claims in a pitch: performance figures presented without the context that makes them meaningful are a problem for the agency making them, not a selling point.

If the quotes are close and you still cannot separate them, take the free audit from each. What an agency notices about your account before it is being paid is the most reliable sample of the work you will get afterwards. Our own is a written document rather than a call, and there is a fuller picture of the day-to-day work in what an Amazon agency actually does and across the eight services we run.

Questions people also ask

Last reviewed 22 August 2026. We update articles in place rather than republishing at a new URL, so the link you have keeps working.