Key takeaways: Choose an Amazon agency on process, not on promises. Before you sign, you should know exactly who will work on your account, what the audit found, what the written plan says will happen in the first 90 days, what a weekly report looks like, how the fee is calculated at your spend, and what happens when you leave. Any agency that cannot answer these twelve questions in writing is asking you to trust a sales conversation with real money.
Why the questions matter more than the pitch
Every Amazon agency will tell you it lowers ACoS, grows sales and has a great team. None of that is checkable in a sales call. What is checkable is the process behind it: does the agency audit before it quotes, does it name the people, does it write down what it will do, and does it report in a form you can read and question.
The twelve questions below are grouped into five areas: the team, the audit and plan, reporting, money, and the exit. Ask them in order. A good agency will have answered most of them before you finish, because its own process covers them.
How a good engagement should start
The order matters. If an agency quotes a price before it has looked at your account, the price is a guess and the plan is a template. The sequence you want is audit, diagnosis, written plan, written price, then payment.
Read this flowchart as text
- First contact
- Access granted for a read-only audit
- PPC audit and listing scorecard, 5 to 7 days
- Does the agency show you the findings before quoting?
- Walk away or ask why
- Plan call: objective, KPI targets, 90-day roadmap, named team
- Written scope and price before any payment?
- Sign, onboard, week one changes logged in your report
Questions about the team
1. Who exactly will work on my account, and how many other accounts do they hold?
You want names and roles, not "our team of experts". Ask who sets strategy, who makes the weekly changes, who you email when something breaks, and how many accounts each of them carries. A PPC manager holding forty accounts cannot open your search term report every week. Twelve to twenty is more typical of agencies that actually do weekly work. If the person on the sales call is not the person who will run the account, ask to meet the one who will.
2. Do you run ads, listings and creative, or ads only?
This is not a question about breadth for its own sake. Ads send traffic to a page. If the page does not convert, an ads-only agency can lower bids and improve ACoS a little, and your sales will fall with it. An agency that can also rewrite the bullets, replace the main image or build A+ Content can fix the cause rather than manage the symptom. If the agency is ads-only, ask how it works with whoever does your listings, and who owns conversion rate.
3. Which marketplaces have you actually run accounts in?
If you sell in Germany or the UAE, an agency that has only run US accounts will learn on your money. Ask for the marketplaces where they hold live accounts today, and how they handle language, VAT and local peak calendars. General answers here are a warning.
Questions about the audit and the plan
4. What did your audit find in my account?
A serious agency audits before it quotes, and shows you what it found. For PPC, that should include wasted spend (search terms with spend and no sales), placement performance, campaign overlap, budget capping and an estimate of what it expects to save or gain. For listings, expect a scorecard: indexing, copy, images, A+ Content, reviews, price position. If the audit is a one-page summary with no numbers from your own account, it was not an audit.
We score six levers from 1 to 5 and build a 30/60/90-day plan that starts where the score is lowest and the upside is highest. Whatever form an agency's audit takes, it should be specific to your ASINs.
5. What will happen in the first 90 days, in writing?
Ask for the plan, not the pitch. It should name the objective (growth, profit, launch, rank), the KPI targets, what changes in weeks one and two, what you should see by week four and by week twelve, and what you need to provide. A plan that promises results by a date is a sales document. A plan that says which levers will be pulled in which order, and how long each usually takes to show, is a working document. The First 90 Days with an Amazon Agency: What Should Happen describes what a realistic timeline looks like.
6. What would make you recommend spending less?
This question exposes the incentive. An agency paid a percentage of spend earns more when you spend more. An agency paid a flat fee has no incentive either way. Either can be honest, but you want to hear a concrete answer: "when ACoS on the incremental spend exceeds your break-even", "when stock cover falls under four weeks", "when the launch reaches its target rank". If the answer is vague, the agency has not thought about it.
Questions about reporting
7. Can I see a real weekly report?
Not a dashboard screenshot and not a template. A real report from a real account with the numbers blurred if necessary. It should say what changed that week, why, and what the agency expects it to do. It should show spend, sales, ACoS and TACoS at account level and by ASIN. If the agency only offers a live dashboard, ask how you would know what was changed and why from a dashboard. Amazon Agency Reporting: What Good Reports Look Like sets out what good looks like.
8. How and when will I hear from you?
Get the cadence in writing. A reasonable standard is a weekly report, a monthly strategy call, a quarterly review and alerts when something needs your decision (stock running low, a listing suppressed, a Buy Box lost). Ask what the response time is when you email. Ask what happens when your named manager is on holiday.
9. How do changes reach my account, and can I trace them?
This sounds technical but matters. Changes made in bulk sheets can be validated before upload and logged afterwards. Changes made by hand in Campaign Manager leave no record beyond Amazon's own history. Ask whether every bid, budget and keyword change is logged where you can see it. If the agency uses third-party software, ask who reviews its changes before they go live.
