Amazon Agency Evaluation Checklist

This amazon agency evaluation checklist is the complete vetting system on one page: pre-screen criteria to eliminate weak candidates before you waste a call, the question list to run in every sales conversation, a scoring rubric so three agencies get compared on identical axes, and a reference-check script that gets past the cherry-picked happy client. It’s the operational companion to our guide on how to evaluate Amazon agencies — that page explains the reasoning, this one is built to be worked through with a pen. Budget two to three weeks for the full process. Every shortcut you take here gets repaid with interest during month four of a retainer you regret.

Pre-Screen: Eliminate Before You Evaluate

Don’t book calls with agencies that fail these. Each takes under ten minutes to verify from their website, LinkedIn, and a two-line email.

• Amazon is their core business, not a service line. A “full-funnel digital agency” that added marketplaces in 2023 will learn on your account. Check what percentage of their case studies and team titles are Amazon-specific.
• They publish real specifics somewhere. Case studies with numbers, teardown content, named methodology. An agency whose site is all stock photos and “we drive growth” will run your account the same way.
• They ask for read-only access before quoting. Any agency that quotes a retainer without seeing your Seller Central data is quoting off a rate card, not your situation.
• Team size roughly fits your account. A 3-person shop can’t cover a 2,000-SKU catalog across five marketplaces; a 200-person agency will route your $800K brand to its most junior pod.
• No contract longer than 6 months on first engagement. 12-month lock-ins for an unproven relationship are a red flag, full stop.

Three survivors is the right number to take into full evaluation.

The Amazon Agency Evaluation Checklist: Questions by Topic

Run every finalist through all four blocks. Take notes verbatim — you’ll score answers later, and vague answers are themselves data.

Team

• Who specifically will work on my account daily? What’s their name, and can I meet them before signing?
• How many accounts does that person manage concurrently? (Over 8–10 for a full-service book is a volume operation.)
• What happens when my account manager leaves? Walk me through the last time that happened.
• Is PPC handled by the same person as catalog and compliance, or by specialists? Who coordinates them?
• Where is the team located and what’s the guaranteed response time on an urgent issue — listing suppressed, account health warning, Buy Box loss?

Reporting and Attribution

• Show me an actual (redacted) monthly report for a client my size. Not a template — a real one.
• Do you report TACoS or just ACoS? How do you separate organic lift from ad-attributed revenue?
• What tools do you use — Pacvue, Perpetua, Scale Insights, Helium 10 — and do I keep access to the data if we part ways?
• Who owns the ad account and campaign structures? (The only acceptable answer: you do, in your own Seller Central.)
• What does week one look like? What’s delivered at 30, 60, and 90 days?

Compliance and Risk

• Have you handled an account suspension or ASIN reinstatement in my category? What was the outcome and timeline?
• What’s your process when Amazon requests documentation with a 24–72 hour deadline?
• Do you use any tactics that violate Amazon’s Terms of Service — review manipulation, search-find-buy, fake ranking schemes? (Watch for hedging. “Everyone does a little of that” ends the call.)
• Who on your team monitors Account Health Rating, and how often?

Commercial Terms

• Full pricing structure: retainer, percentage of revenue, percentage of ad spend, or hybrid? What’s excluded and billed separately?
• What’s the out-clause? Notice period, and what happens to campaigns, creative, and data on exit?
• Are there performance clauses or is the retainer due regardless of results?
• What would make you fire us as a client? (Good agencies have an answer; order-takers don’t.)

Cross-check quoted numbers against typical market rates in our agency pricing breakdown before you negotiate.

Scoring Rubric

Score each agency 1–5 per row immediately after the call, while answers are fresh. Multiply by weight, then total.

Maximum score is 90. Above 70, proceed to negotiation. Between 55 and 70, proceed only if the weak rows are ones you can live with (weak Sponsored Brands creative, fine; weak compliance, not fine if you sell in a gated category). Below 55, pass — a mediocre agency costs more than no agency, because you’ll stop watching the account yourself.

Reference-Check Script

Ask for two current clients in your revenue range and one former client. Then call — don’t email — and use this script. Fifteen minutes per call.

1. “What did the first 90 days actually look like versus what was pitched?”
2. “Who works on your account day to day, and has that person changed since you signed?”
3. “Tell me about a time something went wrong — a suppressed listing, a bad campaign month. How did they handle it?”
4. “What do the monthly reports look like? Do you read them?”
5. “What’s one thing you wish they did better?” (Every honest reference has an answer. “Nothing, they’re perfect” means a coached call.)
6. For the former client only: “Why did the engagement end, and how was the handover?”

Listen for specifics. A reference who can name their account manager, describe an actual incident, and cite a real number is genuine. A reference who speaks entirely in adjectives was warmed up an hour before your call.

Common Evaluation Mistakes

Four failure patterns show up again and again when brands run this process, and all four are avoidable:

Scoring the salesperson instead of the delivery team. The person who ran the pitch will never touch your account. If your rubric scores are based on how sharp the founder sounded on the discovery call, you’ve evaluated the wrong employee. Weight everything toward the named account manager you insisted on meeting.

Letting the audit become the evaluation. Most agencies offer a free audit, and a good one is genuinely informative — but an audit measures how well they diagnose, not how well they execute for eighteen months. Treat the audit as one input to the reporting-depth row, not a substitute for the checklist.

Comparing prices without comparing scope. A $4,000 retainer that excludes creative, catalog fixes, and compliance is more expensive than a $6,000 retainer that includes them. Force every finalist’s quote into the same line-item format before you look at totals.

Skipping the process because you’re bleeding. A suspended account or a collapsing ACoS creates pressure to sign whoever answers the phone first. Compress the timeline — run the calls in one week — but never drop the reference checks or the exit-clause review. Desperation signings produce the worst contracts in this industry.

After the Evaluation

If one agency clears 70 and the references hold up, sign the shortest term they’ll offer and judge them on the 90-day deliverables they committed to in writing. If nobody clears the bar, that’s a finding, not a failure — revisit the broader options in our hiring an Amazon agency guide, including in-house hires and freelancers.

And if you want to see how an agency performs on this checklist before running it on anyone else, run it on us. Our full-service Amazon management engagement is built to score well on exactly these criteria — named account team, TACoS-first reporting, in-house compliance, your accounts, your data, and terms you can exit. Start with the free audit and grade the audit itself against this page.