Pick the partner who treats Amazon as its own channel with its own search behavior, not as a shop window for your website. Run selection as a sequence: free audit, scope, a named brand manager, then a first 90 days with gates. Judge the audit long before you judge the pitch.
The short version
- Your website playbook does not transfer. Amazon shoppers arrive with intent and leave in seconds.
- Buy in stages. Audit, then scope, then a named person, then a plan with gates at each step.
- The audit is the real sample of the work. Everything before it is a brochure.
- Protect the direct channel deliberately. Pricing, bundles and subscription mechanics need a rule, not a hope.
- Ask what the partner controls and what stays yours. Account, campaigns and creative should never leave your ownership.
Why I trust the sequence more than the pitch
Before Flapen I ran data and technology at BRANDED and at Moonshot Brands, two large Amazon aggregators. Part of that job was buying agency services for portfolio brands and then living with the result. I sat through a lot of pitches, and the pattern was consistent: the quality of the pitch had almost no relationship to the quality of the work. What predicted the work was whether the team could look at an account cold and tell us something true about it that we did not already know.
That is why the sequence below front-loads the audit and back-loads the commitment. It is the process I would use as a buyer, not the process that is easiest to sell.
The sequence, with a gate at each step
- Free written audit. Ours returns within 48 hours and covers listing quality, primary image click-through, conversion rate, ad performance, which traffic channels are live, pricing and return rate. Gate: did they find something specific and prioritized, or did they send a template with your logo on it?
- Scope by product count. Decide how many ASINs are actually in scope. Our fee is tiered on exactly that: $800 per month for one product, $1,150 for two, $1,500 for three, $1,950 for four, $2,400 for five, with six or more scoped on a call. Gate: is the price legible without a negotiation?
- Meet the person, not the pitch. Ask for the name of the brand manager who will run the account, and speak to them before signing. Gate: is the person on the call the person doing the work?
- Agree the first 30 days in writing. Onboarding should be audit, assign a brand manager, identify the blockers, then execute. A measurable improvement in advertising efficiency inside the first month is a fair expectation, because it is the fastest lever. Gate: is there a named deliverable with a date?
- Set the reporting cadence. We send a written update over Slack weekly, run a live review every two weeks, and stay reachable in Slack in between. Gate: is reporting in writing, or does it live in somebody's memory?
- Agree the exit before you need it. Month to month with 30 days' notice, and on the way out you keep the Seller Central account, the campaigns, the creative and a written handover. Gate: what leaves with them if this ends badly?
Each gate is a stop, not a formality. A candidate who fails one is not improved by clearing the next.
The D2C-specific questions
Direct-to-consumer brands carry three problems that pure marketplace sellers do not.
The first is channel conflict. Your Amazon price sets a reference point that leaks into your own store and into retail conversations. Decide the pricing rule up front, and consider differentiated pack sizes or bundles so the two channels are not competing on an identical unit.
The second is audience data. On your own site you own the customer relationship. On Amazon you do not, and no partner can change that. What a good partner can do is use off-channel demand, creators and external traffic to build audiences you do own, then point them where they are most valuable to you.
The third is brand consistency. Your Amazon page is often the first thing a new customer sees. Ask who writes the copy and who produces the images, and ask to see work in a category near yours. We keep creative production in-house in our Dubai studio, which is a specific answer you can test by asking for examples.
What most agencies will not tell you
They will not tell you that a healthy D2C brand can be a mediocre Amazon brand for reasons that have nothing to do with brand strength. Search behavior on Amazon is dominated by category and attribute terms, not by your name. If your product only sells when the story is told first, the Amazon page has to carry that story in an image, and that is a production problem before it is a marketing one.
The other quiet truth is about access. You should never hand over ownership of the account. We work inside your Seller Central through granted user permissions that you can revoke in a moment, and every deliverable becomes your intellectual property on full payment. Any arrangement where the agency owns the account is a hostage arrangement, whatever it is called in the proposal.
Related answers
- How to choose a full-service Amazon partner
- Full funnel Amazon ads and SEO service providers
- Contract terms to negotiate with Amazon agencies
- Questions to ask before hiring an Amazon agency
- Done-for-you Amazon management: the complete guide
Start with the audit and decide afterwards, at Flapen.
