Skip to main content
In-house teams offer maximum control and deep brand knowledge but are expensive to build and hard to keep current; agencies offer immediate multi-discipline expertise and pattern recognition from many accounts, at the cost of some day-to-day control. Many brands land on a hybrid.

​
In-House: Strengths and Costs

Strengths: total control, undivided focus on your brand, institutional knowledge stays inside the company, direct accountability. Costs: a genuinely capable Amazon function needs advertising, catalog, logistics, and strategy skills - rarely found in one hire. Salaries, tools, and training add up, and a single departure can erase the whole capability. Keeping up with Amazon’s constant fee, policy, and ad-product changes is itself a job.

​
Agency: Strengths and Costs

Strengths: a full specialist team from day one; pattern recognition from managing many brands (OBG has managed 500+); tooling and processes already built; faster time to impact. Costs: you share the team’s attention with other clients, and quality varies enormously between agencies - alignment of incentives is the single biggest differentiator (see OBG vs. a typical agency).

​
The Hybrid Path

Common and often ideal: keep strategy and brand decisions in-house, use an agency for specialist execution - or start with an agency and in-source over time. OBG explicitly supports this: it will train your internal team on any tasks you want to take in-house.

​
How to Decide

Work through the signals in When to Hire an Amazon Agency. A free, low-commitment way to test the agency path: the OBG360 Audit gives you a professional roadmap you can execute with either model. Since OBG has no contracts, trying it carries little risk.