The Hard Truth About Agencies
Hiring an Amazon agency should give you clarity, growth, and confidence. Too often, it does the opposite. Founders come to us after spending months—sometimes years—stuck with agencies that drained time, burned cash, and left the brand worse off than before.
The problem is not that every agency is bad. The problem is that most founders do not know what red flags to watch for until it is too late.
Red flag #1: the b-team bait and switch
You meet the founder in the sales process. You like their vision, you sign the contract. Then the work is handed off to a junior account manager or a rotating cast of freelancers. Strategy gets lost in translation. Execution becomes sloppy. If the people who sold you are not the ones doing the work, you are paying for theater, not results.
Red flag #2: death by reporting
If your agency drowns you in dashboards but cannot explain what actually happened—or what they will do about it—you are not getting insight. You are getting cover. Reports should clarify decisions, not confuse them.
Red flag #3: everything is an “optimization”
Agencies love to say they are “optimizing.” But are they actually changing your unit economics? Are they pushing the right SKUs? Are they building defensible rank? If the only answer you ever hear is “we tweaked some keywords,” you are not scaling—you are stalling.
Red flag #4: no point of view
Amazon changes weekly. If your agency is not proactively advising you on Vine, Subscribe & Save, Prime Day, or catalog structure, you are flying blind. A good agency should feel like a strategist and operator rolled into one. If you are always the one bringing them ideas, the value is upside down.
Red flag #5: they do not know your brand
Your brand is more than a listing. If your agency does not understand your positioning, your pricing strategy, or your competitive set, they cannot translate your story into the third aisle. Execution without context is just noise.
When It Is Time To Walk Away
If you see two or more of these red flags, it is not just “room for improvement.” It is time to move on. Staying loyal to an underperforming agency is not protecting your brand. It is delaying the growth your brand deserves.
What To Look For Instead
- Hands on Keys: Real operators running your account, not outsourcing it
- An Operating System: A framework like SOAR that ties every lever back to strategy
- Radical Transparency: Clear numbers, clear wins, clear misses
- Founder-Minded Strategy: People who think about your business as if it were their own
The Bottom Line
The third aisle is too important to leave in the wrong hands. Agencies should be partners who unlock growth, not roadblocks that slow it down. If you are not getting the clarity, performance, and confidence you expected, do not wait it out. Fire them, and find the team that treats your brand like it is their own.