Four alternatives: an agency, a fractional manager, a virtual assistant paired with a specialist, or splitting the role across existing staff. Score each against six weighted criteria including sourcing, creative, and advertising depth. One salaried hire rarely covers all three, which is the real reason the role is hard to fill.
The short version
- The job description is the problem. Most in-house briefs describe three separate specialisms and one salary.
- Score the capability, then price it. Weighted criteria first, cost comparison second.
- Continuity is a real line item. One person means one holiday, one resignation, and one point of failure.
- Sourcing depth is the capability most often missing. It is also the one that decides product margin.
- Total cost of employment, not salary. Compare that against a published fee, or the comparison is meaningless.
Read your own job posting again
If you are at the point of writing a brand manager role, look at what the draft asks for. Keyword research and listing optimization. Advertising strategy across campaign types. Creative direction for images and A-plus content. Supplier negotiation and quality control. Account health and compliance. Forecasting and inventory planning. Possibly a second marketplace in another language.
Those are not one job. They are four or five, and the people who do all of them well have already built their own brands. What normally arrives is somebody strong in one area, competent in a second, and learning the rest on your catalog. That is not a criticism of the candidate, it is arithmetic about how specialization works.
Which is why the honest first question is not "agency or in-house" but "which of these capabilities do I actually need, and at what depth".
The scorecard
Weight each criterion for your own situation, score every option from 0 to 10, and multiply. The weights below are a reasonable default for a brand with under ten products.
| Criterion | Weight | What a 10 looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Advertising depth | 20 | Runs campaign structures across product stages, not one ACoS target for everything |
| Sourcing and supplier control | 20 | People on the ground who can inspect, negotiate, and fix a factory problem |
| Cost flexibility | 20 | Scales down in a bad quarter without a redundancy process |
| Creative production | 15 | Images, video, and A-plus produced in-house on a repeatable schedule |
| Continuity and cover | 15 | Work continues when one person is unavailable |
| Compliance and account health | 10 | Handles suppressions and policy issues without an external escalation |
How the options tend to score
| In-house hire | Agency | Fractional manager | VA plus specialist | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Advertising depth | Depends entirely on the individual | Structural, multiple people | Strategy yes, execution limited | Strong in the specialist channel only |
| Sourcing and supplier control | Rare in a marketing hire | Only if they have their own studio | Advisory | No |
| Cost flexibility | Lowest, it is a fixed cost | High with short notice terms | High | High |
| Creative production | Outsourced by the hire | Only if there is an in-house studio | Outsourced | Outsourced |
| Continuity and cover | Single point of failure | Covered by a team | Single point of failure | Fragmented |
| Compliance and account health | Learned on your account | Handled routinely | Advisory | Usually a gap |
Two columns in that table depend on a question most buyers never ask, which is whether the agency actually owns the sourcing and creative capability or resells it. We built a sourcing studio in Guangzhou and a creative studio in Dubai in-house, on frameworks developed across more than 500 brands, precisely because those two rows are where outsourced arrangements break. Ask any candidate firm the same question and score their answer honestly, including if the answer is no.
Do the cost comparison properly
Price the in-house option at total cost of employment in your own market: salary, employer taxes and contributions, benefits, recruitment cost, software licenses, and the management time of whoever supervises the role. Then add the ramp period, because a new hire is not productive in month one, and add the replacement risk, because the median tenure in this role is not long.
Compare that annual figure against a published agency fee for the same period. Ours runs $800 a month for one product up to $2,400 for five, all services included at every tier. I am not going to tell you which side of that comparison wins, because it depends on salaries in your country and on how much of the capability list you need. What I will say is that most buyers compare a salary against a fee and forget everything else on the employer's side of the ledger, which makes the in-house option look cheaper than it is.
The reverse mistake exists too. If Amazon is your primary channel and you are large enough to absorb a fixed cost, an internal team gives you control, institutional memory, and a capability that compounds. There is a size at which building is obviously right.
What most agencies will not tell you
An agency is not a replacement for an owner. Whatever you buy, somebody inside your company has to make decisions about price, inventory, and product direction, and that person needs enough context to argue with the agency when the agency is wrong. Brands that hand over the whole function and disengage get worse outcomes than brands that keep two informed hours a month. Ours needs about two hours a month from a client after onboarding, and four to six hours a week during an active launch, which is the honest number rather than the comfortable one.
The other thing worth saying: the hybrid works well and is rarely proposed, because it splits the revenue. An internal owner with commercial authority, plus an agency carrying execution depth across sourcing, creative, and advertising, covers more of the scorecard than either option alone.
Related answers
- Amazon agency vs in-house team pros and cons
- Alternatives to big-box Amazon brand managers
- Monthly cost to manage an Amazon brand
- How to choose an Amazon FBA marketing partner
- Amazon agency pricing and economics: the complete guide
Score us against your own weighted criteria before you post the role, at Flapen.
