Amazon Seller Consulting: What It Actually Is and How to Hire Right

Most Amazon seller consultants are just freelancers with a Helium 10 subscription and a Canva logo. Here's how to tell the difference between someone who can actually move your business forward and someone who'll waste three months of your time.

I've been on both sides of this. I've hired consultants who couldn't outperform my VA. I've also worked with operators who 3x'd a brand in six months. The gap between the two is enormous — and most sellers can't tell the difference until they've already written the check.

This guide breaks down what Amazon consulting actually looks like, what it costs, and how to avoid the landmines.

What Does an Amazon Consultant Actually Do?

At the most basic level, an Amazon consultant diagnoses problems and implements solutions across your seller account. But that definition is so broad it's almost useless.

In practice, a good consultant does three things:

• Audit your current state. Catalog performance, listing quality, PPC efficiency, inventory health, and competitive positioning. Most sellers have blind spots the size of craters.

• Build a prioritized roadmap. Not a 47-page PDF you'll never read. A ranked list of what to fix first based on revenue impact and effort required.

• Execute or oversee execution. Strategy without implementation is a blog post. The consultant either does the work or manages the people who do.

The best consultants operate like fractional CMOs for your Amazon business. They're not just tweaking bids — they're thinking about your brand's position in the category, your margin structure, and your 12-month trajectory.

Types of Amazon Seller Consulting

Not all consulting is the same. Here's how the market breaks down:

Strategic Consulting

High-level guidance on brand positioning, product line expansion, channel strategy, and exit planning. Usually delivered in monthly calls with a senior operator. Best for sellers doing $500K+ who have a team but lack direction.

Operational Consulting

Hands-on work inside Seller Central: catalog management, case resolution, account health issues, listing suppression, brand registry problems. This is the plumbing work most sellers hate doing themselves.

PPC-Specific Consulting

Focused entirely on advertising. Campaign architecture, bid management, keyword strategy, DSP, Sponsored Brands. This is the most common type of consulting because PPC is where most sellers feel the most pain.

Full-Service Management

The consultant (or agency) takes over everything. Listings, PPC, inventory planning, A+ content, brand defense, reporting. You get a monthly report and a strategy call. This is what we do at GigaBrands.

Red Flags When Hiring an Amazon Consultant

After managing 50+ brands, I've seen every flavor of bad consulting. Here's what to watch for:

They guarantee specific results. No one can guarantee you'll hit $1M or achieve a 15% ACoS. Anyone who promises specific numbers before seeing your account is lying or naive. Both are dangerous. They won't share past client results. Case studies, references, and before/after data should be table stakes. If they can't show you what they've done, they haven't done much. They don't ask about your margins. A consultant who jumps straight to PPC without understanding your unit economics doesn't understand the business. ACoS is meaningless without margin context. They use only manual processes at scale. Managing 10,000+ keywords manually isn't "hands-on" — it's inefficient. Modern Amazon management requires software and automation. If they're proud of doing everything by hand, they're leaving money on the table. They lock you into long contracts with no performance benchmarks. Month-to-month with clear KPIs. That's the standard you should demand.

What Results Should You Expect (and When)?

Set realistic expectations:

• Month 1: Audit, onboarding, baseline metrics established. You might see quick wins from obvious listing fixes or wasted ad spend elimination.

• Months 2-3: Strategy implementation begins. PPC restructuring, listing optimization, keyword expansion. Results start showing but aren't fully baked.

• Months 4-6: Compounding effects. Organic rank improvements from better conversion rates. PPC efficiency gains from data accumulation. This is where the real ROI shows up.

If a consultant can't move the needle in 90 days, something is wrong. Either the strategy is off, execution is slow, or the account had less opportunity than expected.

How GigaBrands Approaches Consulting Differently

We're not a traditional consulting firm, and I think that distinction matters.

AI-assisted operations. We use proprietary AI tools to process data at a scale that human-only teams can't match. Keyword analysis, bid optimization, competitive monitoring, listing audits — we automate the grunt work so our strategists focus on decisions that require judgment. Data-first decision making. Every recommendation we make is backed by data. Not hunches, not "best practices" from a 2019 blog post. Current data from your account, your category, and your competitors. Operator-led, not salesperson-led. I built GigaBrands after running my own Amazon brands. Our team is made up of people who've managed real P&Ls, not people who read a course and hung out a shingle. Radical transparency. We share our dashboards, our logic, and our mistakes. If something isn't working, we say so and pivot. No three-month song and dance before admitting the strategy was wrong.

We've managed over $205M in Amazon sales across 50+ brands. That's not a vanity metric — it's the dataset our AI models are trained on.

How to Decide If You Need a Consultant

Ask yourself three questions:

• Am I leaving money on the table? If your conversion rate is below category average, your ACoS is climbing, or your organic rank is slipping — yes.

• Do I have the time and expertise to fix it myself? If you're spending 20 hours a week in Seller Central and still falling behind, the opportunity cost of not hiring help is real.

• Can I afford to keep guessing? Every month of suboptimal performance is revenue you don't get back. The question isn't whether consulting costs money — it's whether the alternative costs more.

If you're doing $50K+/mo on Amazon and you're not confident your growth is optimized, a conversation costs nothing.

Book a free strategy call: https://calendly.com/d/crft-5qs-x9w

Hunter Harris is the founder of GigaBrands, an AI-assisted Amazon growth agency managing 50+ brands with over $205M in total Amazon sales.