The costly ones: hiring on a pitch instead of a written audit, never asking how many brands the manager carries, signing an annual contract, accepting a percentage of ad spend, and skipping the sourcing question. Score every candidate against the five and require a written answer to each.
The short version
- A pitch is a sample of their sales team. An audit is a sample of their work.
- Attention is the product you are buying. Ask for the brands-per-manager number before anything else.
- Long contracts transfer risk from the agency to you. Short notice periods do the opposite.
- Some accounts have a supply problem wearing a marketing costume. Ask who handles that.
- Score candidates numerically. Impressions are not comparable across three good conversations.
You have had three good calls and cannot separate them
That is the normal position, and it is exactly where the expensive mistakes get made. Three competent-sounding teams, three similar service lists, three fee quotes within a few hundred dollars. What separates them is not visible in a conversation, so the way through is to convert the decision into a score built on written answers.
Start at 100 points. Subtract the weight for every mistake you are currently making. Below 70, do not sign anything yet.
| Mistake | Weight | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Deciding without a written audit | 20 | You have a proposal, but nothing specific about your ASINs |
| Not asking brands per manager | 15 | You know the company size and not your own share of it |
| Signing a long minimum term | 15 | Twelve months, or a 90-day notice period |
| Paying a percentage of ad spend | 15 | The fee rises when your budget rises |
| Ignoring sourcing and quality | 15 | Nobody has asked about your supplier or return rate |
| No agreed exit terms | 10 | What you keep on leaving is not written down |
| Assuming marketing fixes a product problem | 10 | Rating and return rate are drifting, plan is more ads |
The five that cost the most, in detail
Hiring on the pitch
The proposal will be polished, the case studies will be real, and neither tells you how this team thinks about your account. Ask for a written audit before you commit. We produce one with prioritized fixes inside 48 hours at no charge, and any candidate declining to look at your account before invoicing you is telling you something.
Not asking how thin the team is spread
The fee buys hours. Hours come from a person who has a fixed number of them and some number of other brands. Ask for the current figure, ask what it was a year ago, and ask what happens to it when the agency signs its next four clients. The direction of that number over time matters more than the number itself.
Locking in the term
An annual contract with a long notice period means the agency has secured revenue before it has demonstrated results. Month to month with 30 days of notice puts the renewal decision in front of you twelve times a year, which is the strongest performance incentive available to a client without paying a premium for it.
Accepting the wrong fee structure
Any structure that pays the agency more when your spending goes up will eventually cost you a hard conversation about cutting waste. Flat pricing removes that entirely. Ours runs from $800 a month for a single product with everything included and no commission of any kind.
Skipping the sourcing question
This is the one buyers miss most often, and it is the one that quietly caps the account. If the unit cost is 25 percent above the market, the price cannot compete and no listing work closes that gap. If quality is inconsistent, the rating drifts down and every other lever weakens with it. We run an in-house sourcing studio in Guangzhou, with frameworks built across more than 500 brands, because supply is upstream of everything a brand manager can do on the marketplace itself. Ask any candidate what they would do if your problem turns out to be the factory rather than the funnel.
What most agencies will not tell you
The hire is often made on personality, and personality is predictive of the working relationship. It is not predictive of the work. Both matter, but only one shows up in a first call, so weight the written evidence deliberately to compensate.
The second thing. Plenty of agencies will accept a client they cannot help, because a client who is going to fail still pays for several months. The single most useful question you can ask is what would make them decline your business. A candidate with a real answer has criteria. A candidate who says they can help anybody has a sales target.
Related answers
- Amazon agency red flags to watch out for
- Contract terms to negotiate with Amazon agencies
- Questions to ask before hiring an Amazon agency
- What does an Amazon brand manager do
- Done-for-you Amazon management: the complete guide
Score us with the same table before you score anyone else, at Flapen.
