You Know Last Month's Revenue. Do You Know What Was Left?

Ads first if they are unmanaged or obviously wasteful, because that is the fastest money and you can see it inside a month. Here is a test you can run before talking to anyone: pull the search-term report for the last sixty days and total the spend on terms with zero conversions. If that figure is a meaningful share of your ad spend, PPC management is the direct fix. If ads look roughly sane and the margin still is not there, start with the profit audit, because the leak is somewhere ads cannot reach — aged storage surcharges, a suppressed listing, returns dragging a SKU under water, reimbursements never filed, a lost Buy Box sending your own paid clicks to a reseller. More ad optimisation will not find any of that. If you genuinely cannot tell which case you are in, the free growth review exists for exactly that and costs nothing, and it is a fair use of it.

Not before we have seen the account, and you should be wary of anyone who does. A recovery percentage quoted on a sales call is a guess dressed as a forecast, and the person who finds out it was wrong is you, three months in. There is also a structural reason the number cannot be known from outside: the largest variable is your landed cost per unit, Amazon does not hold it, so anyone quoting without it is calculating revenue minus platform fees and calling the result profit. What we will do instead is show each leak with the underlying data behind it, label every figure as measured or estimated so you can tell which is which, and rank them by dollars so you decide what is worth acting on. Some of what we find will be things you already knew. If the account turns out to be in good shape, that is the finding and we will say it.

Reporting access to Seller Central and to the advertising account. Between them those cover referral and fulfillment fees, ad spend and search terms, inventory age and storage, returns, reimbursement eligibility and listing status. We do not need the ability to change your pricing or your catalog in order to run an audit, and we would rather start read-only. The one number Amazon does not hold is your landed cost per unit — product, freight, duty and inbound — and without it nobody can calculate contribution margin, only revenue minus platform fees, which is a different and much friendlier-looking number. Give us landed cost at SKU level and the audit becomes arithmetic rather than estimation. If you do not have it broken out per SKU, that is common, and it is worth fixing whether or not you work with us, because it is the number that tells you which products are actually worth advertising.

Often yes, and this is worth saying plainly: a competent PPC agency is running your ad account, not your P&L. The costs that add up quietly sit outside their remit entirely. Long-term storage surcharges on units that should have been liquidated two quarters ago. Reimbursements for inbound shipments Amazon lost and never credited. A listing suppressed for three weeks that is still accruing storage while selling nothing. A reseller holding the Buy Box, so the clicks your agency bought convert for somebody else. And fee changes landing on a price that has not moved since launch: 2026 FBA fees rose roughly eight cents a unit on average, and from April 17, 2026 a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge applies to US and Canadian FBA fulfillment fees, calculated on the fulfillment fee rather than the sale price, which Amazon puts at about seventeen cents a unit in the US. None of that appears in an ACOS report. If your agency is good, the audit will say so.

No. We work with brands that already make or own a product, and everything here assumes a real product with a real landed cost behind the listing. If you want someone to pick a category, find a supplier, or tell you what to sell, we are not it, and the firms that do that well are a different kind of business. It is worth knowing why we stay out of it: product selection is where the largest and least reversible mistakes get made, and an agency paid monthly to market whatever you chose has no incentive to tell you the choice was wrong. Where we can help before you commit is the arithmetic. Referral fees run 8 to 17 percent in most categories and up to 45 percent on Amazon device accessories, and running your intended retail price through referral, fulfillment, storage and landed cost tells you quickly whether the margin is there at all.