Four: a smaller in-house agency, a single-channel specialist, a fractional brand manager, or building the function yourself. Compare them on effective hourly rate and on who physically does the work. Divide any monthly fee by the hours your account receives, and ask whether any part is subcontracted.
The short version
- Every fee funds four things. Delivery labor, tools and data, sales and marketing, and margin. Only the first one touches your account.
- Effective hourly rate is the comparison that works. Fee divided by real hours, across every option.
- Subcontracting is the variable nobody volunteers. One question settles it, and the answer changes the price you are really paying.
- Small does not mean cheap and large does not mean capable. Both are correlated with sales spend, not with delivery.
- A fractional manager is underrated. For a catalog that needs judgment more than volume, it is often the right answer.
Why large firms end up structured the way they are
A monthly fee funds four buckets, and this is true of every agency on earth including mine. Delivery labor is the people who touch your account. Tools and data cover the software and datasets the work depends on. Sales and marketing covers acquiring you as a client. Margin is what is left.
As a firm grows, the third bucket grows fastest, because growth at scale is bought rather than earned by referral. That has two structural consequences a buyer should understand. The first is that account load per operator tends to rise, because delivery headcount is the easiest place to find efficiency. The second is that specialist work gets subcontracted, because maintaining an in-house creative or sourcing team is expensive and invisible to prospects.
I cannot tell you how any particular company is staffed, and I would not make claims about firms I have not worked inside. What I can tell you is that the two questions above are answerable in one email, and that the answers reorder most shortlists.
The arithmetic that makes options comparable
Take every proposal you are holding and reduce it to one number: fee divided by hours your account actually receives per month. Ask for the hours in writing. A firm that will not estimate them is telling you something.
| Option | Cost shape | What you are really buying | Where the money leaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Large full-service firm | High fixed fee, wide service list | Coverage and process | Sales overhead, account load, subcontracted specialisms |
| Smaller in-house agency | Moderate fixed fee | Operator attention | Bench depth if a specialism is missing |
| Single-channel specialist | Fee for one channel | Depth in that channel | Your coordination time across the gaps |
| Fractional brand manager | Day rate or part-time salary | Judgment and ownership | Execution capacity, they cannot do everything |
| Fully in-house team | Salaries plus tools | Total control | Fixed cost that does not flex, and hiring risk |
Run a worked example. A $3,000 monthly fee against 15 hours of genuine account work is $200 an hour. The same $3,000 against 40 hours is $75. Neither number is right or wrong on its own, but they are different products, and the proposal will not distinguish between them unless you force it to.
Then apply the second test. If the creative, the sourcing support, or the translation work is subcontracted, part of your fee is a margin on somebody else's margin, and the person doing the work has no relationship with you and no view of your account history. We run everything in-house with no subcontracting: 50 operators, a Guangzhou sourcing studio, a Dubai creative studio, and an internal tech team. That is a deliberate cost structure, and the reason for it is that handoffs to outside vendors are where account knowledge goes to die.
Choosing between the four alternatives
A smaller in-house agency suits a brand that needs several functions moving together and cannot afford the coordination tax of managing vendors. Test it with the account-load question and the subcontracting question, in that order.
A single-channel specialist suits a brand with an internal team and one specific gap, usually advertising or creative. It is the wrong answer if you have nobody internally to own the channels the specialist does not cover.
A fractional brand manager suits a catalog that is stable and needs strategic ownership rather than execution volume. Cheap relative to a full-time hire, and effective when there is an existing team to direct. It fails when there is nobody to execute what they decide.
Building it in-house suits a brand large enough that the fixed cost is comfortably absorbed, and where Amazon is the primary channel rather than one of several. Price the total cost of employment in your own market, add tooling, then compare against a published agency fee. Do the comparison on total cost, not on salary.
What most agencies will not tell you
Size is a proxy for marketing budget, not for outcomes. A firm that is everywhere in your feed has decided to spend on being everywhere in your feed, and that spending is funded by fees. That is not a scandal, it is just a cost you are paying, and it should be weighed against what proportion of the fee reaches your account.
The second thing goes the other way, and it is fair to the larger firms: scale buys bench depth. When your account manager leaves a small agency, continuity is at risk. When they leave a large one, somebody replaces them the same week. If you choose small, that risk is real and you should ask directly how it is covered.
The honest summary is that neither size solves your problem. Delivery structure does, and delivery structure is knowable before you sign.
Related answers
- Amazon agency vs in-house team pros and cons
- Alternatives to hiring an Amazon brand manager in-house
- Alternatives to hiring an Amazon aggregator
- Cheap vs premium Amazon brand management comparison
- Amazon agency pricing and economics: the complete guide
Ask us the subcontracting question first, then look at the fee, at Flapen.
