What does an Amazon agency actually do?

What services does an Amazon agency provide?

Seven pieces of work make up almost every Amazon retainer. An agency may do all of them or specialise in two or three.

What does an agency actually do in a normal month?

Stripped of the language, a month of retainer work usually looks like this:

1. Weekly. Search term reports pulled, negatives added, bids adjusted, budget moved between campaigns.
2. Fortnightly. Rank positions checked against the tracked keyword set; any listing that has slipped is investigated.
3. Monthly. A written report against agreed targets, plus the plan for next month.
4. Continuously. Account health notifications, suppressed listings and policy warnings dealt with as they arrive.
5. As needed. New product listings built, A+ Content refreshed, seasonal pricing and advertising adjusted.

Most of the value is in the weekly work. An agency that only appears at month end to send a report is not managing the account, it is describing it.

On price, our own retainers are published at $999, $1,999 and $3,499 a month, with what each tier includes, on our agency pricing page.

What should an agency deliver in the first ninety days?

The first ninety days should produce a diagnosis, a rebuilt foundation and a measurable baseline — in that order. An agency that starts by raising advertising spend in week one has skipped the first two.

Ask for the baseline in writing at the start: current sessions, conversion rate, organic rank on your top terms, advertising cost of sale and total advertising cost of sale. Without it, month three has nothing to be measured against, and every subsequent report becomes a story rather than a comparison. Our free listing checker and PPC audit tool will give you a rough version of that baseline yourself before anyone quotes you.

Ninety days is also the fairest point to judge the work. Amazon rank responds to conversion and sales velocity over weeks, not days, so a fortnight tells you nothing and a year is too long to wait to find out.

What can an Amazon agency not do?

This is the more useful list, and it is short.

• Guarantee a ranking position. Rank depends on your price, reviews, stock and competitors. Nobody controls all four.
• Guarantee an ACoS. Advertising cost of sale is set by an auction you do not own.
• Guarantee reinstatement. The decision belongs to Amazon alone.
• Get you reviews outside Amazon's rules. Buying, incentivising or gating reviews breaches the Amazon Community Guidelines and can suspend the account.
• Fix a product problem with marketing. If forty per cent of your reviews mention the same fault, no amount of optimisation outruns it.

An agency promising any of the first four is either inexperienced or telling you what you want to hear. Both cost the same.

Does it matter that an agency is UK-based?

For Amazon.co.uk sellers, yes — but not for the reason people assume. Time zone is the smallest part of it.

The substantive differences are that Amazon.co.uk has its own search volume distribution and its own vocabulary, that UK VAT is charged on the sale price before Amazon's referral fee is calculated, that category gating requirements differ from Amazon.com, and that UK product safety and Trading Standards information belongs in the listing itself.

A listing adapted from an Amazon.com original routinely indexes for terms British buyers never type. We wrote about that in more detail in Amazon UK VAT for sellers.

How do you tell a good Amazon agency from a bad one?

Four questions separate them quickly, and none of them is about price.

1. "What is your pricing?" If the answer requires a call, ask why.
2. "Show me a report you send clients." A real one, redacted. If reporting is a dashboard login rather than a written view, nobody is analysing anything.
3. "What would you not do for us?" An agency with no refusals has no standards.
4. "Who will actually work on the account?" The person in the pitch is often not the person doing the work.

There is a longer version of this in agency vs freelancer vs in-house.

What access does an agency need, and what should you keep?

An agency needs user-level access to your Seller Central and Amazon Ads accounts, at permissions matched to its scope — and nothing more. The accounts themselves, the Brand Registry enrolment and the trade mark behind it should all stay in your company's name.

Seller Central lets you set permissions per user rather than handing over the account, so the practical rule is to grant what the work needs and no more:

Three things are worth protecting whatever the scope. Keep the Brand Registry enrolment and the underlying trade mark — applied for through the UK IPO — in your own name.

Keep the Amazon Ads account in your company's name so the campaign history stays with you. And make sure the contract assigns copy, images and A+ modules to you, so leaving does not mean rewriting your catalogue. There is more on how those terms are usually written in what an Amazon agency costs in the UK, and the full list of services sets out what each scope covers.

Revoke access on the day an engagement ends. It takes a minute in Seller Central, and it is the step most sellers forget.

What types of Amazon agency are there, and what does each one do?

The phrase "Amazon agency" covers very different businesses. Some run every part of an account. Others do one thing, such as ads or images, and do it in depth. Knowing which type you are talking to saves weeks of mismatched expectations.

Full-service or specialist?

A full-service Amazon agency suits you if nobody in-house owns the account. One team sees how a listing change affects ad costs. A specialist suits you if you already have a strong operator and need depth in one area, such as Amazon PPC management. Ask either type who decides when SEO and advertising disagree.

Seller Central or Vendor Central?

Most agencies work in Seller Central, where you sell to customers directly. That is where most of the volume is. Third-party sellers accounted for about 60% of paid units sold on Amazon in Q1 2026. Vendor Central is a different job. Amazon buys your stock, so the work is purchase orders, cost prices and chargeback disputes. Ask for proof an agency has done it before.

Brand protection: the service lists often leave out

Good agencies also watch who else is selling on your listings. With Brand Registry, they can use Report a Violation and, where you qualify, Project Zero and Transparency. Amazon says more than 2.7 billion units have been verified as genuine through Transparency. Brand Registry is free, but it needs a pending or registered trade mark. Keep that trade mark in your own name.

Work beyond the listing: traffic from outside Amazon

Larger brands send shoppers from Google, Meta or email to their Amazon listings. Amazon Attribution measures that traffic for free, using a 14-day attribution window. On amazon.com, the Brand Referral Bonus then returns an average of 10% of qualifying sales as credits against referral fees. The full credit lands after a two-month wait for returns. Set up well, this lowers your real cost of selling.

Most sellers need the core work first: organic rank, efficient ads and clean account health. If search visibility is the gap, talk to an Amazon SEO agency. If you want one team to own all of it, see our Amazon marketing agency services.

Questions people also ask

Last reviewed 23 May 2026. We update articles in place rather than republishing at a new URL, so the link you have keeps working.