Your Amazon channel doesn't have a commercial owner. And that is why you are not growing profitably.

Most leadership teams know Amazon is split across several roles within their organisation. Marketing owns product development and revenue. Finance owns margin. Operations owns stock. An agency owns advertising. A vendor manager owns the relationship with Amazon itself. Nobody would dispute any of that.

What's harder to answer is a different question: who owns Amazon as a whole, and what does that job actually involve?

It's not a coordination role.

Coordination is what happens now, in the weekly call where everyone reports their slice and nobody adjusts anyone else's. Ownership is different. It means being the one person who can see the whole commercial picture at once, and who has the authority to act on it.

What ownership actually means

Some decisions on Amazon can't be made well from inside a single function, because they need someone weighing trade-offs no specialist has full sight of.

Which products should be prioritised and get backed hard this quarter, and which require investment to be pulled back. When to walk away from an AVN ask rather than concede it. Whether to hold advertising spend on a SKU that's missing target ROAS this month, because pulling it now would cost more in organic rank over the next two quarters than it saves today. Whether finance's instinct to cut ad budget is right, or whether it's about to choke the one lever keeping the account visible at all.

None of these are advertising decisions, or finance decisions, or ecommerce decisions. They're commercial decisions that happen to touch advertising, finance and ecommerce. Someone has to make them with the full picture in view, not stitch together several partial ones after the fact.

Why the role doesn't exist by default

Ask why most businesses don't have this person, and the honest answer is structural. Amazon touches marketing, finance, operations and often a direct vendor relationship, but it doesn't sit fully inside any one of them. So by default, it gets absorbed into whichever function has the capacity, or it gets managed through meetings and reporting lines that create the appearance of oversight without the substance of it.

That's not a criticism of the people involved. Most of them are doing their part well. The problem is that "their part" was never designed to add up to the whole.

If Amazon were one of your largest retail customers, run through a single buyer relationship worth several million pounds a year, would you let it operate without someone senior clearly accountable for it? Most leadership teams wouldn't consider that a real question. Yet that's exactly how Amazon gets run in a lot of established brands: too big to ignore, and somehow still nobody's job to own.

It's tempting to assume the fix is more resource: another specialist, another agency, another dashboard tracking another set of numbers. That's rarely what's missing. Strong specialists doing individually good work don't automatically add up to a good Amazon business. Someone still has to decide what all of that good work should be working towards. Add capability without adding ownership, and you've just given yourself more people to coordinate.

The Amazon Vendor relationship makes this harder, not easier

For vendors, the case for senior ownership gets stronger, not weaker.

Amazon manages its own commercial position on your products closely. Net PPM, base terms, AVN increases, MDF, promotions, chargebacks: all of it is tracked and negotiated by people whose job is specifically to protect Amazon's profitability on your catalogue. That's their whole role.

The question worth asking is whether your side of that negotiation has an equivalent. Who in your business understands both Amazon's commercial position and your own, and is making decisions based on both, not just the revenue number and the terms you've been asked to sign.

Without that person, you're not really negotiating with Amazon. You're responding to it.

What this looks like in practice

We work with established brands that sell on Amazon. We manage their whole Amazon commercial operation - from strategy through to implementation, and day-to-day management.

One of our clients, when we first started working with them a few years ago was being managed under one head of ecommerce, along with their DTC channel. A genuinely capable person, but stretched across two channels that behave nothing alike, with limited Amazon-specific experience to draw on.

When budget conversations came up, the business wanted DTC to grow, so spend leaned that way. Amazon lost out, not through a considered trade-off, but because the loudest voice in the room was arguing for DTC and there was no equally informed Amazon case being made against it.

Amazon sales and profitability fell. Market share went with them. Only once the business felt that drop did it register how central Amazon actually was, by which point the same stretched person was now expected to fix a channel she'd never had the room to properly learn, on top of everything else on her desk.

That's when we came in. Not to add another voice to the room, but to take the ownership question off the table. We started with the commercial picture: what was actually happening on Amazon, separate from what was happening on DTC, and why. From there, we set out the priorities in two horizons, what needed fixing now to stop the decline, and what needed building over the next one to two years to grow it properly, and ran execution against both. The business ended up with one clear, connected answer to where Amazon stood and what to do next, rather than a different partial answer from every desk it touched.

Ownership, not another hire

None of this means every business needs to create a Head of Amazon role. Some should. Many won't, and don't need to. The ownership can sit internally, or it can be provided by a senior team from outside the business. What it can't do is stay split across a handful of good specialists, none of whom is accountable for how the whole thing performs together.

That's the actual test. Not whether your Amazon team is capable, most are. Whether someone can currently answer, without checking with four other people first, where Amazon stands, what's worth backing, and what should stop.

If the honest answer is no, that's worth sitting with before the next budget cycle, not after it.

Amazon, a commercial success, starts with someone whose job it is to make it one.

If you would like greater commercial clarity around your Amazon business - where the real opportunities sit, which products justify investment and how to grow Amazon profitably. book a call for a complementary review. Visit www.zealagency.co.uk