Every question we get asked, answered in one place
The company, getting started and how the work runs, then every question from every service page, kept current with the pages they come from.
Loading FAQ hero image
About Xcelerate Brands
Who we are, what we do, and what we do not.
We are a commerce growth and operations partner. We run the marketplaces and storefronts a brand sells on, the advertising that feeds them, the creative and compliance work around them, and two commercial partnerships for brands that want a different arrangement from a retainer. The work is organised into five service families, each with its own page.
Amazon, Walmart, eBay and TikTok Shop, and Shopify for a brand's own storefront. Each has its own service page describing what running it involves.
An operator. We run accounts, advertising and listings inside your own seller accounts rather than writing a strategy document for somebody else to implement. Where a brand wants advice alone, that is a conversation we can have, but the work we are known for is doing it.
Since 2015. The About page carries the company facts and the team.
Xcelerate Brands' registered office is in Sheridan, Wyoming, with an Xcelerate Brands office in Irvine, California, and Xcelerate Brands teams in Košice, Slovakia and Jhelum, Pakistan. The offices are listed on the contact page, and the map on the About page shows where the people are.
Brands selling on marketplaces and through their own storefronts, from established consumer brands to retailers with a catalogue to move. The case studies show the categories we have grown and what changed on each account.
Yes. Most of the demand is on the US marketplaces, and we also run accounts in the UK and the EU, including Amazon Renewed in Europe, and on the marketplaces' other regions where the brand sells there.
Not as a reseller of our clients' goods. The retail growth partnership is the one arrangement where we sell under a client's brand, and in it the inventory stays the client's until it sells. The partnership page explains the model.
A family is an area of work, such as Marketplace Management or Compliance & Account Health. A service is one thing inside it with its own page, such as Amazon or Account Reinstatement. The Services page lists every family and what is inside each.
Yes, through xB Academy. The courses page lists what is taught, and the community is where people who have taken a course keep asking questions.
Yes. BPO Services covers an outsourced team working under your own name, with your processes and your reporting. It sits under Strategic Partnerships because it is an arrangement rather than a project.
We do not promise rankings, reinstatements, approvals or revenue figures, because none of them is ours to promise. We do not buy reviews, manipulate rankings or work around a marketplace's policies. And we do not take on work where we do not see a realistic path to improvement.
Getting started
What happens between the first message and the first month.
Send the form on the contact page. Tell us the category, where you sell and what is not working, and the first reply will already say something useful about it.
A review of your category and your account before any talk of a retainer, sent back through the form. We look at who ranks above you, where their position comes from and whether it can realistically change, and we tell you what we would change first.
The category you sell in, the marketplaces you are on, and access to the account if you want the audit to be specific. Seller Central, Walmart Seller Center and the advertising consoles all allow read-only user permissions, which is all the audit needs.
By whether there is a realistic path to improvement. If the sellers above you hold their place for reasons additional spend will not change, we say so. Taking a fee for work that cannot move the numbers serves nobody.
It depends on the account and the channels, and we say how long each step takes when we propose the work. Access, a read of the catalogue and the advertising, and an agreed plan come before anything is changed.
Always. The seller accounts, the advertising accounts, the storefront and the brand registrations stay in your name, and we work inside them as users you can remove. Nothing about the arrangement makes leaving difficult.
Yes, and it is a common starting point. We read what the previous agency built before changing it, keep what is working, and say plainly what is not.
Yes, where the category supports it. A launch is a different plan from a takeover, and the audit is where we say which one applies and what it would need.
Yes. Project services such as Design, Product Listing Optimization, Keyword Research, Unit Economics, Cost Recovery, Trademark Registration and Brand Registry are bought as pieces of work. Managed services run month to month.
It depends on the channels, the catalogue and the scope, and it is set out in the proposal after the audit. We do not publish a price list, because two accounts in the same category can need very different work.
The proposal states the term for the work it describes. Managed work is planned in months because results on a marketplace take months. Project work ends when the project does.
A named account lead, and the specialists the account needs behind them. The team page introduces the people.
How the work runs
Reporting, operations, and what we measure.
Contribution after fees, advertising, returns and storage, alongside share of voice in the category. Growth that costs more than it earns is not reported as a result.
A regular report on the cadence agreed in the proposal, and a message whenever something on the account needs a decision from you. The reporting is built so a question about any number can be answered from the underlying data.
Inside yours. Listings, advertising, inventory and compliance are handled in your own seller and advertising accounts, so everything that is built stays with you.
Stock, pricing and demand decisions cross between channels, so they are made together rather than per marketplace. A promotion on one channel is planned knowing what it does to stock on the others.
Yes. Campaign structure, targeting, bids, budgets and the search term work are done by the team, against contribution margin rather than against the platform's own report of itself.
The Compliance & Account Health family covers it. We establish what actually triggered the action, assemble the case the process asks for, submit it through the right route and follow it. The decision is always the marketplace's to make.
No, and nobody honest can. A marketplace decides rankings, approvals and reinstatements. What we control is whether the work is done properly and reported honestly, and the case studies show what that has produced on real accounts.
Access is through named user permissions in your own accounts, limited to what the work needs and removable by you at any time. We do not hold your account credentials.
The marketplaces' own consoles and advertising platforms first, with reporting built on their data. Where a third-party tool earns its place for research or monitoring, it is used, and it is never a substitute for reading the account.
Yes. Everything is done in your accounts, so the history is visible there, and the reporting names what was changed and why.
On the notice the proposal states. Your accounts, listings, campaigns and registrations are yours and stay as they are; we hand over what we built and remove our access.
Every service has its own page with what it covers, how it runs and its own questions, and those questions are repeated further down this page under the service's name.
About Marketplace Management
Listings and catalogue, advertising, inventory and replenishment planning, account health and compliance, pricing and promotions, and the reporting that says what each channel actually contributed. On every marketplace we run, the whole operation rather than a slice of it.
No, and most brands should not. Each channel has its own economics, and one run well earns more than four run thinly. The first conversation is about which channels your catalogue and margins suit.
Yes. Most of the work starts on accounts already trading, which is usually where the largest short-term gains are: an established account with a structural problem is a faster win than a new channel.
One team across all of them, so stock, pricing and promotional decisions are taken knowing what they do elsewhere. Brands that split channels between suppliers usually discover the interaction later, in the inventory.
Amazon account management is the ongoing operation of a brand's Seller Central or Vendor Central presence: listing content and keywords, advertising, account health and compliance, inventory and forecasting, and the reporting that ties it to profit. It is continuous rather than a project, because Amazon's auction, catalogue rules and policies all change without notice.
Ten areas, weighted differently for each account: compliance operations, Seller and Vendor Central administration, listing optimisation, Amazon SEO, A+ and Brand Store creative, sponsored advertising, DSP, account health and reinstatement, inventory and FBA reimbursements, and reporting on contribution margin. A brand losing money to stockouts needs different attention from one whose listings never rank.
Our management fee starts at $1,500 a month (see Pricing). The audit confirms scope: catalogue size, how many marketplaces are in scope and whether advertising is included. The test we apply is whether the fee is smaller than the money currently being lost to stockouts, unclaimed reimbursements, untended advertising and listings that do not convert. If the audit does not find that, we say so.
Advertising changes typically show in two to three weeks, because that is how long a campaign needs to gather enough clicks per keyword to be read honestly. Listing and keyword changes typically take four to eight weeks, since ranking responds to sales history rather than to the edit. Account health work can resolve in a week or take months, depending entirely on Amazon.
Yes. The Seller Central or Vendor Central account stays in your name, we work inside it under user permissions you grant and can revoke, and every asset we create is yours. You can end the arrangement and keep the listings, the campaign structure, the creative and the data.
An audit, then the fixes that stop money leaving. In practice that is suppressed or miscategorised listings, stranded and aged inventory, advertising campaigns running without negative keywords, unclaimed FBA reimbursements, and missing or non-compliant images. Strategy comes second, because none of it survives an account that is bleeding.
In-house wins when Amazon is the whole business and you can hire three or four specialists, because nobody will ever care about your catalogue as much as your own people. An agency wins when Amazon is one large channel among several, when the work needs six skills at a fraction of a person each, or when the account is in trouble now and hiring takes three months. The failure case for both is one overloaded generalist.
Seller Central is third party: you sell to the customer, set your own prices, hold the inventory, and keep the margin and the risk. Vendor Central is first party: you sell to Amazon at wholesale, Amazon sets the retail price, and you trade margin for volume and for not owning the inventory. They have different economics, different advertising tools and different failure modes, and a brand can run both at once.
Yes. Vendor Central is a different discipline from Seller Central: purchase orders, chargebacks, cost negotiations, retail analytics, and content submitted through a different pipeline. Brands running both need the two coordinated, because they compete with each other on the same detail page if nobody is watching.
Amazon SEO is ranking inside Amazon's own search, which is a purchase engine rather than an information engine. It rewards conversion and sales velocity for a keyword, not backlinks or domain authority. A listing ranks because people who searched that term bought it, so the work is making a listing eligible for the right terms and then making it convert once it appears.
Backend search terms are hidden keyword fields that make a listing eligible to appear for terms the visible copy does not contain. They still matter, and they are often wasted: duplicated words, competitor brand names that are not permitted, and commas that do nothing. They will not rank a listing on their own. They decide what it can rank for at all.
Platinum keywords are a legacy Seller Central field left over from the old Platinum Merchant programme. For almost every seller they do nothing and can be left empty. They are worth mentioning only because the field still appears, and a seller reasonably assumes an empty field is a missed opportunity. It is not.
Advertising buys sales history for a keyword, and sales history is the main input to organic ranking on that keyword. So PPC is how a new listing earns an organic position it could not otherwise reach. The search term report is also the cheapest keyword research available, because it records what real buyers typed before they bought your product.
There is no universal number, and an agency quoting one is describing their other clients rather than your business. ACoS is only meaningful against contribution margin: 30% is excellent on a product with 60% margin and ruinous on one with 25%. The figure worth managing is total advertising cost of sale against profit, not advertising cost against advertising revenue.
Often, and it depends far more on the first appeal than on the tenth. Amazon wants a plan of action identifying the root cause, what has been corrected and what will prevent recurrence, with evidence. Generic appeals and repeated resubmissions of the same text make reinstatement harder. We cannot promise reinstatement, and an agency that does is selling something Amazon has not agreed to.
