Amazon Agency: Solution or Support? — with Remazing

For a scaling brand operating on Amazon, deciding whether to bring on an agency is arguably the single most expensive operational decision a business leader will make. It dictates not just a significant monthly expenditure, but the fundamental architecture of how a brand’s presence, advertising strategy, and international rollout will be executed over the coming years. Despite the sheer financial weight of this choice and the operational dependencies it creates, an alarming number of founders and brand directors still make this decision based on sheer vibes. They review a slick pitch deck, feel an immediate rapport with a charismatic sales director, and sign a retainer without fundamentally understanding what an agency can—and cannot—do.

The AMALYZE AMA Session hosted by Christian Otto Kelm alongside guests from Remazing—one of Europe’s largest and most established Amazon agencies—set out to dismantle the myths surrounding agency partnerships. The discussion moved past the customary marketing fluff to critically examine the mechanics of engaging external partners. Rather than framing the conversation as a simple binary choice between outsourcing and in-housing, the session explored how agencies actually function as force multipliers for brands that have reached a threshold of scale, dissecting the precise operational advantages of partnering with a top-tier firm.

Why "Should We Hire an Agency?" Is the Wrong Question

When internal e-commerce teams reach their bandwidth limits, the immediate reflex is often to ask whether the brand should hire an agency. However, the AMA session highlighted that this is fundamentally the wrong question. A brand must first diagnose the exact nature of its operational bottleneck. Are you lacking bandwidth, or are you lacking capability?

If a brand has a highly sophisticated Amazon strategy but simply lacks the manpower to implement daily bid adjustments or upload A+ Content across hundreds of SKUs, they are solving for capacity. Conversely, if a brand has plenty of staff but cannot figure out how to structure complex Amazon Demand-Side Platform (DSP) campaigns or properly attribute holistic search standing, they are solving for capability.

Approaching the agency question without first understanding this distinction leads to misaligned expectations. Brands that hire agencies solely to dump unwanted administrative tasks often fail to leverage the strategic expertise they are paying a premium for. On the other hand, brands that blindly hand over the reins without having internal stakeholders who grasp the basics of Amazon’s ecosystem risk losing control of their own brand narrative. The correct question is not whether to hire an agency, but rather which precise operational and strategic gaps an agency is uniquely positioned to fill.

Meet Remazing and the Tier 1 Agency Tier

To understand the modern agency landscape, one must look at the top of the market. Headquartered in Hamburg, Remazing stands as a prime example of the European Tier 1 agency tier. They have cultivated a formidable reputation not by servicing first-month product launches or speculative private label sellers, but by acting as the strategic engine for ambitious multi-national sellers and established brand manufacturers operating across the DACH region and broader Europe.

What separates a Tier 1 agency from a mid-market consultancy is infrastructure. Remazing, for instance, operates with deep vendor-side expertise, navigating the labyrinthine complexities of Amazon Vendor Central—from purchase order (PO) management and shortage claims to advanced catalogue integrations. Furthermore, top-tier agencies differentiate themselves through proprietary tooling. The development of software like Remdash allows an agency to automate content monitoring, protect buy boxes, and standardise reporting across massive, complex catalogues in a way that off-the-shelf software often cannot accommodate. They are not simply executing manual tasks faster; they are deploying proprietary ecosystems to manage scale that would break a traditional brand’s internal processes.

The Multiplier Thesis: What Agencies Can Build That You Can't

The core economic argument for hiring a heavy-hitting Amazon agency is the "multiplier thesis". At its heart, this thesis dictates that there are certain high-level operational assets that a single retail brand simply cannot justify building or funding alone.

Consider the staffing requirements for a truly pan-European Amazon presence. A single brand selling home goods cannot realistically afford to hire a full-time, native-speaking French copywriter, a dedicated Italian marketplace specialist, and a full-time Amazon PPC data scientist just for their own account. Even if they could afford the payroll, there would not be enough daily work to keep these highly specialised roles occupied. Furthermore, building a bespoke, API-integrated proprietary dashboard to monitor granular market share shifts requires a team of software engineers.

