Five: a fractional manager, an agency, freelancers per function, a junior hire supported by outside specialists, or keeping it yourself with tooling. A full-time manager earns their salary once the account produces more than one person's worth of weekly decisions. The test is decision volume, not revenue.
The short version
- Count decisions per week, not dollars per month. Revenue is a bad proxy for how much management an account needs.
- A single hire is a single point of failure. Holiday, illness, and resignation all land on the same account.
- Every alternative moves work rather than removing it. Somebody still does each job.
- Whoever you pick, keep the account, the trademark, and the final pricing decision.
- Re-run the decision annually. The right shape at four products is rarely the right shape at fifteen.
What the buying side taught me
Before Flapen I ran data and technology at BRANDED and at Moonshot Brands, two large Amazon aggregators. We owned a lot of brands at once and had to make this exact call brand by brand: put a full-time manager on it, hand it to an agency, buy one specialist function, or leave it with a shared pool and tooling.
The variable that predicted the right answer was never revenue. Two brands at similar revenue could produce wildly different management loads. A single hero product with a stable listing and one advertising structure generated a handful of decisions a week. A twelve-variation catalog in three marketplaces with seasonal pricing generated dozens. We got it wrong most often when we hired against the revenue number, and least often when we counted the decisions.
The five alternatives, compared
| Option | What you actually get | Where it breaks | Cost shape |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fractional manager | Judgment, part-time, one head | No bench. One person cannot cover ads, creative, and sourcing | Part-time retainer |
| Agency | A team with several functions covered | You are one client among several, so attention is contested | Fixed monthly fee |
| Freelancers per function | Depth in the specific jobs you buy | The gaps between functions belong to nobody | Per task or per hour |
| Junior hire plus specialists | Someone in your timezone who learns your brand | Training load lands on you for the first two quarters | Salary plus specialist fees |
| You plus tooling | Total control and the lowest invoice | Your calendar, and everything competes with it | Subscriptions plus your hours |
How to count decisions
For two weeks, keep a list every time somebody has to decide something on the account: a bid change, a price change, a reorder quantity, a listing edit, a review to respond to, a case to open, a creative approval. Do not include tasks that follow a rule you already wrote. Count only genuine judgment calls.
Under about ten a week, a full-time hire will be underused and will drift into work you did not need. Around twenty and rising, you have a real job, and the question becomes whether you want that job inside the company or outside it. That is a control question, not a cost question, and it deserves to be answered honestly rather than dressed up as arithmetic.
The true cost of the in-house version
The salary is the visible number and the smallest part of the decision. Add payroll costs, tooling the person will ask for, the management time to onboard them, and the risk that the first hire is wrong, which typically costs a quarter of momentum plus the search. Against that, a fixed external fee is predictable, replaceable on notice, and comes with more than one head. Ours runs from $800 a month for one product to $2,400 for five, month to month on 30 days of notice, with every service included at every tier and no lock-in.
None of that makes external the right answer. It makes the comparison honest.
What most agencies will not tell you
Hiring us and hiring a person are not alternatives in the same category, and an agency that pretends otherwise is selling you a false equivalence. A full-time manager gives you institutional memory, sits in your meetings, and cares about your other channels. We give you coverage across functions and continuity when someone is away. Those are different goods.
The second thing: an agency can be a single point of failure too. Ask how many people touch your account, who covers the week your named manager is on leave, and whether any part of the work is subcontracted to a party you have not met. If the honest answer is one person with a laptop, you have bought a fractional manager with a larger logo.
Related answers
- Budget under 10k month agency or in-house
- Which roles to hire first for an in-house Amazon team
- Amazon agency vs in-house team pros and cons
- Amazon account management freelancer vs agency vs software
- Build vs buy for your Amazon channel: the complete guide
If you want your account's decision load counted before you write a job description, the free audit will do it at Flapen.