Ungating is Amazon's approval process for restricted categories and brands, usually requiring invoices from an authorised supplier and sometimes documentation or test reports. You need it if the category refuses your listing attempt. It is administrative rather than strategic work, and it fails most often because the invoices do not meet Amazon's requirements rather than because the seller was refused.
Amazon regularly loses, damages or miscounts inventory in its own warehouses and owes the seller for it. Some is refunded automatically and a meaningful share is not, which is why it has to be claimed. Many accounts that have never run a reconciliation are owed something, and claims expire, so the older the account the more has usually gone.
From sales velocity, lead time, seasonality and planned advertising, reconciled against what the supply chain can actually deliver. The point is not accuracy for its own sake, it is avoiding the stockout: ranking decays while a product is unavailable, and the advertising that bought that ranking has already been paid for.
For many brands selling small, standard-sized, steadily moving products, yes, because Prime eligibility and Amazon's delivery promise lift conversion enough to cover the fees. It stops being worth it on large or heavy items, on slow movers that accrue storage fees, and on products whose margins cannot absorb fulfilment and referral fees together. It is an arithmetic question per product, not a decision for the whole catalogue.
No. Amazon allows individuals to register as sole proprietors and many sellers start that way. An LLC or equivalent is usually taken for liability and tax reasons rather than because Amazon requires it, and Brand Registry needs a registered trademark rather than a particular company structure. Take advice from an accountant in your jurisdiction rather than from an agency.
There is no minimum ASIN count. What matters is whether the account is large enough that the fee is small against what is recoverable, and whether there is inventory to sell. We would rather tell a brand it is too early than take a retainer that cannot pay for itself, and we say that at the audit rather than at renewal.
Frequently. The usual arrangement is that the brand keeps product, pricing and supply, and we run the marketplace execution. What has to be agreed at the start is who decides on price and promotions, because that is the one place a brand team and a marketplace team will disagree and both will be partly right.
Monthly reporting on contribution margin by ASIN rather than gross revenue, advertising performance against agreed targets, inventory position and forecast risk, account health status, and a written note on what was tried and what did not work. Weekly figures are available and are usually noise. The monthly view is the one worth acting on.
Walmart, eBay, TikTok Shop and Shopify, plus Google Ads and Meta advertising alongside them. Brands most often come to us for Amazon and add a second channel once the first is stable, which is the right order: a second marketplace multiplies the operational load before it multiplies revenue.
A product nobody wants, a price the category will not bear, a supply chain that cannot keep stock in the country, or margins too thin to fund advertising. Marketplace work makes a viable product findable and profitable. It cannot make an unviable one viable, and an agency that takes the retainer without saying so is charging you to find that out slowly.
A conversation about what the account is doing now and what is going wrong, then an audit of the account itself. The audit is where the specifics come from and it is worth having even if you do not go on to work with us, because it produces an ordered list of what is losing money, which is useful to anybody who owns the account.
We run Amazon seller (3P) accounts in the US, the EU and the UK.
Walmart marketplace management is the ongoing operation of a brand's Walmart Seller Center presence: item setup and catalogue compliance, listing content and keywords, Walmart Connect advertising, pricing position, fulfilment through WFS or your own network, inventory planning, and reporting on whether the channel earns its cost.
For brands with competitive pricing and a catalogue Walmart shoppers buy, usually yes, because the channel is far less contested than Amazon and cost per click through Walmart Connect is often lower. It is not worth it for premium-priced niche products, or where margins cannot absorb another channel's operational cost. It is a question worth answering before onboarding rather than after.
Three differences matter most. Walmart weighs price competitiveness heavily in its ranking and runs parity checks against other retailers, so an overpriced item can be suppressed however good its content is. Its item setup standards are stricter, so catalogues imported from Amazon arrive with errors. And it publishes a content quality score, which makes listing quality unusually measurable.
You can import them, and it is the most common reason a Walmart launch underperforms. Titles and attributes that pass on Amazon are frequently rejected or de-prioritised here, the required category fields are different, and Walmart's search responds to different phrasing. The catalogue needs rewriting for the channel, not copying into it.
Walmart Connect is Walmart's advertising platform, covering Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and display placements on and off the site. It works much as Amazon Ads does, in a smaller auction. Lower competition usually means a lower cost per click, which makes it a reasonable place to buy early visibility while a new listing builds sales history.
Walmart Fulfillment Services is Walmart's own fulfilment network, the equivalent of FBA. It carries the delivery promise that improves search placement and conversion, so it is usually worth it for standard-sized, steadily moving products. Seller fulfilled can compete where you can meet the delivery speed yourself, since fulfilment speed feeds ranking either way.
Most often a price above Walmart's competitiveness threshold, a failed parity check against another retailer, missing required category attributes, or an image that does not meet specification. Suppression on Walmart is more frequently a pricing or data problem than a policy one, which is good news because both are fixable quickly.
Walmart ranks on relevance to the query, content completeness and quality, price competitiveness, fulfilment speed, and sales performance. The unusual part is how much weight price and delivery carry compared with Amazon, which means listing work alone will not rank an item that is priced above the category.
Walmart publishes a score for each item measuring how complete and rich its content is: attributes filled, image count, description quality, rich media present. It is one of the few ranking inputs a marketplace states directly, which makes it a rare case where the work needed is unambiguous.
Account approval and setup typically takes days to a few weeks. Getting a catalogue live cleanly takes longer and depends almost entirely on data quality: a well structured catalogue with complete attributes can be live in two to three weeks, while one imported from an Amazon feed usually spends a month in error resolution.
Yes, including spec sheets, category attribute mapping and the bulk upload process, plus the rejection and error resolution that follows. This is the least visible and most decisive part of a Walmart launch, because items that never go live cleanly cannot be optimised later.
Yes, and they are difficult to separate here. Walmart's ranking rewards sales performance, so advertising buys the early velocity a new listing needs, and listing quality decides whether that spend converts. An agency running one without the other is optimising half a system.
It depends on catalogue size, whether item setup is included and whether advertising is in scope, so we quote after assessing the catalogue. The honest framing for a brand adding Walmart is that the first months are setup cost against uncertain revenue, and it should be entered as an investment in a channel rather than as an immediate return.
We do not sell them, and we would advise caution about anybody who does. In this market the phrase usually describes done-for-you dropshipping stores sold as passive income, which is a different business from managing a brand's own catalogue, carries real account risk, and is often outright fraudulent. What we do is manage marketplaces for brands that own their products.
That is the majority of this work. The advantage is one team seeing both catalogues, both ad accounts and the shared inventory, which is the thing two separate agencies cannot do. The first question is usually which products belong on which channel, because putting the whole catalogue everywhere raises operational cost without raising revenue proportionally.
A rollback is Walmart's temporary price reduction badge, and it does drive visibility and conversion. Used deliberately for a launch or a seasonal push it buys velocity. Used routinely it trains the category to wait for the discount and makes the undiscounted price look like the wrong one, which is a slow way to lose margin.
Yes. The Seller Center account stays in your name and billing, we work in it under permissions you grant and can revoke, and the listings, content, campaigns and data are yours. You can end the arrangement and keep all of it.
Both platforms monitor prices elsewhere, so they are not independent decisions. Pricing lower on Walmart to win competitiveness can affect Amazon's own price checks, and pricing higher can get items suppressed on Walmart. A brand selling on both needs one pricing policy across channels rather than two teams optimising in opposite directions.
Monthly reporting on contribution margin by item, advertising performance against agreed targets, content quality and catalogue health, channel share against Amazon, and a written note on what was tried. Including, where it applies, an honest read on whether the channel is worth continuing.
Usually, and the diagnosis is normally one of four things: items never went live cleanly, content was copied from Amazon, pricing sits above the competitiveness threshold, or fulfilment speed is losing the placement. All four are fixable, and none of them are fixed by advertising harder.
Start with the products that are priced competitively and already sell, not the whole catalogue. A focused launch of thirty well-built items outperforms two thousand imported ones, and it keeps the item setup work small enough to do properly. Breadth can follow once the channel is proven.
A price the channel will not accept, a product with no demand on Walmart specifically, or a supply chain that cannot support a second channel's stock. Walmart is price led in a way Amazon is not, and no amount of content or advertising work makes an uncompetitively priced item rank.
A conversation about the catalogue and its pricing, then an assessment of whether Walmart fits it. If it does, item setup and content come before advertising. If it does not, we would rather tell you at that point than take a retainer to find out slowly.
eBay account management is the ongoing operation of a seller account: listing structure and content, item specifics and catalogue data, Promoted Listings, pricing and listing format, postage settings, and the seller performance metrics that decide placement. On eBay the last of those matters more than on any other marketplace, because performance is scored over a rolling period.
For the right catalogue, yes. It can be less contested than Amazon in some categories, fees are often lower, and it supports used, refurbished and open-box inventory that Amazon restricts. It is a poor fit for brands wanting tight control of presentation and pricing across a large new-product catalogue, where Amazon's structure serves better.
eBay's search engine, Cassini, weighs relevance to the query, listing quality and completeness, price competitiveness, sales history, postage speed and seller performance. The distinguishing feature is that seller account standing feeds directly into placement, so a good listing on a poor account is held back by something that has nothing to do with the listing.
You need a minimum number of transactions and sales value over the previous twelve months, a defect rate at or below eBay's threshold, a low late dispatch rate, cases closed without seller resolution below the limit, and tracking uploaded within the stated handling time. The requirements vary by marketplace region, and the metric that most often fails is tracking uploaded on time rather than anything to do with the product.
Better search placement, the Top Rated Plus badge on listings that qualify, and a discount on final value fees. The badge affects conversion because it appears in search results next to competitors without it, and the fee discount is meaningful at volume. Together they make the status worth protecting rather than chasing back after it is lost.
Selling limits rise as an account builds a record: consistent sales, on-time dispatch, low defects and prompt case resolution. Requests can be made through Seller Hub once the account has performed for a period, and they are granted more readily on accounts with clean metrics. There is no way to buy an increase, and services offering one are worth avoiding.
Through a multi-variation listing, which holds sizes, colours or other variants under a single item. It is almost always better than separate listings, because sales history, reviews and search authority accumulate in one place instead of being split across twenty weak listings. The structure has to be set up before selling begins, since converting later loses history.
Item specifics are the structured attributes on a listing: brand, size, colour, material, model and so on. They matter because they decide which filtered searches your listing appears in at all. A shopper narrowing by brand and size will never see a listing that left those fields empty, however well the title is written.
