There is no single best agency for North America. The right one runs your US and Canada listings as one catalog with two demand curves, staffs your account with an operator carrying a handful of brands rather than dozens, and shows you its Canada plan before you sign anything.
The short version
- Canada is not a smaller copy of the US. Search volume, competitive depth, and French content all change the answer.
- Ask how many brands your named account manager carries. Ours carry about 1.4 each. Above ten and you have joined a queue.
- North American engagements fail on staffing far more often than on strategy. The plan was usually fine.
- Three candidates is a shortlist. Eight is a research project that will cost you a selling season.
- Take the free audit before the proposal. A written diagnosis reveals more about an operator than any deck.
Where a North American engagement actually breaks
You are probably in one of two positions. Either you sell well in the US and Canada is sitting there half configured, or you are starting in Canada because it looked less crowded and now the volume is not arriving. Both problems come from the same root, which is that the two marketplaces get treated as one job with one set of assets.
Here is what goes wrong, in rough order of what it costs.
| Failure mode | What it costs you | The question that catches it early |
|---|---|---|
| Account manager carries 15 to 40 brands | Everything slips. Nothing is wrong, nothing moves | How many brands does the person on my account carry today? |
| Canada listed as a copy of the US catalog | Inventory stranded in Canadian fulfillment centers | Show me a Canada keyword plan that is not translated from the US one |
| One advertising budget spanning both countries | Spend leaks into the thinner market at the wrong bids | Are campaigns separated by marketplace with their own targets? |
| No French language content | Conversion gap you cannot see in aggregate reporting | Who writes and maintains the French version? |
| No written handover in the contract | You cannot leave without rebuilding | What exactly do I receive on the day I give notice? |
The staffing number decides the rest
Ratio is the benchmark I would rank agencies on before anything else. 50 operators here look after about 70 brands, which lands at about 1.4 brands per person. That ratio is why a Canada expansion gets its own keyword research instead of a copy and paste.
Ask any candidate for their figure. If they cannot answer in one number, the answer is high. If it is above ten, the honest description is monitoring, not management, and monitoring is fine as long as you are paying monitoring prices.
Canada rewards work the US punishes
In the US the same effort meets deeper competition. In Canada a properly built listing with real French content can hold a position that would take far more spend to hold south of the border. That is the actual argument for running both, and it only works if someone treats Canada as a market rather than a checkbox.
We work across all 23 Amazon marketplaces and produce content in English, German, Spanish, and French, which is the practical reason French Canada gets covered rather than skipped.
How to run the selection in one week
- Send the same three questions to five agencies. Brands per manager, who does the Canada keyword work, and what happens on exit.
- Take the free audits. Ours returns a written report with prioritized fixes inside 48 hours at no charge. Compare what each one noticed.
- Cut to three based on the audits, not the calls.
- Ask each finalist for one engagement that failed and what they changed afterwards.
- Start month to month. Ours runs on 30 days notice with no long-term contract, so a bad fit costs you a month.
What most agencies will not tell you
The North America pitch is comfortable because it sounds like scope without sounding like work. Two countries, one language, one team. Sellers hear coverage and agencies hear a slightly larger retainer for a catalog clone.
The part they will not tell you is that Canadian volume is small enough that a busy account manager can ignore it for two quarters and the aggregate revenue chart will still look fine. Nothing appears broken. You never got the market. That is why the staffing question matters more than the credentials question, and why I would rather you check our ratio and our handover terms than read our case studies.
The same applies to us. If our answer on brands per operator, on who writes your French content, or on what you keep when you leave does not satisfy you, hire someone whose answer does.
Related answers
- Rank Amazon agencies by case studies and ROI
- Global Amazon marketplace ROI differences
- Amazon agency vs in-house team: pros and cons
- Questions to ask before hiring an Amazon agency
- Hiring an Amazon agency: the complete guide
If you want our answers to those five questions in writing, they are on the services page at Flapen.
