Flat fee or a percentage of spend? What Amazon PPC management really costs

Almost every conversation about hiring an Amazon ads manager focuses on the rate. Is 12% reasonable? Is 15% too much? It's the wrong question. The model shapes the advice you'll be given far more than the number attached to it.

What percentage pricing rewards

If your agency's income is a share of your ad budget, then two things follow that nobody says out loud.

First, growing your spend grows their revenue. That doesn't make anyone dishonest — but when a recommendation to increase budget is both plausible and profitable to the person making it, you've lost an independent opinion. You're the only one in the room with a reason to say no.

Second, and less obviously: cutting wasted spend costs them money. Pruning search terms that don't convert is one of the highest-value things an ads manager does. Under a percentage model it directly reduces their own fee. The incentive points away from the work you most need.

The arithmetic

Percentage rates vary widely. Run your own numbers against whatever you're quoted:

Now ask the honest question: does the work triple when your spend triples? Occasionally yes — more ASINs, more marketplaces, more complexity. Frequently no. It's the same account, the same weekly review, the same search-term report, with bigger numbers in it.

Where percentage pricing is defensible

To be fair to the model: at low spend it can be the cheaper option, and it aligns risk in one useful way — if you pause spending, you pause the fee. For a seller doing $2,000 a month in ads, 10% is $200, and few agencies will do serious work for that flat.

The model breaks down as you scale. Somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 a month in spend, most sellers cross the point where they're paying for budget size rather than for work done.

Questions worth asking before you sign

• What exactly happens each week? "Optimisation" is not an answer. Search-term review, bid changes, negatives added, campaigns restructured — ask which, and how often.
• Do you report on TACOS or only ACOS? ACOS measures only ad-attributed sales. An account can post a flattering ACOS while total sales fall. TACOS — ad spend against total revenue — is the number that shows you that.
• Who owns the account? The answer should be you, working inside your own Seller Central and advertising accounts. Anything else makes leaving expensive.
• What's the minimum term? Confidence usually shows up as a willingness to work month to month.
• If you cut my spend by 30% and sales held, what happens to your fee? The answer tells you which way the incentives point.

What we do, and why

We charge a flat monthly fee starting at $500, never a percentage of spend. At small budgets that isn't always the cheapest option available and we won't pretend otherwise. What it is, is predictable — and it means nobody managing your account benefits from your budget being larger than it needs to be.

Every engagement starts with a free ad audit: we look at your existing campaigns and tell you what we'd change, before you pay anything. Plenty of sellers take that and implement it themselves. That's a perfectly good outcome.