Standard charges a percentage of the sale price, and only when a buyer clicks the promoted listing and then purchases within the attribution window. Advanced is a cost per click auction with keyword targeting, charged whether or not the click converts. Standard suits most sellers; Advanced suits high volume accounts that can manage bids actively.
Amazon has far more traffic and stricter control: one catalogue, one detail page, and competition on the Buy Box. eBay gives sellers more control over presentation and format, supports used and refurbished inventory, and often costs less in fees. Brands with new products and a large catalogue usually lead with Amazon; sellers with varied, used or hard-to-find inventory frequently do better on eBay. Many brands should be on both.
eBay's measure of transactions that went wrong in ways attributable to the seller, principally cases closed without seller resolution and cancellations initiated by the seller for out-of-stock items. Exceeding the threshold costs Top Rated status and can trigger selling restrictions, so it is monitored continuously rather than reviewed monthly.
Fixed price for anything with predictable demand and repeatable stock, which is most brand inventory. Auctions suit genuinely scarce, collectible or hard-to-value items, where letting the market set the price finds a number you would not have guessed. Running a whole catalogue as auctions is a way to sell everything slightly too cheaply.
Yes, including bulk listing tools, variation structure, item specifics mapping and inventory feed connections. For an existing catalogue the more common work is restructuring rather than creating: consolidating split listings and completing the attribute data that was skipped at launch.
Delivery speed and the estimated delivery date shown on the listing both feed placement, and handling time is one of the inputs to Top Rated status. Reducing stated handling time and uploading tracking promptly is often the cheapest ranking improvement available on an eBay account, because it costs nothing but discipline.
Frequently, and it is the arrangement we prefer. The two share inventory and pricing decisions, so having one team see both prevents the most common failure, which is a stockout on the stronger channel caused by an unplanned surge on the weaker one.
Our management fee starts at $1,500 a month (see Pricing). The audit confirms scope: catalogue size, whether listing creation is included and whether advertising is in scope. For accounts with damaged metrics, the honest framing is that the first phase is recovery rather than growth, and pricing should reflect that.
Usually, and it takes time rather than cleverness. Metrics are scored over a rolling period, so the only route is a clean run of transactions: dispatch on time, upload tracking, resolve cases before they close against you. Anybody promising a fast fix is describing something eBay does not offer.
Yes. The account stays in your name, we work under permissions you grant through Seller Hub and can revoke, and the listings, feedback history and data are yours. Feedback and seller standing are tied to the account and cannot be transferred, which is another reason nobody should ever sell through an agency's account.
Monthly reporting on contribution margin by listing and category, Promoted Listings performance, seller metric trends with any risk flagged early, and a written note on what was tried. Where eBay is a clearance channel rather than a growth one, the reporting should say that plainly rather than dress it up.
Yes, and eBay is often the better channel for it. Condition description, grading consistency and photography matter far more here than on new inventory, because the buyer is assessing risk as much as product. Amazon Renewed is the equivalent programme on Amazon and we run that too.
Inventory the market does not want, prices above what the category clears at, or an account with restrictions that require time rather than intervention to lift. eBay is also slower to reward improvement than Amazon, because so much of its ranking rests on rolling history, and that patience has to be part of the plan rather than a surprise.
An audit of the account: seller metrics and standing first, then the catalogue structure and listing quality. Metrics come first because they constrain everything else, and there is no point optimising listings on an account that is one late dispatch away from losing its status.
TikTok Shop management is running a brand's shop on TikTok end to end: registration and compliance, catalogue and product content, affiliate and creator partnerships, live selling, paid media, promotions, and fulfilment. It differs from other marketplace management because demand is created by content rather than captured from search, so creator and content work is the growth engine rather than a supporting activity.
Amazon captures existing demand: somebody searches, you compete for that search. TikTok Shop creates demand: content appears in a feed and prompts a purchase nobody set out to make. That means keywords and bids matter far less, creators and video matter far more, and a listing that would rank well on Amazon can sit unsold here because nothing is driving attention to it.
It depends on the category more than on the brand. Products that demonstrate well in a few seconds, sit at an impulse price point and have margin to absorb commission and vouchers do well. Considered, high-price or hard-to-demonstrate products struggle, and there is no amount of management that changes that. It is worth assessing honestly before setup rather than after six months.
Sellers offer commission to creators, who then feature products in their content and earn a share of resulting sales. Plans can be open to any creator, targeted at specific ones, or negotiated individually. Commission rate, product appeal and how easy you make sampling all decide whether creators pick you up, and it is a continuous recruitment exercise rather than a launch task.
Through the affiliate marketplace at volume and through direct outreach to creators already covering the category, backed by sample seeding. The hit rate is deliberately low, so it is run as a pipeline with continuous outreach rather than as a campaign. Brands that treat it as occasional outreach conclude creators are not interested, when what was missing was volume and follow-up.
Enough to compete for attention in your category while leaving margin after TikTok's fees, vouchers and returns. Rates vary widely by category, and the mistake at both ends is common: too low and no creator picks it up, too high and the volume that arrives is unprofitable. It should be set from your own unit economics rather than from a benchmark.
Yes, and before recruiting creators rather than instead of it. Brand-owned content proves the product works in the format and gives creators a reference for what converts. A shop with no content of its own is a harder proposition to a creator deciding whether to accept a sample than it is to a shopper.
Live selling is a real-time stream where a host demonstrates products and viewers buy without leaving. It works well in categories where demonstration and urgency matter, and it moves a substantial share of TikTok Shop volume in those categories. It is operationally demanding: it needs a host, a schedule, stock readiness and offers built for the format.
Video Shopping Ads and related formats place product-linked video into the feed, with campaign types that optimise towards purchases. The important discipline is that paid spend should amplify content already performing organically. Putting budget behind a video the feed has ignored is the fastest way to conclude the channel is expensive.
Register and verify the shop, upload and get products approved, set up fulfilment and returns, then build the demand side: brand content first, then affiliate plans and creator recruitment, then paid amplification of whatever is working. The setup is administrative and takes days to weeks; the demand side is the actual job and is continuous.
TikTok Shop is built around physical goods, and support for digital products is limited and varies by market. Categories, eligibility and rules change often enough that the current position should be checked against TikTok's own seller documentation rather than taken from any agency page, including this one.
Registration and verification usually take days. Getting a catalogue live and approved takes longer and depends on category and data quality. The realistic timeline to meaningful sales is longer still, because it depends on creator recruitment and content rather than on setup, and that is measured in months rather than weeks.
Yes: the logistics, tracking and follow-up. Seeding is where creator programmes stall, because sending samples is easy and tracking who received what, who posted, and what it produced is the part that turns it into a channel rather than a cost.
TikTok takes a commission on sales, with rates varying by category and market, plus whatever affiliate commission you offer creators and the cost of any vouchers or promotions. The combined figure is materially higher than a marketplace referral fee alone, which is why margin has to be checked before entering rather than after.
Some crossover is normal and mostly not worth worrying about, because the audiences are reached in different states of mind: one is searching, the other was not. The real risk is operational, not commercial. A video that performs can clear a month of inventory in a day and leave the channel that was already working out of stock.
Yes, and it is the arrangement that avoids the inventory problem above. Shared stock and pricing decisions need one team seeing all of it, particularly on a channel whose demand is spiky by design.
Treating it as a third marketplace listing, under-resourcing creator recruitment, offering commission that does not compete, launching without brand content, and running out of stock during the one surge that worked. Almost none of the common failures are about the product itself.
Yes. The shop stays registered to your business, we work under permissions you grant and can revoke, and the catalogue, creator relationships and content are yours. Creator relationships in particular are worth owning, because they are the asset that took longest to build.
Monthly reporting on GMV by creator, video and campaign, margin after commission, vouchers and returns, creator recruitment pipeline, and content performance. Plus a straight view on category fit, which on this channel is the question that matters most in the first six months.
It depends on whether content production and creator recruitment are in scope, which is where most of the work sits. We quote after assessing category fit, and if the assessment says the catalogue does not suit a content-led channel we will say that instead of quoting.
A product that cannot be shown working in a few seconds, a price point that does not suit impulse purchase, or margins that cannot absorb commission plus vouchers plus returns. Management makes a viable product visible on this channel. It cannot make an unsuitable one suitable.
An honest assessment of category fit first, using your products, price points and margins. If it fits, setup and brand content come before creator recruitment, because creators are choosing between shops and the shop needs to look worth choosing.
eCommerce SEO is the work of getting an online store and its product pages to rank in Google: site structure and crawlability, page speed, structured data, keyword targeting per page, content that answers buying questions, and internal linking between them. It differs from marketplace optimisation because Google ranks what it can crawl, understand and trust, whereas Amazon and eBay rank largely what already sells.
The discipline is the same and the obstacles are Shopify's own. Its URL structure creates duplicates through collections, tags and variants; its apps inject scripts into every page; and its theme decides much of your Core Web Vitals before you write anything. Shopify SEO is therefore weighted more heavily towards technical cleanup than SEO on a platform where the developer controls the templates.
Technical fixes typically show within two to four weeks, because they change what Google is able to index rather than how it judges quality. Content and authority typically take three to six months, and competitive commercial terms longer than that. Any agency promising first page in a month is describing a keyword nobody searches.
Our management fee starts at $1,500 a month (see Pricing). The audit confirms scope: catalogue size, how much technical debt is in the theme and whether content production is included. The useful comparison is against paid traffic: if a store is spending on ads to reach terms it could rank for, the SEO work has a payback period you can actually calculate.
Yes, where the work requires it and with your agreement. Much of Shopify SEO is in the theme: heading structure, template markup, schema, image handling and script loading. We work on a duplicate theme and publish only after review, so nothing changes on a live store without somebody deciding it should.
We will tell you what each one costs in page weight and what it appears to be doing, and recommend removals. The decision stays with you, because an app that is slowing the site may also be running something the business depends on. App bloat is a common cause of poor mobile performance on Shopify.
Core Web Vitals are Google's measures of loading, interactivity and visual stability: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift. They are a ranking input, and a modest one compared with relevance. They matter far more for conversion: mobile shoppers abandon slow pages regardless of where the page ranked.
Commonly because several pages are competing for the same term, because the collection has no content beyond a grid of products, or because pagination and filters have created dozens of near-identical URLs. Google has to pick one and often picks none. Deciding which URL owns which term is usually the single highest-value change.
Yes, and it is often skipped in eCommerce SEO. Descriptions taken from a supplier feed appear on every retailer selling that product, so there is nothing to distinguish your page. You do not need a thousand words: you need the specifics, the use case and the answers buyers actually ask, written once per product that matters.