An agency amortises these massive overhead investments across dozens of high-value clients. When a brand pays an agency retainer, they are functionally renting fractional access to an entire floor of native-speaker copywriters, elite PPC analysts, and multi-million-euro tech stacks. The agency acts as a multiplier, granting the individual client the operational firepower of an enormously resourced enterprise at a fraction of the cost of building it from scratch.

The fundamental takeaway from the session is that an agency should never be viewed as a substitute for a viable business strategy. The most successful brand-agency relationships are built on the premise of multiplication: the brand provides a proven product, healthy margins, and a distinct positioning, while the agency provides the infrastructure, scale, and specialised manpower to amplify those assets across multiple marketplaces.

Tier 1 Status, Beta Access and the Amazon Ads Partner Network

Not all agency relationships with Amazon are created equal. The AMA session heavily emphasised the tangible, measurable advantages of working with an agency that holds Tier 1, Strategic Agency Partner, or Amazon Ads Verified Partner status. This is not merely a vanity badge for a corporate website; it drastically alters the toolkit available to the brand.

Amazon reserves its most potent advertising tools, data clean rooms (like Amazon Marketing Cloud), and beta programmatic features for its highest-performing partners. A Tier 1 agency gets access to new ad formats and targeting capabilities months before they are rolled out to the general Seller Central public. For a client, this means a critical structural advantage over competitors who are still relying on legacy campaign types.

Furthermore, this status provides the agency with dedicated Amazon partner managers and VIP escalation paths. Anyone who has ever attempted to resolve a suspended listing, a hijacked ASIN, or a toxic catalogue merge via standard Amazon Seller Support understands the sheer futility of the process. Top-tier agencies have internal channels to escalate case work and resolve catastrophic catalogue issues in days, rather than the weeks or months it might take an isolated seller.

Internationalisation: Translation Is Not Localisation

When successful local brands decide to expand beyond their home marketplace, the friction of internationalisation often halts their momentum. A major focal point of the discussion was the difference between translation and true localisation—a distinction that routinely separates amateur expansions from dominant pan-European brands.

It is relatively cheap to run a German product listing through a translation tool to generate a French or Spanish listing. However, native shoppers do not search via literal translations; they search using culturally specific colloquialisms and regional search modifiers. A top-tier agency approaches internationalisation through the lens of native keyword research. They rebuild the SEO architecture of the listing from the ground up for each of the six core European marketplaces (Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, and increasingly, smaller nodes like Poland, Sweden or the Netherlands).

Beyond linguistic rigour, internationalisation introduces severe compliance hurdles. Agencies provide the necessary frameworks and vetted partner networks for navigating local VAT requirements, complex packaging laws (such as Germany’s LUCID or France’s EPR), and marketplace-specific category gating. Without an agency’s infrastructure, a brand’s international expansion is often bogged down by legal compliance long before the first unit is sold.

Amazon-Deep vs. Omnichannel-Broad: Pick a Lane

As the European e-commerce landscape matures, Amazon is no longer the sole digital shelf. Marketplaces like Otto, Kaufland, and Zalando have emerged as powerful secondary channels. This presents scaling brands with a critical strategic divergence: do you hire an agency that is incredibly deep on Amazon, or one that is omnichannel-broad?

The AMASession highlighted that sellers must consciously pick a lane based on their product category and internal resources. A highly focused, Amazon-deep agency will possess an intricate, almost forensic understanding of the A9 algorithm. They will know precisely how to manipulate broad match modifiers, structure complex defensive DSP campaigns, and exploit vendor negotiations. An omnichannel agency, by contrast, trades some of that granular Amazon mastery for the ability to seamlessly integrate API product feeds into Otto and manage generic display ads across Kaufland.

Brands must be wary of agencies claiming absolute mastery over every single platform. The algorithms, logistics requirements, and advertising ecosystems of Amazon and Zalando are vastly different. An agency can offer broad support, but pure algorithmic dominance usually requires a concentrated focus.

