A real audit contains at least one number specific to your account that you could not have found in five minutes. A sales deck says your listings need work and your ads are inefficient, which is true of nearly every account on Amazon and can be written before anyone looks at yours.
The short version
- Generic findings are the tell. True of everyone means measured on no one.
- A real audit names something to kill or deprioritise. Sales decks never do.
- It should be useful even if you never hire them.
- Watch for urgency and credential requests. Both are pressure tactics.
- No audit can assess margin without your landed cost. If it claims to, it is estimating.
The five patterns
I run Flapen with 50 operators managing about 70 brands, and our own growth audit is free, so read this knowing I have an interest. That is also why the tests below are ones you can apply to us.
| Pattern | What it looks like | Why it is a problem |
|---|---|---|
| Template findings | Listings need work, ads inefficient, keyword gaps | Written before looking at your account |
| No negative finding | Every product has upside, nothing should stop | Avoiding half the job |
| Urgency | "Losing $X per day, act this week" | Manufactured pressure |
| Credential request | Asks for your login rather than user permissions | Never necessary, and creates linkage risk |
| Unusable without them | Findings with no specifics you could act on | The audit is the pitch |
The template test
Read the findings and ask whether they would be true of any Amazon account. Your images could convert better. Your backend keywords have gaps. Your campaigns need restructuring. All true almost everywhere, which is why they can be produced in bulk.
Now look for one number that is specific to you: your primary image click-through rate against category norms, your return rate on a particular product, your organic share of revenue, your Buy Box percentage trend. One genuine number means someone looked.
The missing kill recommendation
A real audit produces a verdict on each product: scale, fix, or kill. Kill means the criteria are not met, based on rating trend, return rate, conversion rate, and cost of customer acquisition trajectory.
An audit that finds upside everywhere and nothing to stop is not analysis, it is a proposal. Across any catalog of reasonable size, something should be a candidate for deprioritisation.
I learned to insist on this after pouring money into a failing product for three months hoping the ads would turn around. They did not. Nobody had told me to stop, because nobody was being paid to.
The credential request
This one is not just shady, it is a real risk. No audit requires your password. Read access through user permissions is enough, and it is revocable by you.
An agency logging into multiple sellers' accounts with shared credentials from one office creates exactly the pattern Amazon uses to link accounts, and linked accounts can be suspended together. Grant permissions, never credentials.
What a good free audit looks like
Ours returns a written report with prioritized fixes within 48 hours, at no charge and with no commitment. Three things make that format honest rather than a lead magnet.
It arrives in writing, so you can act on it without us. It is prioritized by impact on cost of customer acquisition rather than ordered by section. And it covers the seven diagnostic areas: listing quality, primary image click-through rate, conversion rate, ad performance, traffic channel activation, pricing, and return rate.
The test that matters: could you hand this document to a freelancer and have them execute it? If yes, it is an audit. If it only works as a reason to hire the author, it is a deck.
Questions to ask before accepting an audit
- What access do you need? User permissions, never credentials.
- Will I get it in writing?
- Will it tell me what to stop doing, not just what to start?
- Do you need my landed cost? If they do not ask, profitability claims are guesses.
- What did you find that surprised you? Ask after delivery. Vagueness is the answer.
What most agencies will not tell you
The free audit exists because it works as a sales mechanism, and that does not automatically make it dishonest. It makes the incentive worth understanding.
An audit written to sell services will emphasize problems the author can fix and quietly underweight problems they cannot. If your real constraint is a market that is too small or a landed cost that leaves no margin, no agency service fixes that, and it is the finding least likely to appear.
So ask the question directly: is there anything here that hiring you would not solve? An honest answer to that costs the agency a sale often enough that hearing one tells you a lot.
Related answers
- What does a good Amazon account audit include
- How to audit current Amazon agency performance
- Amazon agency red flags to watch out for
- Must-ask questions for Amazon seller consultants
- Hiring an Amazon agency: the complete guide
Apply every test on this page to our audit too. Request it at Flapen.