You need content that answers what buyers ask before they buy, and a blog is one way to hold it. What does not work is a blog with no plan: articles that rank for nothing commercial, are not linked to the pages that sell, and exist because somebody said to post weekly. Content earns its place when it supports a collection you want to rank.
Structured data is markup that tells Google what a page contains: that this is a product, this is its price, this is its rating and availability. It matters because it decides whether your result in search shows those things. Two results side by side, one with a price and stars and one without, do not get the same click-through rate.
Yes, and it is the moment SEO risk is highest. A migration without a mapped redirect plan loses rankings that took years to build, and the loss shows up weeks later when it is hardest to diagnose. The work is URL mapping, redirect testing, structured data parity and a monitored launch rather than a switch flipped on a Friday.
Yes, through Google Ads and Meta, and it is often worth running alongside SEO rather than after it. Paid search tells you within weeks which terms convert, which is the fastest way to decide what the organic work should target. Ranking for a term that does not convert is a slow way to learn the same thing.
By commercial intent first and volume second. A term with 500 searches from people ready to buy is worth more than one with 50,000 from people researching. We also weigh difficulty against the store's current authority, because targeting terms the domain cannot reach this year produces a report full of movement and no revenue.
Answer engine optimisation is being the source an AI assistant quotes when somebody asks it a question. Assistants lift passages that state things plainly: definitions, specifications, comparisons and direct answers. A product page written as marketing copy has nothing quotable in it, and increasingly that is a channel rather than a curiosity.
No, and neither can anybody else, because nobody controls Google's index. What we commit to is the work, the reporting and an honest read of whether it is producing revenue. An agency guaranteeing a position is either targeting terms nobody searches or planning to explain later why the guarantee did not apply.
Monthly: organic sessions and revenue by landing page, conversion rate by template, indexation and technical health, and what changed since last month with a written note on what was tried and what did not work. Rankings sit underneath as diagnosis, because a ranking that does not move revenue is not a result.
Yes. The theme changes, the content, the schema, the redirect map and the keyword strategy are all yours and stay in your store. There is no proprietary layer that stops working when the retainer does, and nothing is hosted anywhere but your own Shopify account.
Frequently, and it is usually the fastest arrangement. We specify the technical work and review it, your developer implements it in the theme they know. What needs agreeing at the start is who owns the release process, because SEO fixes that sit in a branch for six weeks are not fixes.
Often more than for a large one, because a small catalogue can realistically make every page good. The question is not catalogue size but whether people search for what you sell in language you can compete in. If the demand is there, a focused store with thirty excellent pages will beat a neglected one with three thousand.
Then the two need to be planned together rather than run as rivals. Marketplace and direct sales use different levers, different economics and different content, and a brand doing both should know which channel it wants a given customer to arrive through. We run both, which makes that conversation easier than it is between two agencies.
It can, if it is done badly. Pages stuffed with copy to satisfy a keyword tool convert worse, and traffic from terms with no buying intent lowers your conversion rate by arriving at all. Good eCommerce SEO targets commercial intent and puts content where it helps a decision rather than where it inflates a word count.
An audit, then foundations. Crawl and indexation problems, duplicate URLs, broken redirects, missing or invalid schema, and the speed issues in the theme and app stack. Content and link work start in month two, once the site can actually be indexed properly, because content published onto broken foundations is content Google may never read.
A conversation about the store and what it is trying to reach, then a technical and content audit. The audit stands on its own: it produces an ordered list of what is limiting organic performance, which is useful whether or not you go on to work with us.
We work with Shopify stores selling in the US, the EU and the UK.
About Growth & Advertising
On contribution after fees, ad spend, returns and storage, rather than on the ROAS a platform reports about itself. Every platform measures the part of the journey it can see, which is why a campaign can look efficient in the dashboard and unprofitable in the accounts.
Yes, and deliberately together. They compete for the same queries and the same page, and a brand that buys traffic it already ranks for is paying for something it owns.
Sponsored ads and programmatic display sit in this family because they are advertising, and they are run on the channel page for the marketplace they belong to. The economics are the same question: what did the spend contribute after everything it costs.
Paid changes show within a cycle or two of the buying window. Organic and conversion work is slower and compounds, which is why they are planned together rather than sequentially.
A Google Ads agency runs the account that decides what a brand pays to be found for: campaign structure, keyword and audience targeting, the product feed behind Shopping, bidding and budget allocation, conversion tracking, ad creative, and the weekly work of reading search terms and cutting waste. The strategic part is deciding what to optimise towards; the automation handles the arithmetic.
Agency fees are usually a percentage of spend or a flat monthly retainer. Our management fee starts at $1,500 a month (see Pricing), and the audit confirms scope, because a $10,000 account with one campaign and a $10,000 account with forty are not the same job. The fee is separate from the ad budget, which is paid to Google directly from your own account.
There is no universal figure, and an agency quoting one is describing its other clients. A 3x return is excellent on a product with 70% gross margin and loses money on one with 25%. The useful target is set from your contribution margin, which is why we ask for margin data before quoting a target rather than after missing one.
Waste reduction typically shows in the first two to four weeks, because cutting spend on queries that never convert is immediate. Structural and feed changes typically need four to eight weeks for the bidding algorithms to relearn. Anything that changes the bid strategy resets the learning period, which is why good management does not change strategies weekly.
Yes. The account stays in your name and your billing, we work in it through manager account access you grant and can revoke in a click, and the campaigns, audiences, conversion history and feed are yours. Any agency that insists on running your spend through their own account is holding your data hostage.
Performance Max is a campaign type that spends across Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover from a single budget, with Google deciding the mix. It works well for eCommerce with a good feed and clear audience signals. It works badly when it is given no structure, because it will find the cheapest conversions available, and the cheapest conversions are usually people who were going to buy anyway.
Standard Shopping shows products in search results and gives you visibility and control over product groups and bids. Performance Max includes Shopping inventory but adds every other Google surface and takes most of the control in exchange for automation. Many accounts run both, with Shopping holding the products that need protecting and PMax handling breadth.
Commonly, missing or invalid GTINs, price or availability mismatches between the feed and the landing page, missing shipping or returns policies, image requirements, or restricted content in a title or description. Disapprovals are usually a data problem rather than a policy dispute, and clearing them is the fastest available win on most Shopping accounts.
Yes, and on eCommerce accounts it is frequently the highest-value work available. The feed decides which searches your products are eligible for at all, and many feeds are a raw export from a store platform with titles written for a product page rather than for search. Bid changes cannot fix a title that does not contain the words people type.
Usually yes, and less than many accounts do. Brand terms are cheap and convert well, which makes them flattering in a report, and some of that traffic would have arrived free. Bid on brand where competitors or resellers are bidding on you, or where the organic result does not own the page, and measure it separately so it does not inflate the account's apparent performance.
Google Ads buys position immediately and stops the day you stop paying. SEO earns position slowly and keeps it. They work best together: paid search tells you within weeks which terms actually convert, which is the fastest way to decide what the organic work should target, and organic reduces how much you have to pay for the same click over time.
Almost always work with the existing account. Conversion history is an asset the bidding algorithms use, and starting from a blank account throws it away along with any audiences you have built. We rebuild inside the account instead, which is slower to look tidy and much faster to perform.
We check it before trusting it. Conversion actions, values, deduplication between Google and analytics, enhanced conversions, and consent handling, reconciled against the store's own revenue. It is common to find an account reporting twice the orders the shop recorded, and every optimisation made on top of that was made towards the wrong number.
It varies far too much by position, query type and industry for a benchmark to be useful. What matters is the direction and the comparison against your own account: a rising click-through rate on the same keywords at the same position means the ad copy is working. An absolute number quoted without a query type behind it is not information.
Yes, and it is usually worth having both read together. Google captures demand that already exists; Meta creates it. Measured in isolation each one will claim conversions the other contributed to, so blended reporting across both, and across marketplaces where a brand also sells, is the only view that reflects what actually happened.
Enough for the account to gather data faster than the market changes, which in practice means enough clicks per campaign per week to read a result rather than a coincidence. Below that, the honest advice is usually to spend on fewer keywords rather than to spread thinly, and we will say so rather than take a management fee on a budget that cannot learn.
Amazon, Walmart and TikTok advertising are separate platforms with their own auctions and their own agencies inside ours. Where a brand sells on Google and a marketplace at once, the useful question is which channel should own which product, because the same catalogue competing with itself across channels raises the cost of every sale.
An audit, then the waste. Negative keywords, disapproved products, campaigns competing with each other for the same query, and product groups that cannot be profitable at any conversion rate. Structural rebuilding comes second, because a rebuild on top of broken tracking or a broken feed is a rebuild that has to be redone.
Monthly reporting with a written note on what was tried, including what did not work, and a call whenever something needs a decision rather than on a fixed schedule that fills time. Weekly figures are available on request and are usually noise: the auction moves enough day to day that reading it weekly invites changes that undo each other.
No, because nobody controls the auction, competitors' budgets or Google's algorithm changes. What we commit to is the work, honest measurement against contribution margin, and telling you when the problem is the product, the price or the page rather than the advertising. Guaranteed ROAS is a sales technique, not a service.
That usually means the account is efficient and the ceiling is elsewhere: the catalogue, the price, the landing page, or a target so tight the automation refuses to bid on anything new. Growth almost always costs efficiency at the margin, so the real question is what return you are willing to accept on the next unit of spend, which is a business decision rather than an advertising one.
Yes, and it is the usual starting point. The audit covers structure, tracking accuracy, wasted spend, feed health and the things being counted as conversions that are not. It produces an ordered list of what is losing money, which is useful whether or not you go on to work with us.
A price the market will not pay, a product page that does not convert, out of stock inventory, or margins too thin to fund a click. Advertising buys attention. It cannot make an unconvincing offer convincing, and an agency that takes the retainer without saying so is charging you to discover it slowly.
A conversation about the account, the catalogue and what the business needs the advertising to earn, then an audit of the account itself. We ask for margin data early, because a target set without it is a target that will be hit and still lose money.
We run Google Ads for brands selling in the US, the EU and the UK.
A Meta ads agency runs the Facebook and Instagram account that decides who a brand pays to reach and what it shows them: campaign structure, the product catalogue behind dynamic ads, the conversion signal the platform optimises against, budget allocation between prospecting and retargeting, creative strategy and production, and the weekly work of reading results and cutting waste. The strategic part is deciding what to optimise towards. The automation handles the arithmetic.
