Choose by who does the work and how much of it they carry. Three options exist: a trademark attorney for the filing, a brand management agency for the filing plus the catalog work that follows, or your own team with a paralegal. Ask each candidate how many accounts one person handles.
The short version
- Registry is two jobs, not one. The trademark is legal work. Everything enrollment unlocks is operational work, and the same person rarely does both well.
- Score on ownership, not on quoted price. A cheap filing is worthless if the brand tools sit unused for six months afterwards.
- Accounts per person predicts the outcome. Our own cap is about 1.4 brands for every operator, and the reasoning is below.
- Never hand over a Seller Central login. Registry work runs through granted user permissions you can revoke in a click.
- Ask for a written audit before you pay anyone. Ours costs nothing and arrives inside 48 hours.
Write down which of the two jobs you are buying
Job one is the mark itself. Somebody files in the correct class, in the territory where you actually sell, in a name that matches the entity on your seller account. That last detail causes more delay than any other part of the process, and it is a legal decision, not a marketing one.
Job two starts the day enrollment is accepted. Enrollment gives you access to A+ content, Brand Story modules, a storefront, brand analytics, Vine, and the reporting tools for infringement. It does not use any of them. A brand can sit enrolled for a year with a default storefront, no A+ on its best seller, and variation families that were never rebuilt.
Buyers get burned by assuming job two is included in the price of job one. It usually is not. Decide which one is your bottleneck before you shortlist anybody, because the two jobs point at completely different providers.
Score the three options out of 100
Weight the criteria that map to your bottleneck, then score each candidate on the same sheet. Here is the sheet I would use.
| Criterion | Weight | Full marks looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Filing competence and entity match | 15 | Names the class, the territory, and the applicant entity before quoting |
| Catalog execution after enrollment | 25 | Commits to specific A+ modules, storefront, and variation work with dates |
| Accounts per person | 20 | Tells you the number without being pushed, and it is in single digits |
| Access model | 15 | Granted user permissions on your account, revocable, no shared password |
| Marketplace coverage | 10 | Can carry the same brand into the marketplaces you plan to enter |
| Exit terms | 15 | Month to month, written handover, you keep the account and the assets |
Now map the three options against it. An attorney scores near the top on filing and near zero on catalog execution, which is correct, because that is not the service. A full service agency should score across the whole sheet, and if it cannot answer the accounts per person question, treat that as a fail rather than an omission. Doing it in house scores well on access and exit, and lives or dies on whether the person you assign has done it before.
Why accounts per person decides everything else
Registry work is bursty. Nothing happens for weeks, then a filing gets an office action, or a hijacker appears on your main ASIN, or an A+ module gets rejected and the whole brand page reverts. The person handling it needs slack in their week to react in days rather than in the next available slot.
Flapen keeps a deliberate ceiling here. Our 50 operators look after about 70 brands, which lands near 1.4 brands each, and that ceiling is the reason a hijacker report gets filed the morning it is spotted. It is a cost decision we made on purpose, not a stage we are growing out of. When you ask a candidate for their number and they change the subject to headcount or to years of experience, you have learned what you needed.
Ask the question in this exact form: how many brands does the person who will actually touch my catalog carry today, and what happens to my week when one of the others has a crisis.
What registry support providers will not tell you
Enrollment is not a growth event. It is a permission change. Revenue moves when somebody rewrites the listing, replaces the primary image, builds the A+ comparison module, and structures the variation family so the reviews pool correctly. Providers sell the permission change because it has a clean finish line, and the work that follows does not.
The second thing: trademark timelines are outside everybody's control, including ours. Any provider who promises you a date for registration is promising something that belongs to a government office. Promising a date for their own filing work is fine. Promising a date for the registry itself is a sales tactic.
The third: if your brand is enrolled and your conversion rate is still weak, registry was never the constraint. Get a diagnostic before you buy a package built around it.
Related answers
- Who to hire for Amazon Brand Registry support
- Brand Registry support and trademark help on Amazon
- Full service Amazon agency for Brand Registry support
- Questions to ask before hiring an Amazon agency
- Done-for-you Amazon management: the complete guide
Send us the brand and we will tell you which of the two jobs you actually need, at Flapen.
