Full service means one team owns research, sourcing, listing, creative, advertising and inventory decisions and reports on all of it. The arithmetic is simple: $8,000 to $15,000 of launch capital for a single product, $25,000 to $50,000 for a five product brand, plus a fee measured against what the same work costs in house.
The short version
- The fee is the small number. Inventory, freight and advertising dominate a launch budget in every scenario.
- A full brand launch takes about seven months. Anyone promising a fraction of that is describing a listing going live, not a brand being launched.
- Full service has a hard definition. If sourcing, creative, advertising and inventory sit with four different vendors, no one owns the outcome.
- Judge it on one outcome number. Ask what share of the brands they launched are profitable within twelve months.
- Compare it against a real alternative, priced honestly: the salaries, tools and management time an in house version needs.
The cost stack, line by line
| Line | Single product | Five product brand | Who carries it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inventory, first order | Largest single line | Multiplied by product count | You |
| Freight, duties and inbound | Route and season dependent | Same, at higher volume | You |
| Trademark and registration | One filing per market | Usually one brand mark | You |
| Photography, video and A plus creative | Per product | Shared brand assets reduce it | Agency or freelancers |
| Advertising, first three months | From about $1,000 a month | Higher, spread across products | You |
| Management fee | From $800 a month | $2,400 a month at five products | Agency |
| Total launch capital | $8,000 to $15,000 | $25,000 to $50,000 |
Read the table from the top, not the bottom. Sellers negotiate hardest on the row that changes the outcome least. Shaving a few hundred dollars off a monthly fee while ordering the wrong quantity of the wrong product is the standard shape of an expensive launch.
What has to be inside the scope to call it full service
- Research and market sizing, before any product is confirmed.
- Sourcing support, samples and quality expectations written down.
- Trademark and Brand Registry coordination.
- Listing build: copy, backend fields, variations, A plus content and Brand Store.
- Creative: primary image concepts tested, secondary images, video.
- Advertising: structure, launch spend plan and ongoing management.
- Review generation through compliant routes, including Vine where eligible.
- Inventory planning: reorder points, lead times, stockout risk.
- Reporting: a written update every week and a live review every two weeks.
- A scale, fix or stop recommendation at the end of the validation phase.
Anything missing from that list is a gap you will fill yourself, at your cost, usually at the worst moment. Ask for the list of what is not included before you sign, and expect a specific answer.
The comparison that actually matters
Price the in house version honestly. That is a brand manager, an advertising specialist, a designer, a copywriter, tools, and your own management time, at your local market rates. Then price the outsourced version: the monthly fee plus the coordination you still do, which for our clients runs about two hours a month once a brand is steady and four to six hours a week during an active launch.
Both models work. The in house version wins on control and on cost once you are large enough to keep four specialists busy. The outsourced version wins earlier, when you need six skills at a fraction of a person each. What no model survives is a half filled version of itself, one overloaded generalist covering four disciplines.
Across the brands our team manages, the majority are profitable inside their first year. That is the number I would hold any full service provider to, and it is a fairer test than a revenue chart from a single lucky client. Ask for the share, ask over what period, and ask what happened to the brands that did not make it.
What most agencies will not tell you
Full service is the highest margin package in this industry and the easiest one to under deliver on, because the client cannot see which parts were actually done. A launch has dozens of tasks and only a handful are visible from outside. Weekly written reporting exists to solve exactly this, and an agency that reports monthly in a slide deck has chosen the cadence that hides the most.
The second thing: the phrase covers wildly different things. Some providers mean listing plus advertising, with sourcing, creative and inventory left with you. That is a legitimate service and a different product. The word full is doing work in the sales conversation that the scope document does not support, so read the scope document.
Related answers
- Amazon product launch service pricing comparison
- Who can manage my entire Amazon product launch
- Fair Amazon agency pricing models
- How long does an Amazon launch phase take
- Done-for-you Amazon management: the complete guide
Ask us for the scope document and the exclusions list before anything else at Flapen.