Agency fees are usually a percentage of spend or a flat monthly retainer. Our management fee starts at $1,500 a month (see Pricing), and the audit confirms scope, because an account spending $10,000 a month on one product and an account spending the same across four hundred are not the same job. The fee is separate from the ad budget, which is paid to Meta from your own account.
For most consumer brands, yes, and for a reason that has nothing to do with the platform being fashionable: it is still the largest place to create demand for a product nobody is searching for yet. What has changed is what the work consists of. Targeting is largely automated, so the advantage has moved to creative volume, signal quality and the economics you are willing to accept. Brands that judge it on last-click alone usually conclude it stopped working, then find their search and marketplace performance falls with it.
Nothing, in practice. Meta is the company and Facebook is one of its placements, so the same account buys Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network. The words are used interchangeably because the rename happened faster than the vocabulary did, and an agency that runs Meta ads is running Facebook and Instagram ads.
Yes, from the same account and usually within the same campaigns, with placements chosen per creative. Instagram is not a separate channel with a separate plan; it is a set of placements that reward a different edit of the same idea. The commonest waste on Instagram is one square asset stretched across Reels and Stories it was never designed for.
Usually a large part of it. Most of what was lost is signal rather than demand: browser tracking misses a material share of events, and the platform can only optimise towards what it can see. Conversions API sending server-side events, correct parameters, deduplication against the pixel and honest purchase values recover much of it. What does not come back is the certainty of last-click attribution, which is why measurement moves to blended reporting and incrementality tests.
It should be sized to the traffic that exists rather than set to a ratio. Retargeting can only spend against an audience the prospecting created, so an account that over-funds it reports a flattering ROAS while paying repeatedly for people who were going to buy anyway. When retargeting frequency climbs and revenue does not, the money belongs at the top.
We handle the strategy, the iteration and the production through our media team, and we work with a brand's own creators and studio where they have one. What matters more than who makes it is that enough distinct angles are made: an account testing four variations of one idea is not testing, and it is the commonest reason a good account stops improving.
Waste usually comes out in the first month and shows up immediately. Structural changes need a fortnight or so of stable spend before the numbers mean anything, because every significant edit costs the campaign its learning. A fair read on whether the account is on a different trajectory is about ninety days, and anybody promising a verdict sooner is reading noise.
There is no number worth quoting, and an agency that gives you one before seeing your margins is guessing. The target follows from contribution margin, repeat rate and what the business needs the channel to do: a brand at 70% margin with strong repeat purchase can grow profitably at a ROAS that would bankrupt a brand at 25% with none. We work the target out from your economics and then report against it.
Yes. Some engagements are a full takeover, some are the Meta half of an account where the in-house team runs search, and some are an audit and a plan somebody else executes. What does not work is two teams editing the same account without one of them owning the structure, so we agree that first.
Always. We work inside your Business Manager with the access the work requires, and the account, the pixel, the catalogue and the audiences stay yours. If the engagement ends, nothing has to be rebuilt and no data leaves with us.
Campaign and budget management, creative planning and iteration, catalogue and product set maintenance, audience and exclusion work, event and tracking checks, weekly reads of what changed, and a monthly report on contribution margin rather than on platform ROAS. The unglamorous half is the half that compounds: exclusions kept current, catalogue errors cleared, learning phases not reset by needless edits.
Enough for the conversion event to happen often enough for the algorithm to learn from it, which for most eCommerce brands means a daily budget that can produce a handful of purchases a day rather than a handful a week. Below that, results swing so much that no test can be read and money is spent buying noise. The exact figure follows from the product's price and conversion rate, which is why an audit precedes any number.
More than most brands are producing, and the number matters less than the spread. Ten assets that are one idea in ten aspect ratios give the auction nothing to choose between; five genuinely different angles, each cut for the placements that matter, give it a real decision. For an account of any size we would expect a steady flow of new angles every month rather than a quarterly batch.
Yes, though the work is different enough to say so. Lead generation is judged on lead quality and what happens after the form, so the account has to be tied to the CRM and optimised towards qualified leads rather than submissions. Optimising towards raw form fills is the fastest way to buy a great cost per lead and no revenue.
Yes, and the early weeks look different. With no pixel history there is nothing to build lookalikes from, so the account starts broad, leans harder on creative, and optimises towards an earlier event until purchases are frequent enough to optimise on directly. The first month is buying information as much as revenue, and a plan that does not say so out loud is selling optimism.
From the evidence the business already has. Reviews and support tickets say which objection stops the purchase; search terms say what language buyers use; the account's own history says which angles have never been tried. Tests are queued against those rather than against a list of platform features, and one variable moves at a time so the answer means something.
Advantage+ is Meta's automated shopping campaign: it takes a broad audience, a creative pool and a budget, and makes the targeting and placement decisions itself. It works well with a clean conversion signal, a real catalogue and enough creative, and it wastes money quietly when the existing-customer budget cap is left wide open and the account has nothing to compare it against. We run it as part of an account rather than as the whole of it.
By sizing it to the audience that exists, excluding recent buyers, watching frequency, and reading the account blended rather than campaign by campaign. When a retargeting campaign reports a very high ROAS and total revenue has not moved, it is being paid for sales that were going to happen. A holdout test settles the argument in a fortnight.
Read access is enough for most of it and makes the work materially better: the catalogue, the real order values, the return rate and the repeat rate all live there, and none of them can be inferred accurately from the ad platform. Where a server-side event setup is involved we work with whoever owns the store's code rather than around them.
An audit in the first week, the waste stopped in the second, structure and tracking corrected through the third, and the creative pipeline started immediately because it has the longest lead time. Spend is not increased until the signal is trustworthy: scaling an account that is optimising towards the wrong event just buys more of the wrong thing.
There is usually a fortnight where performance is noisier, because significant structural edits reset a campaign's learning and that is the cost of changing anything. We sequence the work so the account is never rebuilt all at once, keep the best-performing campaigns running while their replacements learn, and say in advance which week is likely to look worst.
We only work with eCommerce brands, and we run the marketplaces as well as the ad accounts. That matters on Meta specifically because a Facebook or Instagram campaign frequently converts on Amazon rather than on the brand's own site, and an agency that cannot see the marketplace half will report that the campaign failed. Judging channels in isolation is the commonest way a growing brand cuts the spend that was working.
Yes. Most of our clients sell into several markets, and the account structure follows the economics rather than the map: markets with different margins, delivery costs or return rates are separated so one cannot hide inside another's average.
A monthly report built around contribution margin, blended acquisition cost and what changed, with the platform's own figures beside them as context. Plus a live view you can open whenever you like. Nothing is reported that nobody can act on, and the report says what did not work as plainly as what did.
It depends on the category, the price and the channel, and a benchmark from another brand's catalogue tells you very little. The useful number is your own, tracked per step and per device, and whether it moves.
Usually not. A redesign changes everything at once, which means nothing can be attributed and any gain is luck. Most of the money is in specific friction on specific steps.
Enough for a result to be distinguishable from noise, which depends on the current rate and the size of the effect. Where a store does not have it, we fix what is certainly wrong rather than run tests that cannot conclude.
The principle does, but the levers are different: on a marketplace the page is the listing and the controls are images, content and reviews. That work lives with the platform's own service.
Campaign structure, keyword and product targeting, bids and placements, budgets, search term harvesting and negation, creative for Sponsored Brands, and DSP where it applies. Plus the reporting that ties all of it to contribution rather than to the platform's own ROAS figure.
PPC usually means the sponsored ad types alone. This covers those plus DSP and the relationship between paid and organic: what a listing already earns for free, and where spend is buying something it would have had anyway.
Only at a certain scale. It has minimums and it buys audiences rather than keywords, which suits accounts with a catalogue and a retargeting pool worth reaching. We will say when it is not worth it.
The one your margin supports, which is a different number per product and is not the number the console suggests. We work it out from contribution after fees, returns and storage before setting any target.
No. Advertising buys traffic. The listing decides what happens to it. If the conversion rate is the problem we say so and fix that first, because spending into a poor listing is the most expensive way to discover it.
Buying display and video inventory automatically, targeted at defined audiences rather than at keywords. For a marketplace brand it usually means Amazon DSP, which adds Amazon's purchase data to the targeting and can place ads both on and off Amazon.
Sponsored Display sits inside the advertising console and is bought per campaign against products and audiences. DSP is a separate buying platform with wider inventory, deeper audience controls and minimum commitments.
Amazon DSP has one, and it varies by market and by whether the buying is managed or self-service. We will tell you the current position when we know which market and which route applies to you.
On incrementality where the data supports it, and on contribution after spend where it does not. Attributed return alone flatters retargeting, because some of those people were coming back anyway.
About Creative & Media
eCommerce design is the creative that sells a product inside a marketplace or store: main and gallery images, infographics, A+ or enhanced brand content, Brand Stores, packaging and advertising assets. It is judged on click-through rate and conversion rather than on appearance, because its whole purpose is to win a decision made in seconds against competitors on the same screen.
Not as a standalone service. We build and develop Shopify stores as part of Shopify work, and this page is about marketplace and eCommerce creative rather than web design. If you need a corporate website designed and built from scratch, an agency that specialises in that will serve you better than we would, and we would say so.
Because it is the only asset that competes before anybody reads anything. On a search results page a shopper sees your main image at roughly thumbnail size beside twenty alternatives, and that comparison decides the click. Every other asset on the listing only gets seen if the main image has already won.
Amazon requires the main image to show the product alone on a pure white background, filling most of the frame, with no text, logos, watermarks, borders or props that are not part of the product. Enforcement varies, and creative that ignores the rules risks suppression at exactly the moment it is working, which is the worst time to lose a listing.
As many as it takes to answer the questions that stop a purchase, which is usually six to nine. The number matters less than the sequence: size and scale, what is included, how it is used, what it is made of, how it compares, and who it is for. Filling slots with variations of the same photograph adds nothing.
A+ content, formerly Enhanced Brand Content, replaces the plain product description with designed modules of images and text. It is worth it where a product needs explanation, comparison or brand context to justify its price. It is worth less on a simple commodity item, and it is seen only by shoppers who scroll, so it should never carry information the gallery needs to convey.
Premium A+ adds larger modules, video, interactive comparison tables and hover features, and takes up more of the page. It is available to brands meeting Amazon's eligibility criteria, which change. The design discipline is the same either way: modules that answer objections in order, rather than a longer brochure.