Questions about money
10. How is the fee calculated at my actual spend, and what is not included?
Work out the total monthly cost at your current ad spend, not the headline. If the model is a percentage, multiply. If it is a hybrid, add the base and the percentage. Then ask what is outside the fee: set-up, creative assets, software, extra marketplaces, extra ASINs. Ask what happens to the fee when you add a product or a marketplace. Amazon PPC Management Cost: Agency Fees, Models and What You Get covers the models and typical ranges in detail.
11. What is the minimum term, and what happens after it?
Three to six months is a normal minimum, because PPC changes take weeks to prove. After that it should roll month to month with a notice period of 30 days or so. Be cautious of twelve-month locks with automatic renewal, and of any contract where the exit terms are not in the document you sign. Also ask whether the price quoted is the price you pay: with us, the written quote is the contract.
The question about leaving
12. When I leave, what do I keep?
Everything built in your Seller Central and advertising accounts is yours: campaigns, negative keyword lists, search term history, listing copy, images and A+ Content. Make sure the contract says so, and that the agency does not hold the assets on its own accounts or its own logins. Ask how the handover works: does the agency document the campaign structure and the reasons behind it, or does the knowledge leave with them? Switching Amazon Agencies: A Handover Checklist covers the handover in detail.
Red flags that end the conversation
Some answers should stop the process on their own.
- Guaranteed results. Nobody controls Amazon's algorithm, your competitors' pricing or your stock. An agency that guarantees a rank, an ACoS or a sales figure is either inexperienced or not being straight with you.
- A quote before an audit. The price is a guess and the plan is a template.
- Asking you to pay ad spend through the agency. Ad spend is billed by Amazon to your account. There is no good reason for it to route through anyone else.
- Anything that touches reviews. Incentivized reviews, review swaps, "review services" or messaging that steers unhappy buyers away from leaving feedback all break Amazon's policies. Amazon Vine and the Request a Review button are the allowed routes. An agency that suggests otherwise is putting your account at risk.
- Login credentials instead of user permissions. Access should be granted through Seller Central user permissions and the advertising account's user management, with the agency's own logins. Sharing your master password is unnecessary and unsafe.
- Vague answers about the team. If you cannot get names, you cannot hold anyone accountable.
Common mistakes sellers make when choosing
Picking the lowest fee. The fee is a fraction of what leaves your business each month for advertising. The quality of the work on the spend matters far more than a few hundred dollars of fee.
Picking the biggest name. Large agencies have large client lists, which means your account may not be the priority. Size is not a proxy for attention.
Skipping references. Ask for two clients of similar size and marketplace and actually call them. Ask what the agency is like when a month goes badly.
Not defining the objective. If you have not decided whether you want growth, profit, rank or a launch, no agency can plan for it. Decide before the first call, or pick an agency that makes you decide on it.
Judging too early. Click-through and conversion changes show in two to four weeks. Rank and TACoS take longer. An agency that has done the right things in month one may not show it in the numbers until month two. Judge on whether the plan is being followed and the reports make sense, then on the numbers.
How WeSpark answers these questions
Our first call ends with a written plan and price, not a pitch. Before that call we run the PPC audit and listing scorecard, which usually takes five to seven days, and we walk you through what we found. You get a named strategist and PPC manager, a weekly report, a monthly call and a quarterly review. Everything we build sits in your accounts and stays there.
Frequently asked questions
How long should I give a new Amazon agency before judging results?
Judge process from week one and numbers from week four onwards. Wasted-spend fixes show within one to two weeks; conversion changes take two to four weeks to prove; rank and TACoS improvements typically take two to three months. A fair review point is 90 days, provided the weekly reports have shown the plan being followed.
Should I choose a specialist PPC agency or a full-service one?
If your listings already convert at or above the category norm, a PPC specialist can work. If they do not, ads alone will not fix the account and you need someone who can change the page. In most accounts we see, conversion rate is at least part of the problem, which is why we run ads, listings and creative as one team.
Is it a problem if the agency is not in my country?
Not on its own. What matters is whether it has run live accounts in your marketplace and understands the language, tax and peak calendar. A US agency running your UK account should be able to tell you when Prime Day and Black Friday fall and how VAT affects the price you show.
What access should I give an agency?
Seller Central user permissions and advertising account access under the agency's own logins, scoped to what it needs. Never your master password. Ask for the agency's data policy in writing and confirm access is removed when the engagement ends.
Can I test an agency on one product first?
Often yes, and it is a reasonable way to start if the account is large. The trade-off is that one product on its own is a small sample, and results will be noisier. Agree the success measure and the time frame before you begin.