Have your Amazon sales become inconsistent? Or, has your PPC advertising suddenly become a lot harder to manage? Maybe growth has just generally slowed to a snail’s pace. You’re not alone. And on top of this, there’s probably no clear reason as to why.
At some stage, many brands know they need help on Amazon, but they don’t necessarily know whether they need a consultant, an agency, or a more flexible hybrid setup.
The difficultly is, there can sometimes be a bit of overlap between the services of an Amazon Agency, and those of a consultant, which only further adds to the confusion.
Understanding the difference between an Amazon consultant and an Amazon agency can be tricky at first. And that’s ok. We’re here, backed with a tonne of real world experience to guide you on the right path to longer term success and will provide clarity around what each option is really designed to do.
What does an Amazon Consultant Actually Do?
Amazon Consultants are problem solvers. When somethings gone wrong, and no one can clearly understand why, it’s the consultants job to identify what’s happened and how it can be put right.
Rather than managing account activity day to day, the role of an Amazon Consultant is to step back and assess the business from an external point of view. That could mean identifying why growth has slowed down or why PPC advertising spend has suddenly become less efficient. They may even be looking at why certain products are not gaining the traction they should following a new product launch.
What they don’t typically do is physically implement any changes themselves. The expectation is that your internal team, or an external partner, takes on board the direction of the consultant and then executes it for you.
What an Amazon Agency Usually Handles Day to Day
An Amazon agency is more of an all-round support department for your business, designed to help run and manage the different aspects of your account on an ongoing basis.
On a typical day, that means managing the work that actually keeps things ticking over. Managing PPC ad spend, SEO work, updating listings, improving A+ content and general reporting are not set and forget tasks. When partnering with an Amazon Agency, the focus is shifted towards execution and consistency of these tasks.
For a lot of Amazon sellers, the daily tasks needed to simply maintain the account are where the vast majority of the workload sits. An Amazon agency can step in to help take ownership of that activity, implement required changes, manage campaigns, and keep the account progressing day to day rather than simply advising on what should be done next.
When Is Consultancy the Better Fit?
Consultancy is usually a better direction for brands that have reached a point whereby they are unable to make sense of their performance.
If you’re sales were to suddenly slow down without any clear reason, or your new products are failing to gain the expected traction they should, the natural response is to start making changes. But without knowing what the underlying issues are, this is like throwing fire on fire. At this point, budgets start to get eaten into really fast.
Consultants are often the strongest choice when a brand needs diagnosis, direction, troubleshooting or marketplace expansion advice. Basically, anything which requires senior level input for specific problems. By looking at the bigger picture, their job is to highlight where the problems are while outlining what needs to change in areas such as listings, A+ content, PPC, pricing or catalogue structure.
At What Point Does a Brand Need Full Agency Support?
A lot of brands try to manage Amazon internally for a lot longer than they probably should, and that’s understandable considering things were probably working just fine before. But as the business starts to grow, all those little tasks you were doing on a daily basis suddenly become harder to stay on top of.
You see the thing is, the Amazon platform is not static. Its constantly evolving and requires constant attention as a result. Everything starts to become sensitive to small changes as your grow and expand. When you consider all the elements of your account, from PPC and listing optimisation through to SEO, reporting and day to day execution, without enough time or specialist experience, cracks to start to appear and often decisions get made without having a clear view of the data or what’s driving the results.
Trying to manage an Amazon account in its growth phase without enough strategic or executional depth is where internal teams sometimes get stuck. At this stage, the business doesn’t have any issue with knowing what needs to be done, they simply don’t have the capacity to do it properly, and that’s where a full agency support can help stabilise and improve performance over time.
How Should a Growing Brand Decide Which Support Channel to Take?
Not every Amazon business is built the same, and the growth plans and long term goals will vary a lot between brands. This is why it’s very difficult to place each one neatly into one category. Its also the reason why making the decision on which support channel to take isn’t always straightforward.
To approach decision making effectively, brands need to look at what they stand to gain from external support. Some teams are clear on what needs to be done, but don’t have the resources to execute it, while others are doing the day to day work without any clear direction. Perhaps you’ve simply outgrown ad-hoc support and things have become inconsistent. Identifying which category you fall into is the first step to determining which type of support you need.
In some cases, several problems exist at the same time. When there isn’t full confidence in the direction, and there isn’t enough internal resource to execute properly either, that’s often where a hybrid combination of consultancy and agency support starts to make more sense
At the same time, it’s worth noting that not every brand is ready for full agency support. If your catalogue is small and you’re operating on limited budgets, a full agency retainer might be difficult to justify.
At the end of the day, making decisions about external support comes down to understanding what is actually holding your store back. If the issue is direction, diagnoses or troubleshooting, consultancy is usually the right place to start. If the issue is implementation, account management and active delivery, agency support becomes the more practical option.