The Brand Story module is a carousel that appears above A+ content on every listing a brand owns. It is one of the few places on Amazon to say something about the brand rather than the product, and it cross-links to your other listings, which makes it useful for range discovery as well as for positioning.
If you have more than a handful of products, yes. It is the only page on Amazon whose layout you control, it is where Sponsored Brands traffic lands, and it typically converts better than a product page because a visitor arriving there is exploring a range rather than comparing one item. Most Brand Stores are built once at launch and never revisited, which wastes the asset.
Yes, through Amazon's Manage Your Experiments where the brand is eligible, and through panel testing tools such as PickFu where it is not or where speed matters more than precision. Main image assumptions are wrong often enough that testing is not a refinement, it is how the decision should be made.
A full gallery and A+ set for one product typically takes two to three weeks including revisions, longer where new photography or video is needed. A catalogue is quicker per product after the first, because the brand system and the template decisions have already been made.
Both. We direct and produce studio, lifestyle and video assets, and we design with existing assets where a brand already has a library worth using. Reshooting a catalogue that already has good raw material is usually the wrong first spend.
Yes. Walmart has its own rich media formats and content quality scoring, eBay has its own listing structure, and TikTok Shop is video first. The brand system carries across, the specifications do not, and assets built once for Amazon and pasted elsewhere usually fail a requirement quietly.
Yes, and it is the better starting point when they exist. Where they do not, or where they were written for print and packaging rather than for a marketplace, we would rather agree the marketplace-facing rules first than produce assets that will be inconsistent with whatever comes next.
Each design service shows its price on its own page: listing images and A+ content per ASIN, main images per image, a Brand Store and each page beyond it, and brand guidelines in two levels. New photography or video is quoted against a defined scope. The useful comparison is against advertising: creative is a fixed cost that raises the conversion rate of every click you will ever buy, whereas advertising is a recurring cost that buys the clicks.
It changes click-through rate and conversion rate, which is where its effect appears. It cannot change demand for the product, its price competitiveness or whether it is in stock. Creative work is at its most valuable on a product with proven demand that is losing the comparison, and least valuable on one nobody is searching for.
You do. Source files, layered artwork and photography are handed over, and you keep them if the arrangement ends. Nothing is held back as leverage, which is worth asking any design supplier before starting rather than afterwards.
When performance slips or the category shifts, rather than on a schedule. Competitors update their images, seasonal context changes, and a main image that won a year ago can be losing quietly now. Monitoring the category and refreshing on decay is more useful than an annual redesign nobody measured.
Yes: Sponsored Brands assets, DSP and display, and paid social for Meta and TikTok. Building it from the same brand system as the listings matters more than it sounds, because a shopper who clicks an ad and does not recognise the product page has been given a reason to hesitate.
The products, any existing brand assets and photography, the ASINs or listings to work on, and an honest account of what you think is not working. Access to the listings is useful but not needed on day one; the category audit can be done from outside the account.
Yes, and it is a common starting point. Rejections are usually specification problems rather than judgement calls: background, framing, text on a main image, or a file that does not meet size requirements. They are quick to fix once identified and expensive to leave, since a suppressed image can take a listing with it.
Yes. Creative is taken on as a standalone engagement for brands managing their own accounts or working with another agency. It is useful for us if we can see the listing performance data, but it is not a condition.
A look at the category and your current listings against the competitors a shopper actually compares you with. That audit is where the specifics come from, and it usually makes the priority obvious: main image first, then the gallery, then rich content.
As many as the product needs to answer its questions, which is rarely the same number twice. Five covers a simple product; seven suits one with more to explain; ten is the full gallery for a product that needs a comparison and several uses shown. The tier is chosen by what the product has to explain, not by filling every slot.
Every image is delivered at 2000 by 2000 pixels, large enough for the zoom marketplaces offer on product images and sharp on any screen.
No. These prices are for design work, built from your product photography or from renders. Product photography is quoted separately.
Yes, where each platform's rules allow it. Tell us which channels the images are for when you order, and each set is checked against those platforms' image requirements before delivery.
The main image has to show the product itself on a pure white background, filling most of the frame, with nothing added that is not part of the product, such as text, badges or graphics. The detail varies by category, so each image is checked against the current requirements for its category before delivery.
Yes. Each image is priced on its own, so variants can be made for a split test. On Amazon, brands enrolled in Brand Registry can test main images on eligible listings with Manage Your Experiments.
Up to ten in one order, each priced per image.
No. The work starts from your product photography. Product photography is quoted separately.
Premium A+ uses larger, full width modules and adds interactive ones such as hotspots, carousels and Q&A, and it is available only to brands that meet Amazon's eligibility for it. Standard A+ is available to brand owners enrolled in Brand Registry.
A carousel that sits above the A+ content and introduces the brand, with links to other products in the range. One Brand Story can be applied across many ASINs, which is why it is priced for up to twenty.
Its job is conversion: it answers the questions still open when a shopper scrolls. The alt text and written text can be read by search engines, which is why every design carries both, but A+ is bought for the sale it helps close rather than as a ranking tactic.
Yes. Larger orders are discounted per design, as shown in the pricing on this page.
Brand owners enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry can create a Store, and Amazon does not charge for it. The price here is for its design and build.
Enough for a shopper to reach any product quickly: usually a home page and a page for each category. Each page beyond the home page is priced on its own, up to fifty.
Yes. A Store page is one of the destinations a Sponsored Brands campaign can use, which is why landing pages are designed with the campaigns in mind.
Essential sets the core: logo design, colour palette, typography and starter guidelines. Professional adds the research and strategy behind the brand, advanced logo guidelines, extended brand elements and the system applied across the brand's channels.
They keep every listing, A+ page, Store and ad consistent, so a shopper who sees an ad recognises the page they land on. They are also what lets a new designer or agency produce work that fits from the first day.
Yes. Where a logo exists and works, the guidelines are built around it, and the logo work is limited to its variants and the rules for using it.
About Commerce Services
Both, and each service says which it usually is. Listing optimisation, keyword research and unit economics are normally projects. eCommerce SEO is ongoing, because search visibility is built and maintained over months.
Yes. These are capabilities rather than channels, and they are applied to marketplaces and storefronts we do not manage as often as to ones we do.
Compliance, reinstatement and cost recovery now sit in Compliance & Account Health, because they are the same kind of work: a case assembled and filed with a marketplace or a registry. BPO Services sits in Strategic Partnerships, because an outsourced team is an ongoing arrangement rather than a project.
You do. Files, keyword sets, models and the listing content stay with you, including if we stop working together.
Marketplace search engines rank listings on conversion and sales velocity inside their own platform, so the terms that matter are the ones shoppers use at the point of buying. Google ranks pages on relevance and authority across the open web, which brings in research and comparison queries a marketplace never sees. The same product needs both, worked separately.
Properly once, then maintained. Demand shifts with seasons, competitors and new products, so the map is reviewed rather than rebuilt. A full redo is warranted when the catalogue changes materially or when you enter a new market.
Both. Third party volumes are estimates and are treated as one input, while your own account data is the only source that knows what converted rather than what was searched. Where the two disagree, your data wins.
A project. The research produces a map, and the map is then used by whoever does the listing, content and advertising work. Where we run those channels for a brand, keeping the map current is part of that engagement rather than a separate one.
A clustered term list with the intent behind each group, estimated demand, a realistic difficulty against your domain, one owning page named per cluster, and a written note of where no suitable page exists yet.
Technical fixes can move things within weeks because they change what is already indexed. Content and authority take months. Anybody promising ranking in a fixed number of weeks is describing a coincidence rather than a plan.
Yes. The discipline is the same and the obstacles differ by platform: Shopify's collection and variant URLs, WooCommerce's plugin markup, and whatever a custom build does with faceted navigation.
No. Amazon and the other marketplaces rank listings on conversion and sales velocity inside their own search engine. This is about a store's visibility in Google, which is a different algorithm and a different set of levers. We run both, separately.
Usually yes, and for different jobs. Paid buys demand now. Organic compounds and lowers what you have to buy later. Most accounts should run both and know how much overlap they are paying for.
Indexing of new terms usually takes days. Ranking movement depends on sales accumulating against those terms, so it is weeks rather than days, and a listing with very little traffic takes longer because there is less evidence for the platform to read.
Amazon, Walmart, eBay and TikTok Shop most often, plus Shopify product pages where the same catalogue also has to work in Google. The fields and the rules differ by platform, so copy is written per platform rather than copied across.
Only where that is the right answer. Most catalogues have a small number of listings carrying most of the revenue and a long tail where the cheapest gain is backend fields and images. The audit decides where the work goes.
No. Marketplace listings rank inside the marketplace's own search engine on conversion and sales velocity. eCommerce SEO is a store's visibility in Google, a different algorithm with different levers. We run both, separately.
Yes. Image work sits with the creative team and copy with the listing team, and both work to one brief, because a main image that wins the click and a bullet that answers the next question are one decision split in two.
What one unit of a product earns after every cost of selling it on a given channel: the platform's fees, fulfilment, storage, returns, the advertising that produced the sale and the cost of the unit itself. The result is a contribution margin, per SKU and per channel.
No. The platform's reports cover the platform's own fees and leave out landed cost, returns handling, and most of what advertising actually costs per sale. The model puts all of it in one place.
Managed clients get it as part of the work, because advertising and pricing decisions are made against it. It is also sold on its own to brands that run their own channels and want the number.
Any number. The model is built to be refreshed from reports rather than filled in by hand, so a catalogue of a few hundred products is no harder to keep current than one of ten.
About Compliance & Account Health
No. The marketplace decides who sells on it and the trademark office decides what is registered. What we control is whether the case is complete, accurate and submitted the way the process expects, which is the part most failed cases never had.
Amazon most often, because that is where most of the demand is, and Walmart, eBay and TikTok Shop, which have their own policies and their own enforcement.
Account management is the month-to-month running of a channel. This is the work when something has stopped: an account, a listing or a brand that needs a case made for it. Managed clients get it as part of the service; anybody can buy it on its own.
No, and nobody can. Reinstatement is the marketplace's decision, made against its own policies and its own record of the account. What can be controlled is the quality of the case, the evidence behind it and whether it addresses the real cause. That is the part that is work rather than chance.
The platform sets the pace, and it varies by action type, by how complete the first submission is, and by how busy the review teams are. We do not quote a turnaround because we do not control one. What we do control is avoiding the delay an incomplete case creates.