Choosing an Agency Without Getting Sold a Logo Wall

The process of selecting an agency is fraught with pitfalls. Sales directors are exceptionally skilled at presenting dazzling "logo walls"—slides packed with the badges of massive global brands they supposedly represent. However, merely having once handled a translation project for a Fortune 500 company does not mean the agency is equipped to handle your specific operational needs.

Due diligence is vital. Brands should demand verifiable case studies strictly within their own product category. The strategy used to sell low-margin, high-volume FMCG products is entirely irrelevant to the strategy required to sell high-margin, low-volume consumer electronics. More importantly, brands must seek utmost clarity regarding team structure. A classic agency bait-and-switch involves fielding brilliant, senior strategists during the pitch phase, only to hand the actual day-to-day execution over to junior account managers the day after the contract is signed.

When vetting an agency, brands must enforce a transparent reporting cadence and insist on retaining raw data access. You are looking for a cultural fit, not just a contractor. An agency acts as a long-term commercial partner; if their communication style, agility, or strategic outlook clashes with the brand’s internal culture, the relationship will inevitably sour, regardless of their technical prowess.

Collaboration Models: Hand-Off, Retained Control, or Hybrid

How does the daily collaboration actually run once the signature is on the contract? The session outlined a central tension in agency relationships regarding the division of labour, generally falling into three distinct collaboration models.

The first is the "full hand-off". In this model, the brand completely delegates the e-commerce function. This works best when the brand explicitly lacks execution capacity but maintains strong internal governance to hold the agency accountable to KPI targets. The danger here is total dependency; if the brand loses all institutional knowledge of how Amazon works, they become captive to the agency.

The second model is "retained control". Here, the brand has deep, senior Amazon expertise in-house but utilises the agency purely as a workforce multiplier for specific, time-consuming workstreams—such as managing PPC campaigns across hundreds of secondary SKUs or generating A+ premium content graphics. The brand dictates the overarching strategy; the agency turns the dials.

The third, and most common, is the "hybrid" model. In a successful hybrid setup, clear boundaries are drawn. The agency typically takes full ownership of traffic generation, advertising architecture, SEO optimisation, and content production. The brand retains absolute authority over retail fundamentals: pricing strategy, inventory forecasting, margin requirements, and overall brand positioning.

When an Agency Is the Wrong Answer

Despite the overwhelming benefits of top-tier agency partnerships, the session provided an honest, critical counter-view: there are distinct scenarios where hiring an agency is the absolute wrong answer.

For an early-stage seller generating €10,000 to €30,000 a month in revenue, a full agency retainer will utterly destroy their net margins. At this stage, founders usually gain a far better return on investment by retaining a part-time, specialist freelancer, or by simply doing the arduous work of learning the platform themselves. Agencies become financially accretive only at scale—typically when a brand is clearing €100,000+ in monthly recurring revenue or when a legacy brand manufacturer is making its initial, highly capitalised transition onto the marketplace.

Crucially, agencies should never be brought in to solve fundamental retail failings. An agency cannot fix a broken pricing strategy, they cannot make inventory bets or solve supply chain delays, and they cannot establish a brand’s foundational positioning if the founder hasn’t done so first. If a product lacks product-market fit or suffers from fundamental quality issues, no amount of elite, Tier-1 PPC management will save it.

Conclusion: Agencies Are Force Multipliers, Not Founders

The overarching narrative of the AMA session stripped away the illusion that hiring an agency is a magic bullet for Amazon dominance. Instead, it positioned top-tier agencies like Remazing precisely where they belong in the broader e-commerce ecosystem: as highly specialised, technically advanced force multipliers.

For established brands and scaling vendors, these agencies unlock levels of international reach, advertising sophistication, and operational efficiency that are simply unattainable in-house. They provide the infrastructure necessary to mature beyond amateur operations and compete on a pan-European scale. However, the success of the partnership remains entirely contingent on the brand’s ability to provide a solid retail foundation. An agency will build the engine, fine-tune the aerodynamics, and drive the vehicle at maximum speed—but the brand itself must still build a product worth racing.