Flat Fee, Percentage of Ad Spend, or Revenue Share? How Amazon Agency Pricing Shapes Your Results

How an agency is paid shapes what it recommends. That isn’t a comment on anyone’s honesty. It’s incentives, the same way you’d think about a commission-only salesperson or a contractor billing by the hour.

Before you compare agencies on price, compare them on what their pricing rewards.

Percentage of ad spend

The agency takes a percentage of what you spend on Amazon ads.

• Rewards: higher ad spend.
• The problem: when cutting wasted spend is the right move, it also cuts the agency’s fee. Branded campaigns that buy sales you’d have gotten anyway make reports look great and keep spend up. See branded vs. incremental sales.
• Can work when: you’re deliberately scaling spend and watching TACoS closely.

Flat monthly retainer

A fixed fee for a defined scope.

• Rewards: keeping you as a client.
• The problem: you pay the same whether the channel grows or shrinks. The agency’s risk is low and yours is high. Vague scope makes it worse.
• Can work when: the scope is written down in detail and you can measure results yourself.

Retainer plus a percentage

A base fee plus a cut of spend or revenue. It can balance risk, but you’re paying twice and reading two incentives at once.

Revenue share with no fees

The agency charges nothing upfront and nothing monthly. It’s paid only a share of the revenue on the channels it manages.

• Rewards: a channel that sells more, at a price that holds.
• The problem: it depends entirely on how revenue is defined. Get the definition in writing: which channels, gross or net of refunds, and which report it’s pulled from.
• Works best when: the agency runs the whole channel, not one slice of it.

Why we chose zero fees and a revenue share

We charge no setup fee and no monthly retainer. We’re paid a share of the revenue on the channels we manage, the same rate for every client. Here’s what that means in practice:

• We carry the risk. If your channel doesn’t grow, we don’t either.
• We never earn on ad spend. If the right answer is cutting your budget, we’ll say so. It costs us nothing.
• Holding your price helps both of us. Discounting to chase volume doesn’t serve anyone, which is why pricing enforcement comes before advertising in everything we do.
• You can check the math. Revenue comes straight from your own Seller Central reports, and our monthly report ties to your real costs.

The honest trade-off: a revenue share applies to sales you were already making when we started. We think that’s fair when we’re running the whole channel, with no fee on top, but ask any revenue-share agency exactly how it’s calculated.

Questions to ask any agency about pricing

1. What exactly is included every month?
2. Does your fee go up if my ad spend goes up?
3. If you take a share of revenue, how is revenue defined, and from which report?
4. What’s the contract length, and what does it cost to leave?
5. Who owns the ad account, listings and creative if we part ways?

More in questions to ask an Amazon agency before you sign.

Frequently asked questions

Written by

Troy Marchand, CEO

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