A response that answers the notice rather than the cause, sent without the documentation the policy asks for. Both are fixable before submission, which is the reason the diagnosis comes first and takes as long as it takes.
Yes, and the work has the same shape. Establish which requirement applies, assemble the documentation against it, submit and follow up. Approval is the platform's to give, and we will tell you when the paperwork you have is not going to be enough.
Amazon most often, because its policy surface is the largest, plus Walmart, eBay and TikTok Shop. Each has its own process and its own view of what documentation counts as evidence.
No. This is marketplace policy work. Where a matter needs a lawyer, for example a rights dispute that has moved beyond the platform's own process, we say so rather than continuing past the point where we are useful.
No, and nobody honest can. The marketplace decides. What we control is whether the case is complete, accurate and submitted the way the process expects.
The platform sets the timeline and it varies by case type, from days to months. We can say how long each step on our side takes and how quickly we respond when the platform comes back.
That is the most common starting point. A rejected plan usually answered the notice rather than the cause, and the next submission has to be different rather than longer.
Yes. Each has its own policies and its own process, and the work is the same shape: cause, case, submission, follow-up.
No. The marketplace decides. What we control is whether the exact reason was found and the case that answers it was complete and filed where it will be read.
A retraction from the complainant is the fastest route, and we pursue it. Where none comes, a counter is filed with the evidence that the complaint does not hold.
Yes. Each category has its own document requirements and its own form of application, and most refusals come from the documents rather than the product.
Usually the reviews stay with the ASIN. Rank and the Buy Box can slip while the listing is down, which is why we watch both after reinstatement rather than closing the case at 'live'.
Discrepancies between what a platform's own reports show and what its own policies commit to. Lost or damaged inventory, incorrect fees, returns never restocked, and refunds issued without a return. What is claimable, and how long you have to claim it, are both set by the platform and both change.
Read access to reporting is enough to run the audit. Submitting claims needs the ability to open cases, which can be a limited user rather than full account access. We work at whatever level you are comfortable granting and say what it rules out.
Terms are agreed before any work starts, and they depend on the size of the account and the state of its reporting. Nothing is filed on your account before you have seen what the audit found and agreed how the work is scoped.
Yes, and it is the platform's limit rather than ours. Each marketplace enforces a window after the event inside which a claim can be raised, which is why discrepancies found late are sometimes not recoverable. It is the argument for auditing on a rhythm rather than once.
Wherever a platform publishes a policy committing it to reimburse sellers and gives enough reporting to check against, which in practice means Amazon most of the time. Where a channel does not report in enough detail to audit properly, we say so rather than charging to look.
Months rather than weeks, and the number depends on the office, the classes and whether the application is examined cleanly or draws an objection. Any specific figure quoted at the start is a guess, so we describe the stages and tell you where yours has reached.
No, but most brand protection tools on the major marketplaces require one, Amazon Brand Registry included. Selling is possible without it. Defending what you sell largely is not.
No. This is application preparation and process management. Where a matter requires a licensed attorney, including jurisdictions that demand local representation and disputes that move beyond examination, we tell you rather than carrying on.
The clearance search is where that surfaces, which is why it comes before anything else. Depending on how close it is, the options are a different mark, narrower classes, or filing in the knowledge that objection is a real risk. We set out which applies rather than filing and hoping.
It depends on where you sell and where local representation is required. We will tell you which of your markets can be handled directly and which need local counsel, before any work starts rather than partway through.
Amazon requires a mark at a stage it accepts, and which stages qualify has changed more than once. We check the requirement as it stands when you apply. If you have nothing filed at all, the registration is the first piece of work and it is slow, which is the argument for starting early.
Amazon decides, and the wait depends on its queue and on whether the application arrived complete. A complete application avoids the round trips, and that is the only part of the timeline anybody outside Amazon can influence.
Enhanced content, the brand advertising formats, the Store, brand analytics, and the tools for reporting counterfeits and hijacked listings. Most of it goes unused by brands who enrolled and stopped there.
It gives you the process for reporting them and the evidence route Amazon expects. It does not remove anybody automatically. Amazon assesses each report, so what you control is how well the report is made and how quickly it is raised.
No. Compliance is about your own account and the policy actions taken against it. Brand Registry is about protecting your brand from other sellers and gaining access to the tools reserved for brand owners. The two meet where a rights complaint is involved.
About Strategic Partnerships
A retainer buys a team to run a channel you already own. These are commercial models: a marketplace programme with its own approval and economics, an operating model where we build and run the route to market while the inventory stays yours until it sells, and an outsourced team working inside your operation.
No. In the retail growth partnership you keep ownership until the point of sale, which is the line between that model and wholesale. Amazon Renewed has its own supply requirements, which we work through with you.
The retail growth partnership is designed so you do not: no separate 3P or DTC organisation, no new team, and your wholesale relationships and logistics keep working as they do.
A conversation about the catalogue and the market. For Renewed, whether the category and supply meet the programme's requirements. For the partnership, which parts of the range have retail demand worth reaching.
An Amazon Vendor Central consultant runs the first party relationship with Amazon on a brand's behalf: reviewing and confirming purchase orders, tracking shipments to Amazon's terms, reconciling payments against invoices, disputing chargebacks and shortages, keeping the catalogue and its content accurate, reading Vendor Central's reports and managing advertising from the vendor account. The aim is that more of what Amazon buys turns into money the brand keeps.
Vendor Central is Amazon's portal for first party vendors. Amazon describes it as by invitation only: a vendor sells in bulk, at wholesale, to Amazon, and Amazon then sells to the customer. A vendor's orders arrive as purchase orders from Amazon, and its account is where it confirms them, submits product content, reads reports and is paid.
On Vendor Central you sell to Amazon, at wholesale, and Amazon sells to the customer. On Seller Central you sell to the customer yourself as a third party seller, set your own price, hold or place your own stock and keep the margin and the risk. Vendor Central is by invitation from Amazon; Seller Central is open to any business that signs up.
Amazon issues Vendor Central invitations itself and does not publish the criteria, so no agency can arrange one. If you have been invited, we can help you decide whether to accept and set the account up well. If you have not, Seller Central is the route that is open, and the work we do there is described on our Amazon page.
Yes. Many brands sell some items to Amazon as a vendor and sell others, or the same brand's other channels, as a third party seller. It works when it is managed deliberately: each item is placed where it earns most, and the two accounts are kept from feeding conflicting content to the same detail page.
A purchase order is Amazon's order to a vendor, sent electronically, for a quantity of each item at the agreed cost price. Once the vendor accepts it, the vendor is obliged to deliver the accepted quantity by the dates on the order to the Amazon locations named on it.
Accepting an order commits the account to delivering it, so an order accepted without the stock or the production time behind it tends to arrive late or short, and late or short deliveries are what Amazon's operational chargebacks are for. It also teaches Amazon's forecasting the wrong thing. That is why we check every order against stock and lead time before it is confirmed.
Chargebacks are deductions Amazon takes from what it pays a vendor when a delivery or its paperwork does not meet Amazon's requirements, for example deliveries that are late or incomplete, or labelling and shipment information errors. Each one is a cost, and each one points at a step in the supply chain worth fixing.
A shortage is the difference between what a vendor invoiced and what Amazon records as received, and Amazon pays for what it recorded. Some shortages are real, from units lost or miscounted before the dock. Others are receiving errors on Amazon's side, and those are recovered only by disputing them with proof of delivery inside the window Amazon allows.
Yes, when they are wrong and the evidence exists: proof of delivery, the shipment's paperwork, carrier records and the invoice. Disputes have to be filed within the window Amazon sets, which is why reconciliation has to be weekly rather than occasional. Deductions that are right cannot be disputed away; the value there is in fixing the cause.
It varies too much by account to put a number on honestly, and Amazon does not publish an average. What we can say is that deductions are rarely visible without a full reconciliation of payments against invoices, which is the first thing our audit does, so the first figure you see from us is yours rather than an industry estimate.
Amazon does. As a vendor you sell to Amazon at a cost price, and Amazon, as the retailer, decides what it charges customers. What you negotiate is the cost price and the terms around it; what you influence is the demand, through content and advertising, that makes Amazon order more.
Yes. Amazon Ads treats anyone who manages products in Vendor Central or Advantage Central as a vendor, and vendors register for advertising with that account. Vendors can run Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands and build a Store. A vendor that qualifies can also pay for advertising by deduction from what Amazon owes it, an option Amazon does not offer to accounts with no retail activity in the last six months.
Against the order picture. Advertising an item Amazon is out of stock on wastes money, and an item Amazon has just ordered deep on needs the demand to sell through, or the next order will be smaller. So vendor advertising is planned with the open purchase orders and the stock position in view, not only last month's sales.
Yes. A vendor's titles, bullets, descriptions, images and A+ content are submitted from the Vendor Central account. We write and submit them, keep item data such as case packs and dimensions accurate, and settle the conflicts that appear when a vendor account and a seller account both feed the same detail page.
Vendor Central carries reports on a vendor's sales, traffic, inventory and orders, and purchase order and catalogue data can also be read through Amazon's vendor APIs. Used weekly, it shows what Amazon is likely to order, where stock is running thin and which items are losing traffic, which is what a production plan and a cost conversation both need.
We prepare the case and support you through it: item level margins after deductions, sales and traffic trends, and the evidence for what you are asking. The negotiation is your company's, because the commercial relationship is yours, and you should never hand an agency authority to agree terms on your behalf.
Sometimes, for part of the range. A vendor gives up price and stock control for Amazon's volume and operations; a third party seller keeps both and takes the fees and the work. We compare them item by item, with real deductions on one side and real fees on the other, and many brands end up using both rather than choosing.
Amazon's ordering is its own decision, made from its forecasts, so a drop in orders is a signal to read rather than a switch to flip. We look at what changed: traffic, conversion, stock, cost price, a catalogue problem or a change in Amazon's assortment. Where the range still has demand, Seller Central is the route that keeps it on sale.
Where a vendor ships some orders directly to Amazon's customers rather than in bulk to Amazon's buildings, that is part of the same operation and we manage it with the rest: order confirmation, shipping on time and the paperwork that goes with it.
Yes, as a user under permissions you grant and can remove at any time. The account stays in your company's name, everything we create in it is yours, and you can end the arrangement and keep all of it.
