Every Amazon agency now sells the same three things: growth, expertise, and a dashboard. None of those claims can be verified from a pitch deck, and the cost of getting the decision wrong has risen sharply. An agency that mishandles your ad account structure wastes budget; one that mishandles your EU compliance obligations gets your listings deactivated; one that uses prohibited tactics on your behalf can cost you your selling privileges, because Amazon enforces against the account holder rather than the contractor. At INNELS, we sit on the other side of these conversations every week, and the brands that choose well are the ones who ask uncomfortable questions about ownership, access, and accountability before any money changes hands. This is the conversation we would want a brand owner to have with us, whether they are hiring a full-service Amazon agency or a specialist for one channel.
Strategy is easy to promise. Ownership and access are easy to verify.”— Andrejs Klimovskis, Founder, INNELS
Ask this first, because it determines what you keep when the relationship ends. Some agencies build campaigns inside their own Amazon Ads account rather than the brand's, which means the performance history you paid to learn — every bid test, every keyword harvest, every seasonal pattern — stays with them on exit. We treat that as disqualifying rather than negotiable. Ask whether campaigns will live in your Amazon Ads account under your entity, whether you hold administrator access throughout, and whether creative assets and A+ modules transfer to you without a fee. Then get it into the contract, because a verbal yes from a salesperson is not an asset register. A good agency will not hesitate here; the hesitation itself is the signal.
If the data leaves when we leave, you never really owned the account.”— Mark Daniel Zalomajev, Founder, INNELS
Partner status is real and worth checking, but it proves less than most agencies imply. Amazon operates Verified and Advanced tiers through the Amazon Ads Partner Network, with Advanced adding product adoption, certification, and managed-investment criteria. Amazon frames that status as a data point advertisers can consider, not a performance guarantee, and as of 2026 new status decisions are paused while the tier structure is rebuilt. Verify the badge in Amazon's official Partner Directory rather than trusting a logo on a website, match the company name and marketplace coverage while you are there, and treat the result as one line in a longer assessment. A badge tells you an agency completed a process. It does not tell you whether they can run your category.
Most Amazon agencies price as a flat retainer, a percentage of ad spend, a percentage of revenue, or a hybrid of a smaller base plus a performance component. The number matters far less than the incentive it creates. An Amazon PPC agency charging a percentage of ad spend is rewarded for spending more of your money regardless of whether that spend is profitable, and the structure quietly punishes the efficiency work that protects your margin. A flat retainer removes the conflict but can drift into under-service once an account plateaus. We would rather a brand owner asked what happens to our fee in a quarter where the right answer is to cut spend by thirty percent. If the model cannot survive that question honestly, it will shape the advice you receive for as long as the contract runs.
Ask what our fee does when the correct decision is to spend less.”— Andrejs Klimovskis, Founder, INNELS
Amazon consolidated sponsored ads and Amazon DSP into a single Campaign Manager announced in November 2025, unified reporting left beta and reached general availability on 8 June 2026, and the legacy sponsored ads and DSP report pages are scheduled to retire on 31 December 2026. That deadline makes a useful interview question, because it separates agencies that follow the platform from agencies that follow their own template. Ask which reports a prospective partner pulls today, what they are migrating to before the cut-off, and how they will keep your historical benchmarks comparable. The same test applies to Amazon Marketing Cloud, where access broadened in late 2025, so claiming to have AMC is now weak evidence. What matters is whether anyone on the team can write a query, interpret an overlap or path-to-purchase result, and change a bid because of it.
This is where an Amazon agency in Europe either earns its fee or exposes you. A brand selling across the EU carries obligations that sit outside the advertising conversation entirely: the General Product Safety Regulation and its EU Responsible Person requirement, per-country Extended Producer Responsibility registrations that do not transfer between member states, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation applying from 12 August 2026, and VAT obligations that shift past the ten thousand euro distance-selling threshold. Probe with specifics. Ask how they would handle a Pan-EU seller whose stock sits in seven countries, and listen for whether they distinguish coordination from advice. A competent agency works alongside your VAT specialist and compliance provider. An agency that offers to simply handle your VAT has misunderstood its own scope.
Ads pause when you stop paying. A compliance failure removes the listing.”— Mark Daniel Zalomajev, Founder, INNELS
Amazon's ranking system is A9 with a COSMO semantic layer on top, and shoppers increasingly arrive through AI-assisted search rather than a keyword box. That changes what listing work is worth paying for. Keyword density in a backend field capped at two hundred and fifty bytes is hygiene, not strategy; describing the problem a product solves, in language a semantic model can parse, is where the leverage has moved. Amazon reports conversion lift of up to roughly eight percent for standard A+ Content and up to twenty percent for Premium, but that is a conversion effect rather than a ranking signal, and an agency quoting it as a ranking lever is repeating marketing copy. We would also check that they know comparison charts may only feature your own products, because competitor comparisons in A+ Content are prohibited outright.
Amazon's Seller Code of Conduct treats allowing others to act on your behalf in violation of its policies as an unfair activity, with consequences that include listing removal, withheld payments, and loss of selling privileges. The agency does not absorb that penalty — you do. So ask exactly how a prospective partner generates reviews, and accept one answer: Amazon's own Request a Review function. Insert cards that solicit positive feedback, third-party review services, incentivised buyers, and manufactured orders to seed a launch all borrow against your account. Get the commitment in writing and ask whether subcontractors or virtual assistants will touch the account. Brands rarely discover this kind of shortcut while it is working. They discover it during a suspension appeal.
Condensed into a sequence you can run in a single call, the checklist looks like this. Confirm that campaigns will sit in your own Amazon Ads account and that performance history and creative assets transfer to you on exit. Verify partner status yourself in Amazon's Partner Directory rather than accepting a badge image. Establish access through Seller Central's Authorized Partner route with scoped permissions instead of sharing a primary login, and agree the revocation process before onboarding rather than during a dispute. Interrogate the pricing model for the incentive it creates. Ask which reports they are migrating to before the legacy pages retire at the end of 2026. Test their EU regulatory fluency with a scenario from your own catalogue. Require a written commitment on review practices. Then agree what you will both look at in ninety days, and insist it includes profitability, not only advertising cost of sale.
Choose the partner who answers the offboarding questions without flinching.”— Andrejs Klimovskis, Founder, INNELS
The best Amazon agency for your brand is rarely the one with the strongest capability claims, because every agency claims capability and most have a case study to support it. The questions that matter are about what happens when things go wrong: when the right call costs the agency money, when a regulation changes mid-quarter, when the contract ends. A brand owner who asks about ad account ownership, permission scope, pricing incentives, compliance depth, and review practices will learn more in twenty minutes than a full pitch process can teach them. We would rather be chosen by a brand that ran this checklist on us than one that signed on the strength of a deck, so if you want to start there, put these questions to the INNELS team and see how the answers compare. If the list costs us a deal because a competitor answered the ownership question better, that brand still made the right decision.
%20(1).png)
.png)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)