Every growing Amazon brand reaches the same question: who should run the account? The three usual answers are an agency, your own team, or freelancers for specific jobs. Each can work. The mistake is comparing only the visible price.
What running an Amazon account takes
Start with the skills, not the people. A healthy account needs:
- Listings and SEO: keyword research, copy, attributes, catalog structure
- Advertising: campaign structure, bidding, search term analysis
- Creative: product images, infographics, A+ Content, video
- Operations: stock planning, FBA shipments, cases and reimbursements
- Compliance: account health, policy issues, documents and, in Europe, product safety and VAT
- Analysis: reporting, profitability, decisions about what to do next
Few people are strong in all six. That is the core of the decision.
The three setups compared
| In-house team | Freelancers | Agency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skills covered | What your hires know | Whatever you book | A team of specialists |
| Knowledge of your brand | Deepest | Limited to the job | Grows over time |
| Cover for holidays and illness | Only if you hire more than one | None | Built in |
| Your management time | Moderate | High: you coordinate everything | Low to moderate |
| Speed to start | Slow: hiring and training | Fast for single jobs | Fast |
| Flexibility | Low: fixed headcount | High | Medium: notice periods |
The hidden costs of each
In-house
- Recruiting time and the months before a new hire is fully productive
- Software and tools you pay for directly
- Training to keep up with Amazon’s constant changes
- The risk of losing all knowledge when one person leaves
Freelancers
- Your time spent briefing, coordinating and checking work
- Gaps between jobs where nobody watches the account
- Inconsistent results when several people work without a shared plan
Agency
- Onboarding time while the agency learns your products and history
- Less day-to-day closeness to the brand than an employee
- Work outside the agreed scope, priced as extra
Which setup fits which stage
- Just starting, one marketplace, a few products: do it yourself with expert help for specific jobs, or a short consulting engagement to set things up correctly.
- Growing, advertising becoming important: an agency for advertising and creative, with someone in-house owning the account.
- Several marketplaces or channels: an agency that covers the whole account, or an in-house lead supported by an agency.
- Large brand with its own e-commerce team: in-house ownership, with agencies for specialist areas and new markets.
The hybrid model, an in-house owner plus an agency, is often the best of both. It keeps decisions and brand knowledge inside the company while specialists handle the execution.
Making the decision
List the six skill areas above, mark which ones you already cover well, and price the gaps both ways: hiring or outsourcing. Then add your own time. Our guide to what an Amazon agency costs shows how to compare quotes, and our 12 questions to ask an agency help you choose one.