Signing with an Amazon agency is the start, not the finish. What happens in the first 90 days tells you more about the relationship than any sales call. Here is what a good start looks like, month by month, so you know what to expect and what to ask for.
Before day one
- Agree the scope in writing: which marketplaces, products and tasks.
- Name one contact on each side.
- Share your goals and limits: growth targets, profit targets, budget, products that must not change.
- Prepare access: the agency should get its own user logins in Seller Central and the advertising console, never your main password.
Month 1: understand and fix the obvious
- Audit. Account health, listings, advertising, stock and open cases.
- Baseline. A record of where things stand today: sales, profit after fees, ACOS and TACOS, stock cover, account health.
- Priority list. A written plan of what will be done first and why, agreed with you.
- Quick fixes. Suppressed listings, missing information, open policy issues and overdue reimbursement cases.
What you should receive: the audit summary, the priority list and the first weekly reports.
Month 2: build
- Listing improvements on the products with the most traffic or the weakest conversion
- Advertising restructured by purpose, without pausing what already works. See sorting campaigns by purpose.
- Stock planning for the next season
- Creative work started where images or A+ Content hold sales back
What you should receive: a change log that records every edit, and a first monthly review.
Month 3: measure and adjust
- Results compared against the baseline, with explanations, not only charts
- Decisions on what to keep, change or stop
- A plan for the next quarter: new products, new marketplaces, seasonal peaks
What you should receive: a quarterly review with clear recommendations.
Signs it is going well
- You understand what changed and why, without asking.
- Problems are reported before you find them.
- The agency asks for decisions on things that matter and handles the rest.
- Early metrics move in the right direction, even if sales take longer.
Warning signs
- Big structural changes in the first week, before any audit
- No written plan or change log
- Reports full of numbers but without explanations
- Missed check-ins and slow answers to urgent issues
If you are still choosing, our 12 questions to ask an Amazon agency help you compare. If you already have an agency and these warning signs sound familiar, read how to switch agencies without losing ground. This is also how we run our own account management onboarding.