Nearly 7 in 10 EU Amazon brands are carrying a compliance problem right now — a blocked listing, a rejected document, an ASIN that quietly went dark — and most don't know it yet. That's how Mark Daniel, founder of INNELS, opened a recent conversation with Harshank, who has managed 350+ brands over the past decade and driven more than $200 million in sales across seven marketplaces. Two agency founders comparing notes on what actually breaks at scale — and almost every break point traced back to the same root: structure, or the lack of it.
Here's what came out of that conversation, and how it maps to what we do as an Amazon agency working through the exact same pressure points every week.
Harshank didn't describe a single dramatic pivot from freelance work to running an agency. It was slower than that: he and his co-founder started by personally working every account, until they realized quality was capped by how many hours two people could physically put in.
Anything good, bad, or ugly, the client will only see one face."— Harshank Vyas, Co-Founder of Sellers Umbrella Inc.
That line came up when Mark raised something INNELS hears constantly from prospects fresh off a bad agency relationship: their brand got passed between five account managers, with no one person owning the outcome. Harshank described his fix plainly:
Our model is very simple: we have one point of contact (POC). They are the overall management person for everything that goes on, from onboarding to finish."— Harshank Vyas, Co-Founder of Sellers Umbrella Inc.
It's the same reason INNELS structures Amazon account management the same way — because the alternative is exactly the churn pattern both agencies described.
Both founders built their agencies on referrals for years, and both hit the same ceiling: referrals are a double-edged sword. Great in quiet quarters, dry in others, and impossible to steer toward the categories or account sizes you actually want. Harshank now runs a dedicated outbound function because it's the one channel where he decides who to approach — but only if it's treated as a real function, not an afterthought.
If you're doing outbound as a part-time thing, it's just noise."— Harshank Vyas, Co-Founder of Sellers Umbrella Inc.
That's the same lesson behind how INNELS scopes new engagements: not by volume, but by whether a brand's stage of operational complexity is actually a fit.
The conversation's sharpest moment was about Europe specifically. Mark asked what the most expensive structural mistake is when eight-figure US brands expand into the EU. Harshank didn't hesitate:
He tied it directly to timing: the General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR), fully enforced since December 2024, requires any non-EU brand selling into Europe to appoint an EU-based Responsible Person — a legal representative whose contact details must appear on the product itself.
Harshank was direct about where this goes wrong most often:
The biggest mistake US brands make is a lack of education on navigating these intricacies, or not having someone on paper, resulting in compliance suppression that affects the entire account."— Harshank Vyas, Co-Founder of Sellers Umbrella Inc.
That single gap can trigger account-wide suppression, not just one listing. Layered on top of GPSR are country-specific Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) registrations — LUCID in Germany, CITEO in France, CONAI in Italy — plus cosmetics notifications through CPNP, battery registrations, and German-language listing requirements. A brand running Pan-EU FBA fulfillment can be fully compliant in one market and quietly suppressed in another, and the dashboard often won't tell you which.
Harshank's "seven out of ten" figure is the same number INNELS arrived at independently, from a different dataset: more than 100 structured client conversations — account-management calls, sales discovery sessions, onboarding interviews — across 90+ Amazon and TikTok Shop brands in the EU, UK, and US. Compliance came out ahead of PPC efficiency, inventory coordination, and buy-box loss combined, and it's documented in full in our EU Compliance Report 2026.
The practical output of that research is the EU Compliance Checker, free at check.innels.com. Feed it a live listing URL or manual product details, and in under two minutes it returns a per-country scorecard flagging exactly where GPSR, EPR, CPNP, or country-specific rules leave you exposed — before Amazon's enforcement system finds it during your busiest week, the way it did for the brands in Harshank's portfolio.
Mark asked whether brands rushing into TikTok Shop, Walmart, or Allegro are doing so with a real plan, or reacting to headlines. Harshank was blunt:
In many cases, it is panic buying because of FOMO."— Harshank Vyas, Co-Founder of Sellers Umbrella Inc.
He was specific about why the two channels don't compare directly:
TikTok is seeing massive monthly volume and doubling in the US, but it's operationally very different from Amazon. It's more content and creator-led."— Harshank Vyas, Co-Founder of Sellers Umbrella Inc.
His reasoning: if TACOS is bloated and a third of the catalog is underperforming, that's a problem with the account, not the platform.
You have an execution problem, not a channel problem."— Harshank Vyas, Co-Founder of Sellers Umbrella Inc.
Asked what three questions he'd want an eight-figure brand to ask before hiring any agency, Harshank's answers stack in the same order INNELS uses when scoping a multi-marketplace expansion: Have you extracted every drop of value from Amazon already? Do you have the bandwidth to execute a genuinely different channel like TikTok Shop, which runs on a content-and-creator-led model with little resemblance to Amazon? And does the execution actually match your profitability goals, not just your traffic? Compliance sits underneath all three — unresolved, it caps whatever comes next, since a suppressed listing can't run PPC and a reinstated one carries a ranking penalty that takes months to shake off.
Two closing exchanges rounded out the conversation. On AI, Harshank's view was measured rather than hyped:
AI isn't here to take away your task or your agency."— Harshank Vyas, Co-Founder of Sellers Umbrella Inc.
But he was equally clear that calling an agency "AI-powered" is the wrong framing — AI sharpens keyword research and listing content, but the judgment call on submitting, and the five-year context of a brand relationship, still comes from a person.
On the most underrated KPI in e-commerce, his answer came fast:
Anyone can show you a great ACoS on one campaign, but if your overall TACOS is declining over time, it tells you the flywheel is actually working."— Harshank Vyas, Co-Founder of Sellers Umbrella Inc.
That distinction — Total Advertising Cost of Sales over the more commonly cited ACoS — is the signal that organic traffic is actually growing, not just being rented through ad spend.
Strip away the specifics and the conversation kept circling one idea: growth problems are usually structure problems wearing a disguise. One point of contact instead of five. Sequencing instead of FOMO. And, for any brand touching the EU, visibility into compliance before Amazon supplies that visibility through a suppression notice.
If you're expanding across EU marketplaces, running Pan-EU FBA, or simply unsure whether your listings would survive a GPSR or EPR review, start with the free EU Compliance Checker and read the full EU Compliance Report 2026 for the dataset behind these findings.
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