How to Stop an Agency Blowing Your Budget, and 5 More Amazon Seller Questions Answered
Al and Leon go through the six questions brands asked most on calls over the last two months: stopping an agency overspending, selling on Amazon when you can’t discount, taking back listings from resellers, whether to pay to defend your own brand name, vendor or seller, and launching at scale when Amazon limits your stock. The episode opens with some banter about Argos and easyGroup launching their own marketplaces.
In this episode: Six real seller questions, each with a practical answer and the trade offs to weigh, drawn from recent calls with brands.
Key takeaways
To stop an agency overspending, agree clear caps in advance (an absolute cash amount or a TACOS based limit), build caps into the campaigns, and set measurable goals you stay consistent on and give time to work.
Yes, you should pay to defend your own brand name, and defend your product pages with own product targeting too, because off platform campaigns send people to search for you on Amazon.
Vendor or seller depends on cost of goods, operations and how much control you want, and seller is usually the better fit for most brands, with a grey zone of roughly £5 to £12 where the answer depends heavily on your costs.
Timestamps
00:00 Intro: the questions sellers ask most
00:38 Banter: Argos and easyGroup launch marketplaces
05:31 How do I stop an agency blowing my ad budget?
09:13 I’m not allowed to discount. Can Amazon still work?
12:32 Resellers already own our listings. How do we take them back?
16:18 Should we pay to defend our own brand name?
21:03 Vendor or seller?
23:48 Amazon won’t let us send enough stock. How do we launch at scale?
27:24 Wrap up
The detail
Taking back a listing from resellers starts with Brand Registry: have your brand registered to your account so you can speak with authority, and if a reseller already holds it, ask them to hand over ownership or contest it, since Amazon usually backs the owner of the IP who has the GS1 codes. Then create your own listing and make it look right, using the Brand Registry contribution rights ranking, so your offer can win the Buy Box on account health, fulfilment and competitive pricing. Make sure your seller account is actually linked to Brand Registry, ideally by creating both with the same email. If that fails, speak to the reseller’s supplier (never discussing RRP with another seller in most countries), and as the nuclear option use the Transparency programme, where only products with Amazon’s QR codes can be sold. This is a common form of the reseller problem that quietly erodes your listing.
On defending your own brand name, the answer is yes, with the budget and the numbers deciding how much. People searching your name already intend to buy, so you will always get sales there, but if a competitor has a more compelling offer they will poach your customers. Use Amazon’s tool that shows how many are being siphoned off on your brand terms, make poaching more expensive and painful, and remember that defending your own brand name also means defending your product page with own product targeting, where a competitor has a wider chance of winning the click. If you run campaigns on Meta or TikTok, people will come to Amazon to search for you, and if you are not visible you have effectively run a campaign for your competition.
On launching at scale, Amazon typically makes around a thousand units available at launch and expands that quickly based on rate of sale, so plan to replenish within two to three weeks, remembering that some units go to Vine for reviews. Q4 is the hardest time to launch, with Q2 and Q3 better. You can bid for extra capacity, paying only for space you don’t sell through, but there is about a month’s lag, so bid again and higher if nothing comes through, while being careful trusting Amazon’s bidding system. For a new market, the other options are AWD, which holds your stock and drip feeds it into FBA, or an Amazon programme that can give some sellers much more storage space, which Al and Leon can help with.
Work with us
Facing one of these questions with your own account? Get in touch.
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