Most agency-versus-in-house comparisons stop at monthly cost: a retainer next to a salary, with the salary usually looking smaller. That comparison skips the part that actually determines how a brand's Amazon account performs for the first quarter of the year — what it takes to get a new capability from zero to functioning. Recruiting an Amazon specialist, waiting for them to start, buying the tools they need, and giving them time to learn the account all happen before any results show up, whether the brand realizes it's paying for that runway or not. At INNELS, we think the first 90 days deserve their own comparison, because that's the window where the two paths diverge the most.
Brands rarely budget for the three months before the results start. That's the part that decides whether the first year goes well.”— Mark Daniel Zalomajev, Founder
Agency onboarding runs on a different clock. The published timelines we and other agencies work to generally follow the same arc: an audit and discovery phase in the first month, campaign building and launches in the second, and early optimization by the third — with campaigns commonly live within the first three weeks rather than the first six or seven. We won't pretend that ramp doesn't exist; a new account still takes time to understand properly. The difference is that it's a team absorbing that learning curve in parallel, not one person doing it alone while a recruiting fee and a tool bill sit on top.
Our onboarding month looks the same whether the brand has one SKU or two hundred. It's structured, so it doesn't depend on how fast one person happens to learn.”— Yuliia Hurenko, Design Lead
Part of de-risking that first quarter is knowing who's actually behind the account before any contract is signed. Hiring someone in-house, a brand meets the person doing the work as a matter of course; with an agency, that's often skipped entirely. We arrange a live 30-minute call with your account manager in the first week, before you commit to anything — ask how they'd handle a TACoS spike, what experience they have in your category, how fast they typically reply on Slack. Our account managers are real people running real accounts, not names attached to a pitch deck, and if the fit isn't right, it's better to know that before signing than three months in.
If a brand isn't comfortable with the person after that call, we'd rather hear it then than have them find out during onboarding.”— Niks Saknitis, PPC Manager
Most agencies make more money the more services a brand buys, which creates a quiet incentive to recommend expansion regardless of whether it's the right move. We run the research first — real search volume, the competitive picture, logistics costs, and the break-even math — and say plainly when the numbers don't support it. One brand came to us wanting to expand into the US; the category there was already saturated, so we recommended doubling down on Germany and the UK instead, and that's what worked. Being willing to say no to a bigger scope is part of what separates research-led account management from upselling.
The easiest thing in the world is to say yes to a new market. The harder, more useful thing is doing the math first and telling a brand when it's not worth it.”— Mario Reambonanza, PPC Manager
Most account managers, at most agencies, earn the same salary whether a brand's account grows or stalls — which removes any built-in reason to push harder once onboarding is done. At INNELS, every account manager earns commission from the brands they run, so their pay is directly tied to how those accounts perform. That structure is what makes an AM push back on a bad idea, including one of ours, bring forward opportunities before being asked, and stay engaged well past the onboarding period rather than quietly stepping back once the account is stable.
Commission changes the incentive completely. If the brand isn't growing, neither are we — so we don't get to coast.”— Mark Daniel Zalomajev, Founder
Before signing with any Amazon agency, it's worth asking a short set of direct questions, because most agencies won't have a clean answer to all of them: whether you can meet your account manager before signing, whether you'll have visibility into the agency's project board, whether that manager's pay is tied to your performance, what their longest client relationship actually looks like, whether they've ever told a client not to expand, who answers on Slack at six in the evening if something breaks, and whether they can walk through a case that didn't go well. We can answer all seven, and we think any agency worth hiring should be able to as well.
If an agency can't answer those seven questions clearly, that's the answer.”— Yuliia Hurenko, Design Strategist
There's a risk dimension to this comparison too. Broadly cited HR figures put the cost of a hire that doesn't work out at a minimum of 30% of that person's first-year salary, and often well above it for specialist or managerial roles, once recruiting, onboarding, and lost productivity are all counted. An in-house Amazon hire concentrates a brand's entire marketplace capability in one person; if that hire leaves or doesn't work out inside the first year, the brand isn't just back to square one — it's back to square one with a live account and a gap where account management used to be.
One person managing the account isn't just a resourcing choice, it's a single point of failure. If they're out for two weeks, the account is effectively unmanaged for two weeks.”— Andrejs Klimovskis, Founder
None of this means in-house management is the wrong call for every brand — for a business already running significant ad spend, with an experienced hire already in the seat and a tool stack already paid for, the fixed cost of an internal team can make sense over a longer horizon. What's worth weighing honestly before deciding is the full first-90-day picture rather than the salary line alone: the recruiter fee and the weeks spent without anyone managing the account while the search runs, the months of reduced productivity built into any specialist role regardless of who fills it, the recurring cost of a research-and-PPC tool stack, and the risk of concentrating the entire Amazon function in one hire who might not work out. Weighed against that, an onboarding process with campaigns live inside three weeks and a team rather than an individual behind the account looks different than a simple monthly cost comparison suggests.
The honest version of this comparison isn't agency versus in-house, it's who absorbs the first 90 days of learning — and what that costs while it's happening.”— Mark Daniel Zalomajev, Founder
The first 90 days of Amazon management are never free, whichever path a brand chooses — the real question is who is paying for that runway and in what form. Built into a recruiting fee, a vacant seat, and a learning curve, it's a cost that's easy to miss because it doesn't appear on an invoice. Built into an agency's onboarding process, it's visible, time-boxed, and shared across a team from day one. If you'd rather spend the next 90 days on results than on recruiting, tooling, and ramp-up, INNELS is built to be that Amazon agency. Book a call and you'll meet the account manager who'd actually run your account, before you decide anything. https://www.innels.com/book-a-call-andrey
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