What Amazon marketing agencies in India actually charge

Indian Amazon agencies charge between 25,000 and 2 lakh a month, on one of three fee models. The model matters more than the number, because each one pays us to do something different.

A founder asked me last month what an Amazon agency should cost him. I gave him the range, and then I said the range is the least useful part of the answer.

Because the number on the invoice is not what decides whether you make money. The structure behind it is. There are three ways an Amazon agency in India can be paid, and each one quietly instructs us to do something different with your account.

The range, so we can get it out of the way

Published pricing across Indian Amazon agencies lands roughly here:

Account size	Monthly fee
Small, few ASINs, modest spend	₹25,000 to ₹35,000
Mid market	₹35,000 to ₹75,000
Large or full brand management	₹75,000 to ₹2,00,000 and up

That is consistent across the agencies who publish anything at all, and most do not. The number moves with catalogue size, ad spend and how much of the listing work you are handing over.

One thing to check in every proposal: whether the fee includes the ad budget. It usually does not. An agency quoting ₹40,000 a month is quoting for their time. The money Amazon takes is separate, and it is normally several times larger. Ask for the two split out in writing, because a surprising number of proposals leave it ambiguous and it is not always an accident.

The three fee models, and what each one is really telling us to do

1. Fixed monthly retainer

You pay the same every month regardless of spend or sales.

The good part is that it is predictable, and it does not reward us for spending more of your money. The bad part is that it does not reward us for anything else either. A fixed fee is paid whether your account grew, held or slid. The only way it goes wrong is quietly: fewer hours, less attention, the same invoice.

The thing that fixes this is not the fee model, it is whether anyone is actually looking at the account. Ask who, by name, and how often.

2. Percentage of ad spend

Typically 8 to 20 percent of what you spend on Amazon advertising.

Read that sentence again slowly. You are paying us a percentage of your costs.

Here is what that means in practice. Suppose we are at 12 percent of spend, you are spending ₹5,00,000 a month, and we are earning ₹60,000. Now suppose the right call for your business is to cut spend to ₹3,00,000, because the top 20 percent of your keywords are carrying everything and the rest is bleeding. Making that call costs us ₹24,000 a month.

I am not saying agencies on this model deliberately overspend. I am saying nobody has to be dishonest for this to go wrong. It just makes the correct decision the expensive one for the person making it, every month, forever.

If your agency is on percentage of spend, the question to ask is what happened the last time they recommended a budget cut. If the answer is that it has never come up, that is the answer.

A smaller monthly fee plus an agreed percentage of the revenue generated.

This one pays us when you sell. Which sounds obviously correct, and mostly is, but it has two failure points worth knowing before you sign.

The first is attribution. If the share is on total store revenue, we get paid for sales that would have happened without us. If it is on advertising attributed revenue only, we are incentivised to run ads on branded search terms, where people were already typing your name and were going to buy anyway. Those campaigns look magnificent in a report and add almost nothing. Agree which revenue counts, in writing, before month one.

The second is that revenue is not profit. A revenue share pays us to sell your ₹2,000 product with the thin margin exactly as hard as your ₹600 product with the fat one. If your catalogue has uneven margins, say so, and get the share weighted or the target set on contribution rather than top line.

Done properly, this is the model I would pick as a founder. It is the only one of the three where the agency loses money when the account stalls.

What the fee model does not fix

Whichever structure you choose, none of them touch the thing that most often decides the outcome. If the listing does not convert, the fee model is a rounding error. You can be paying the fairest possible price for someone to send well targeted traffic to a page that was never going to sell.

We wrote about that separately, because it deserves its own argument: your Amazon listing is the leak, not your ads.

And before you agree any target with anyone, work out your real break-even, with returns in it. Most Indian sellers are running against a number that is roughly twice as forgiving as their actual one. That is here, with the arithmetic.

What we do

We run two of the three. A monthly retainer, or a revenue share where a smaller fee sits alongside an agreed percentage of what we generate.

We do not run percentage of ad spend, for the reason above. I do not want to be the person recommending your budget while my own invoice is calculated from it.

We also do not price Amazon as a standalone slice, which is the one place we are genuinely awkward to buy from. Marketplace performance sits downstream of your catalogue, your creative and whether anyone has heard of you, and an ads-only brief means being asked to fix a problem we are not allowed to touch.

If you want a real number rather than a range, tell us what you sell and roughly what you are spending, on the Amazon page. We will come back with one.

And whoever you end up talking to, these are the eight questions worth asking before you sign. A couple of them are uncomfortable for us too.

How much does an Amazon marketing agency cost in India?

Between roughly ₹25,000 a month for a small account and ₹2,00,000 or more for full brand management, with most mid market accounts landing between ₹35,000 and ₹75,000. That fee almost never includes the advertising budget itself, so ask for the two separated in the proposal.

Is a percentage of ad spend a fair way to pay an Amazon agency?

It is common, at 8 to 20 percent, but it pays the agency a share of your costs rather than your results. Cutting wasted spend directly reduces the agency's own income, which makes the right decision the expensive one for the person best placed to make it.

A smaller monthly retainer plus an agreed percentage of the revenue generated. It aligns the agency with sales rather than spend. Agree in advance which revenue counts, because a share on total store revenue pays for sales that would have happened anyway, and a share on branded search campaigns pays for demand you already had.

Should the agency fee include my Amazon ad budget?

Usually it does not, and it should be stated explicitly either way. The management fee is for the agency's work. The advertising spend goes to Amazon and is typically several times larger. A proposal that leaves this ambiguous is worth a second read.