Choose on capacity, channel coverage, and exit terms, in that order. Ask how many brands the assigned manager carries, which traffic channels they run rather than list, and what you keep if you leave next month. Everything else in a pitch is decoration sitting on top of those three answers.
The short version
- Diagnose before you shop. The right agency depends entirely on which part of your business is stuck.
- Capacity beats credentials. A brilliant strategist with fifteen accounts will still give you a slow Tuesday.
- Amazon has five traffic channels. Most sellers run two. Ask which ones a candidate actually operates.
- Get the exit written down first. Notice period, account ownership, and handover, before the fee conversation.
- A free audit is a working sample. What they notice in your account tells you more than any case study will.
Start from what is actually broken
Most sellers begin this search with a vague sense that Amazon should be doing better, then evaluate agencies on how impressive they sound. That gets the order wrong. Work out which sentence below describes you, and the shortlist writes itself.
| What is true of your brand today | What you are actually buying | What to discount in the pitch |
|---|---|---|
| Product sells, growth has flattened | Ranking work and unused traffic channels | Case studies from unrelated categories |
| Traffic is fine, few people buy | Creative, imagery, price position, review depth | Promises to restructure the ad account |
| Profitable, but it eats your week | Operating capacity and a named owner | Strategy decks and quarterly planning |
| Advertising loses money every month | Campaign structure and spending discipline | Any conversation about scaling |
| Nothing launched yet | Category research and validation | Growth percentages from other clients |
| Listings suppressed or account at risk | An operations specialist, quickly | Marketing capability of any kind |
The bottom row is the one people get wrong most often. A marketing team cannot fix a compliance problem, and hiring one to try costs you the weeks that mattered.
The channel question
There are five ways traffic reaches an Amazon product: organic search, paid advertising, promotions and deals, influencer and creator content, and off-channel traffic driven from outside Amazon entirely. Most sellers run two of them, usually organic and paid, and then wonder why growth flattens once those two are optimized.
So ask a candidate to name the five, then ask which ones they run themselves and which they would need to hire out. The answers separate an advertising shop from a brand management team faster than any other question, and there is no shame in a specialist saying they only do two well. There is a problem if they claim all five and cannot describe what running the fifth involves week to week.
I run this test on my own company regularly. Flapen keeps around 50 operators in-house across about 70 brands precisely so the harder channels do not get quietly dropped when a week gets busy.
Three things to get in writing before the fee
- The notice period and what happens on exit. Ours is 30 days, month to month, and the client leaves with the Seller Central account, the campaigns, the creative, and a written handover. If leaving is expensive, the incentive to keep you happy weakens the day you sign.
- Access and ownership. Work should happen inside your own account through user permissions you grant and can revoke. Deliverables should become your property once you have paid for them.
- The reporting rhythm. We send a written update weekly, hold a live review every two weeks, and stay reachable on Slack. Whatever the cadence is elsewhere, have it written down, because "we will be in touch" degrades to silence by month three.
What most agencies will not tell you
The free audit is the most useful part of the entire process and almost nobody uses it properly. We produce a written report with prioritized fixes within 48 hours at no charge, and so do plenty of others. Get two or three of them from different candidates and compare. If all three flag the same primary image, that is your problem. If one names issues the others missed, you have learned something real about who looks carefully.
The second thing: measurable movement should not take a quarter. A competent team should improve advertising efficiency within about the first 30 days, because the early wins are structural and sitting in plain sight. If someone tells you meaningful change takes six months, they are describing their onboarding queue rather than your account.
Related answers
- Questions to ask before hiring an Amazon agency
- Amazon agency red flags to watch out for
- How to choose an Amazon FBA marketing partner
- Amazon agency vs in-house team pros and cons
- Done-for-you Amazon management: the complete guide
Run the audit test on us first and judge what comes back, at Flapen.
