No honest public ranking exists, because transparency is not measured anywhere. Rank the agencies in front of you instead, using six disclosures they either publish or refuse: price, staffing, location of the people doing the work, subcontracting, exit terms, and reporting cadence. Score each one before the first call.
The short version
- Transparency is testable before you speak to anyone. Five of the six disclosures are either on the website or absent from it.
- "Custom pricing" is a data point, not a service level.
- Ask where the work physically happens. Subcontracting is normal and should still be disclosed.
- Reporting cadence in writing beats any dashboard.
- The exit clause is the honesty test. Agencies confident in the work make leaving easy.
Do this before the first call
Open each agency's site and score six things. Do it before you talk to a salesperson, because a conversation supplies answers the website deliberately withholds, and what a company chooses to publish is the signal you want.
- Price. Published tiers, a published range, or nothing at all.
- Staffing ratio. Do they say how many brands one manager carries?
- Location. Where do the people doing the work sit?
- Subcontracting. Is the model stated anywhere?
- Exit terms. Notice period, ownership of the account and the creative.
- Reporting. Cadence and format, named.
Score 1 for published, 0.5 for available on request, 0 for absent. A five or six is a company that has decided disclosure is cheaper than negotiation. A one or two is not necessarily bad at the work, but every one of those blanks becomes a question you have to ask, and answers given verbally in a sales call do not bind anyone.
The sequence, with the gate at each step
| Step | What you ask | The gate |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Website scan | The six disclosures above | Score under 3, add every gap to the call agenda |
| 2. First call | Who does each function, and where | Any function they cannot name an owner for is subcontracted |
| 3. Free audit | A written diagnosis of your account | A call instead of a document means no diagnosis exists |
| 4. Proposal | Fee, scope, pass-through costs, separated | Blended costs go back for a rewrite |
| 5. Contract | Notice, IP, access method, restrictions | Anything longer than 30 days' notice needs a reason |
| 6. First 30 days | A measurable change and a written record | No written weekly update means no accountability |
Step three is the one most buyers skip, and it is where transparency stops being an abstraction. A written audit forces an agency to make falsifiable claims about your account before it has your money.
The disclosures that matter most, and why
Where the work happens. Ask function by function: listing copy, images, video, PPC, sourcing, translation, catalog health. Our sourcing runs through an in-house studio in Guangzhou using frameworks built across more than 500 brands, creative comes from an in-house studio in Dubai, and none of it is subcontracted. That is my answer. Yours may reasonably be a partner network, provided you are told, because a vendor you did not choose is a vendor you cannot manage.
Sourcing capability specifically. If an agency touches your supply chain, ask how many brands they have sourced for, in which categories, and whether they have physically visited factories. Sourcing is where the largest sums of your money move, and it is the area with the least buyer oversight.
Reporting. Ours is a written Slack update every week, a live review every two weeks, and Slack access around the clock. The format matters less than the fact that it is written, because written records are the only thing you can review later when a decision is disputed.
What most agencies will not tell you
Custom pricing exists to price you rather than the work. Two brands with identical catalogs get different numbers based on how well funded they look. That is legal, common, and the single strongest argument for publishing a price list, which is why so few do.
The second thing: transparency about failure is rarer than transparency about price and worth more. Ask directly what they got wrong on a recent account and what it cost the client. An agency that has never had a product fail has either not run enough of them or is not telling you. What you want to hear is a specific mistake, what it cost, and what changed in their process afterwards.
Related answers
- Amazon agency red flags to watch out for
- Questions to ask before hiring an Amazon agency
- Pay-as-you-go Amazon account audit options
- Global Amazon agency pricing benchmarks
- Amazon agency pricing and economics: the complete guide
Run the same six-point scan on us, starting with the published price list at Flapen.
