Before you hand over your accounts

Before you hire a marketplace account manager, settle five things in writing: who holds access, what you see each week, how settlements are reconciled, who watches account health, and how you part ways. The list applies to a person, a firm, or us.

What a marketplace account manager does

A marketplace account manager runs the daily work of your seller accounts: listings, prices and stock, orders and returns, claims, advertising inside the marketplace, account health and settlements. Scopes vary widely, so write down which of these you are buying before you compare quotes.

Some managers run only advertising; some only build listings; some do everything inside the seller panel and nothing outside it. Packing and shipping usually stay with you or your logistics provider. Know where each line sits, or the gaps become yours by default.

Whether you are comparing ecommerce agencies in Delhi NCR or Bengaluru, or a freelancer in your own city, the work runs through seller-panel logins and shared reports. Access and reporting matter more than the address.

If listings are the main gap, a contained catalogue and listing job may be all you need. If it is the whole operation, compare each offer against a full marketplace account management scope.

Who should own the access?

You should. The seller account, its registered email and mobile number, the bank account it pays into and the tax details on it stay in your name and under your control. The manager works through user logins with the permissions you choose.

Most seller panels let the owner add users and set what each can see and change; Amazon’s Seller Central sets permissions by area. Where a panel has no separate users, keep the login in your name and change the password when the work ends.

Three rules hold everywhere. Never move the registered email or mobile number to anyone else’s. Never let anyone else change the bank details. Keep a dated list of every user, tool and app connected to the account: it is your exit checklist.

The same principle covers advertising. Marketplace ad consoles and any Google or Meta ad accounts should be in your name, billed to your own account or card, with the manager added as a user. Spend routed through someone else’s account is spend you cannot check.

The manager borrows the keys. The account stays yours.

What reporting should you expect each week?

One weekly report, on a fixed day, built from the marketplace’s own downloads so you could rebuild it yourself. It should show what sold, what it cost, what came back and what changed, and say plainly when something has stopped working.

A useful weekly report covers:

• Orders, units and net sales after cancellations and returns, by marketplace and by product.
• Returns and RTO (return to origin: orders that come back undelivered), with the reasons given.
• Advertising spend, the sales attributed to it, and ROAS (return on ad spend: attributed sales divided by spend). Amazon’s ad console also reports ACoS (advertising cost of sales), the inverse of ROAS; our guide to ROAS vs ACoS explains both.
• Stock cover for each product, and anything about to run out.
• Account health status, and any policy notices received.
• Claims raised, approved and pending, with amounts.
• Changes made that week: prices, listings, campaigns.

Once a month, ask for the slower view: contribution per product after commission, fees, returns and advertising. That number decides which products deserve more stock and budget, and which should be repriced or dropped.

Before you sign, ask for a sample report with the figures removed. If a number cannot be traced to a download from the seller panel, ask where it came from.

How should settlements be reconciled?

Order by order. Every order should appear in a settlement, every fee should match the marketplace’s published rates for its category, and every return should be either received back in saleable condition or claimed for.

Marketplaces pay out on a cycle, net of commission, fees and shipping charges, and of deductions such as TCS (tax collected at source under GST) and TDS under income tax.

Errors can sit in any of these lines: a shipping fee charged at the wrong weight, a commission at the wrong category rate, a refund issued for a return that never came back.

The output is a monthly file that ties orders to settlements, lists each difference and shows the claim raised for it. Ask who prepares it and whether your accountant receives it. Marketplaces set time limits for raising claims, so a late reconciliation loses money.

TCS deserves its own monthly check. It is not an extra cost: once it appears in your GST account, it can be used against your GST liability.

Make sure it does appear, every month, and that it matches what the settlements say was deducted. Our guide to GST for online sellers explains how TCS works.

Who watches account health, and how often?

The manager should check it every working day, and you should see the same dashboard. Account health is the set of measures a marketplace uses to decide whether you may keep selling: cancellations, late shipments, order defects, customer complaints and policy breaches.

Each marketplace publishes its own measures and targets, and a breach can suppress listings or suspend the account. Agree in advance how quickly the manager tells you about a warning, who drafts the response, and who signs off any appeal sent in your name.

Ask, too, how they would grow ratings and reviews. Any scheme that pays or rewards buyers for reviews, or posts reviews from accounts the seller controls, breaks marketplace policies and puts an account you own at risk.

What should the first month look like?

An audit and a baseline, before anything changes. The first weeks should record what the account looks like today, so every later report has something to be measured against.

• Listings. Suppressed, incomplete or duplicate listings, and missing attributes, images and size charts.
• Account health. Current measures, past warnings and any open policy issues.
• Money. Open claims, pending reimbursements and settlements from recent months not yet reconciled.
• Advertising. How campaigns are structured, what they spend, and which products carry the spend.
• Stock and prices. Where they are out of step across marketplaces.

The audit should end in a written plan: what changes first, why, and how you will see the effect in the weekly report. Keep it. It is the baseline you will judge the work against when the first review comes round.

What exit terms belong in the contract?

Terms that let you leave cleanly: a notice period, a written handover, access removed on the last day, and everything made for you staying yours. Settle them at the start, while both sides are on good terms.

• Notice. A notice period in both directions, long enough to hand over without a gap in daily work.
• Ownership. Listing copy, images, A+ content (the enhanced description section on Amazon product pages), ad campaigns and reports made for you belong to you and stay in your accounts.
• Brand and trademark. Any trademark application or marketplace brand registration is filed in your name, never the manager’s.
• Handover. A list of open claims, pending settlements, live campaigns and scheduled changes, delivered before the last day.
• Access. Users removed, passwords changed, and connected tools and apps disconnected on the last day.
• Money in transit. Who chases claims and reimbursements still open after the exit, and on what terms.

On fees, structure matters as much as amount. A percentage of sales rewards volume, which can tip into discounting; a fixed monthly fee is predictable but says nothing about results. Either way, list what sits outside the fee: ad spend, photography, new listings.

Questions to ask before you sign

1. Do you sell on these marketplaces yourselves, or only for clients?
2. Which permissions will you need, and what is each one for?
3. Can we see a sample weekly report with the figures removed?
4. How do you reconcile settlements, how often, and who receives the file?
5. Who raises claims, and how do you track their time limits?
6. Who drafts and who approves appeals if a listing or the account is suspended?
7. How do you grow ratings and reviews?
8. Who does the work each week, and who covers when they are away?
9. What is outside the fee?
10. What happens to listings, creatives and campaigns if we part ways?

Good answers are specific and come with an example: a report, a reconciliation file with the figures removed, a handover list. Vague answers to the access and exit questions are reason enough to keep looking.

Warning signs

• A request for your primary login, or to move the registered email or mobile number.
• An offer to register your brand or trademark in their own name.
• A promised ranking, sales figure or ROAS before anyone has seen the account.
• No sample report or reconciliation file to show.
• A plan for paid or rewarded reviews.
• Ad spend billed through their own account, with a margin you cannot see.

How we work on accounts we run

We are an operator, not an agency: we run our own brands on the same marketplaces we run for clients, so we know these panels from the seller’s side. The accounts we run stay in your name, and we work through the permissions you grant.

You get one weekly report built from the marketplace’s own downloads, and we reconcile every settlement against the order report. We expect to be held to the same access and exit terms as anyone you might hire.

Our ecommerce brand management page shows how account work connects with storefronts and advertising, including sponsored ads on marketplaces. If you are still deciding where to sell, start with marketplace or D2C.

Tell us which marketplaces you sell on, and we will reply with what we would take on and what would stay with you.