Recovered deductions show first, usually within the first weeks, because the reconciliation finds disputes that are still inside Amazon's window. Process fixes take longer to show, because they reduce future chargebacks rather than past ones. Content and advertising changes show in traffic and sales over the following weeks, and in Amazon's ordering after that.
Access to Vendor Central, your current cost prices and terms, your stock and production lead times, and a contact in your warehouse or logistics team. With those we can run the audit and give you a written view of the account and the first things we would change.
Weekly, a short note of what was done: orders reviewed and confirmed, disputes filed, content submitted, advertising changes. Monthly, the numbers: what Amazon ordered, shipped and paid, what it deducted and what we recovered, how traffic and advertising moved, and what changes next month.
Amazon decides who is invited, and being invited is not the same as being suited. Selling to Amazon suits a brand that can supply at wholesale volumes, absorb Amazon's terms and deductions, and live without setting the retail price. A smaller brand that values price control and margin per unit often does better as a third party seller, and some keep a few items with Amazon and sell the rest themselves.
Yes. We start with the same audit, which shows what was being done and what was not, then agree a handover: open purchase orders, disputes in progress, content waiting on approval and live advertising, so nothing in flight is dropped. Your team or the previous agency keeps whatever access you choose until the handover is done.
Access is set up in the first days, and the audit follows: purchase orders, payments against invoices, deductions, the catalogue, content and advertising. Deductions still inside Amazon's dispute window are filed as soon as they are found, the weekly purchase order review starts straight away, and the plan for the rest is agreed with you before anything else changes.
Our management fee starts at $1,500 a month (see Pricing). The audit confirms scope: the size of the range and the work it needs. Ask for the free audit and you get the reconciliation and our view of the account before any fee is agreed.
Both: the US, and in the EU Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. The programme is the same and the work around it is not: the EU adds VAT registration per market, WEEE, CE marking, customs and multi-language service, while the US adds almost none of that and a different sourcing problem instead. Tell us which market you are entering and the plan changes accordingly.
It depends far more on documentation than on Amazon. Applications stall on supplier invoices that do not meet the 90 day rule and on quality manuals written after the fact. Amazon reviews and decides every application; its US Renewed page says decisions are typically made within 10 days, though processing times vary. Our job is a complete file first time. With documents, sourcing and compliance in place, we target a launch-ready setup within one to two months.
Yes, and a rejection is usually about evidence rather than eligibility. The application is rebuilt from what Amazon actually asked for, the gap that caused the refusal is closed, and it goes back in. What does not work is resubmitting the same package and hoping for a different reviewer.
The physical SIM. From the iPhone 14 onwards the US variants are eSIM only with no SIM tray, and Amazon's EU Renewed listing check flags the missing physical SIM and refuses the listing. International, EU, UK and Hong Kong variants keep the tray. It is the single most common way a new EU seller ends up with capital in stock that cannot be sold, and it is avoided by verifying the variant before purchase.
Established networks in Hong Kong, the UAE and inside the EU: electronics wholesalers, carrier trade-in aggregators, OEM authorised resellers and B2B liquidation. Which one suits you depends on the market you are selling into, the generation you want and how fast you need it, and we negotiate the pricing rather than passing on a list.
Not every one, but more than one, and which ones depends on where the stock sits and where it sells. Pan-EU fulfilment puts inventory in several countries and creates the obligation in each. We map it against what you are actually doing rather than registering everywhere by default.
The argument for Renewed is not the margin on a single unit, it is who you are competing with. Enrolment is restricted, which narrows the field of sellers you compete with, and the Renewed Guarantee means the listing converts close to a new one. The barrier that makes it slow to enter is the same barrier that protects you afterwards.
Amazon's US Renewed page (sell.amazon.com/programs/renewed) asks for $50,000 in qualifying refurbished purchases in the previous 90 days for most categories ($2.5 million for Apple-branded items; 180 days for Home, Tools, Kitchen, Lawn & Garden), experience selling refurbished products, and trademark or Brand Registry proof if you are a brand. Enrolment and eligibility depend on your circumstances and Amazon's applicable enrolment criteria; approval is never promised.
Since 16 October 2026, Amazon applies a reduced referral fee to Renewed products in eligible US categories for one year, automatically. Amazon's US Renewed page announces it; the rate for each category shows in Seller Central.
Amazon's second-hand product sales passed €2 billion across Europe and the UK in 2024, and Europe's online market for used and returned products is worth €21.6 billion (Cebr research for Amazon, July 2025). Both cover all second-hand categories, not Renewed alone.
It is an operating model for selling a brand's products through retail channels without the brand building the function that does it. Xcelerate Brands identifies the retail growth opportunity, builds the commercial plan and runs the selling across consumer and business demand. The brand keeps ownership of its inventory until the point of sale, and the products are sold under the brand's own name at retail pricing.
In wholesale, a buyer purchases inventory from you, takes ownership of it and resells it on their own terms. Here nobody buys your stock. You retain ownership until it sells, and what we provide is the retail growth strategy, channel execution, demand planning, forecasting and operating support that turns that inventory into retail revenue.
You do, until the point of sale. That is the defining feature of the model and the clearest difference from a wholesale arrangement.
Either yours or ours, depending on the channel and the operating model agreed. Both are available and which applies is settled before anything goes live, because it determines where the account, the data and the daily operations sit.
No. The model is designed so that a brand can take part without restructuring its existing wholesale relationships or logistics. It runs alongside what you already have rather than replacing it.
No. That is a large part of the point. There is no separate internal organisation to stand up, no new team to recruit and no new operating function to create in order to reach these channels.
Both consumers and business buyers. The two behave differently in volume, pricing structure and buying cycle, so they are planned and served separately rather than treated as one audience at different order sizes.
It is recurring rather than a one-off plan. We forecast expected retail demand and plan availability against it, and revise both as the channels produce real numbers, so stock and demand stay aligned as the partnership grows.
Yes. Products are sold under your brand at retail pricing, which is what keeps your pricing position and brand presentation intact as the reach expands.
A brand with products that could reach more of the retail market than their current route to market allows, and which would rather not build an internal channel organisation to get there. If you already run these channels well yourself, a management engagement is the more useful conversation.
A conversation about your catalogue, your current route to market and where you think the reach is missing. We will tell you which parts of the range we think have retail demand and which we do not, before anything is agreed.
eCommerce BPO is outsourced operational capacity for online retail: named people who run marketplace operations, advertising, catalogue work, customer support and reporting on your account and your systems. It differs from a call centre in continuity, and from freelancing in that the people are managed, trained and covered for absence.
A virtual assistant is usually one contractor you manage directly. BPO is a managed team: people matched to skills, trained on documented process, supervised, and covered when somebody is unavailable. The distinction matters most when you are away, ill or busy, which is exactly when a directly managed contractor stops being useful.
Marketplace specialists, advertising specialists, catalogue and data staff, customer support, inventory and order operations, reporting analysts, designers, and account managers who coordinate them. Most engagements are a mix of part-time skills rather than one full-time role, because that is usually what the work actually is.
Yes. Named staff rather than a rotating pool, with a nominated cover for absence. This is the point of the arrangement: an outsourced specialist becomes more valuable every month they learn your catalogue, and that value resets to zero each time the person changes.
It is priced on the roles and hours required, and it is quoted after scoping rather than from a rate card. The comparison worth making is against the fully loaded cost of hiring the same skills directly, including recruitment, management time and the months before a new hire is productive.
Usually, and cost is rarely the main reason brands do it. The stronger arguments are speed, since a trained team starts in weeks rather than months, and divisibility, since you can buy a quarter of an advertising specialist and a half of a catalogue specialist, which no employment contract offers.
We have offices in the United States and Pakistan, and teams are assigned with your working hours in mind, including a defined overlap with your own team. Overlap matters more than location: work that needs a question answered stalls without it.
Agreed at the start, with a stated overlap with your own working day. Marketplace support has response time requirements that feed seller metrics, so where support is in scope the coverage is planned around those rather than around convenience.
Through user permissions you grant inside your own accounts, scoped to what the role requires and revocable in a click. Nobody works through shared logins or through our own accounts, and access is removed when a person leaves the engagement.
Least-privilege access, no shared credentials, no data taken outside the systems it belongs to, and access removed promptly when roles change. Access review should be a condition of any outsourcing arrangement, and it is reasonable to ask for it in writing before starting rather than after.
Cover is nominated in advance and the documentation is maintained throughout, which is why the documentation step is not optional. A handover from written process takes days; a handover from somebody's memory takes weeks and loses things nobody notices for a month.
Typically two to four weeks: scoping, documentation, then assignment and training. Documentation is what varies. A brand with written procedures starts quickly, and one where the process lives in one person's head spends the first fortnight getting it out.
No, and most brands do not. Building the documentation is part of the onboarding and one of the more useful by-products, because you keep it. Several clients have said the documentation was worth more than the first months of the service, since it made their own team replaceable in the healthy sense.
Yes. Your Seller Central, your helpdesk, your PIM, your project tool. Working in your systems rather than exporting into ours is what keeps the arrangement reversible: if it ends, the work and its history stay where they always were.
A supervised first period where output is reviewed before it goes out, then agreed quality measures for the ongoing work: error rates on catalogue changes, response times on support, adherence to the documented process. Reviewed with you rather than reported at you.
That is the usual and the better path. One role, one channel, a defined scope, and expansion once the process is documented and the first person is productive. Brands that outsource six functions at once spend the first months managing the arrangement instead of the work.
We do both, and they are different arrangements. Agency management means we own the outcome and the strategy. BPO means you own both and we provide the hands. Some brands use us for agency work on one channel and BPO capacity on another, which is a sensible way to keep strategy in house where it matters most.
Either you, if you want hands and already have the management capacity, or a named account manager on our side if you would rather outsource the coordination as well. The second costs more and is usually the right answer when the scope covers three or more functions.
Some does not, and we would rather say so at scoping. Work requiring constant judgement calls on brand, pricing or supplier relationships belongs in house. Repetitive work with a documentable process outsources well. Most roles are a mix, and the useful exercise is separating the two rather than moving the whole job.
English is the default. Other languages depend on availability and are confirmed at scoping rather than promised in advance, because staffing a language badly is worse than not offering it.
With notice, and with everything you need to continue: the documentation, the account access that was always yours, and a handover. Nothing is held in systems you cannot reach, and the process documentation built during onboarding is yours whether or not the arrangement continues.
A scoping conversation about what the work actually is, in hours rather than in job titles. That usually reveals whether you need one person or three part-time skills, and it is worth having even if you go on to hire directly instead.