Switching Amazon Agencies: A Handover Checklist

Key takeaways: Before you give notice, export everything, confirm you own every account and asset, and set the new agency's start date so there is no gap in weekly management. The handover itself is a short list: access, history, cost data, brand assets and a clear objective. Do not let either agency restructure the account in the overlap week.

Before you give notice

The moment an agency knows it is leaving, its attention moves elsewhere. Do the protective work first, while the relationship is normal.

Confirm ownership. Your Seller Central account, your advertising account, your Brand Registry enrollment and your Brand Store must all be registered to your business, with your email as the primary account holder. If the agency created any of them, or if the advertising account sits inside the agency's own manager account in a way you cannot detach, fix that before anything else. Check the Amazon Ads account's user list and the Seller Central user permissions page, and note every login that belongs to the outgoing agency.

Export the history. Download the last 12 months of search term reports, campaign and placement reports, the bulk operations file for the whole account, Business Reports by child ASIN, and the advertising change history if the agency kept one. Save your current listing content in full for every ASIN, including backend search terms, A+ modules and Brand Store pages, because listing content is the thing most often lost when a departing agency's tools disconnect.

Ask for the working files. The keyword research, the campaign map, the change log, the creative source files and any test results are your property if your contract says so, and worth asking for even if it does not. Read your contract for the notice period and any minimum-term clause. If you signed a long term, it is still worth knowing exactly when it ends before you choose a start date for the new agency.

Choosing the start date

Set the new agency's start so their audit runs during the outgoing agency's notice period. Weekly management should never lapse: a fortnight with nobody reviewing search terms or budgets costs real money, and a stock or suppression alert nobody sees costs more. An overlap week, where the old agency still runs the weekly cycle and the new one only reads, is ideal. It is also the week where nobody should restructure anything.

The handover checklist

What the new agency needs from you is shorter than most sellers expect. This is the list we work from, set out in A5 · What we need from you before work starts; we start the audits while the rest arrives.

1. Access. User permissions in Seller Central for the sections they will work in, and user access to the advertising account. Grant permissions to named individuals rather than a shared login, so you can revoke them one by one later.
2. The exports. The reports and bulk file you already saved, so the audit reads a full year rather than the 60 days the console shows easily.
3. Cost data. Landed cost per ASIN, so profit per ASIN can be built in the first month. Without it the new agency will optimize to ACoS, which is not the same thing.
4. Brand assets. Logo files, brand guidelines, product photography source files, any video, and the A+ and Store design files if you have them.
5. The objective. One primary goal and the KPI it is measured by, with the current baseline. If you are switching because the last agency never had this, write it down now.
6. The history you carry in your head. Which ASINs were launched when, which tests were run, what went wrong with the last agency, what you have already tried on the listing. Half an hour on a call saves the new team from repeating an experiment that already failed.

The overlap week

The new agency reads. It runs its audit, builds the scorecard and drafts the 30/60/90 plan. The old agency runs the normal weekly cycle. Neither restructures campaigns, rewrites listings or moves budgets beyond routine pacing. The reason is simple: the audit is measuring the account as it stands, and the day-90 review will compare against that baseline. A restructure in the overlap week destroys the baseline and the sales history in the existing campaigns at the same time.

If the outgoing agency makes large changes in its last week, ask for them to be reversed from the bulk file you exported. That export is the reason you made it.

The cutover

On the agreed day, remove the old agency's users from Seller Central and the advertising account, change any shared passwords, and check that no third-party tool the old agency connected still has authorization in your account settings. The new agency's first weekly report should land within the first full week, and it should list the changes made, the reason for each, and the number each is expected to move.

Pricing & choosing an agencyThe First 90 Days with an Amazon Agency: What Should HappenAn honest timeline for a new Amazon agency engagement: what happens in weeks one to two, what you should see by day 30, and which results take the full 90 days.

Three mistakes we see in handovers

Giving notice before exporting. Letting a gap of two or more weeks open between agencies because the new contract was not signed in time. And allowing a new agency to rebuild the account in week one to make its mark, which resets everything and makes the first quarter's results impossible to read.

A5What we need from you before work startsno wasted weeks. We only ask for what we will use, and we start the audits while the rest arrives.

A10Your first 90 days with usan honest timeline. Click-through and conversion changes show in 2–4 weeks; ranking and TACoS improvements take 60–90 days.