Amazon can buy you the first order, but if it also owns the refill you have rented out the only part of a Bay Area business that was ever going to pay for itself.
Delivered remotely for brands across San Francisco and California.
Almost every subscription brand in this city eventually has the same argument in a board meeting. Acquisition costs enough that Amazon looks like relief, the listing goes up, revenue appears — and eighteen months later a meaningful share of the recurring revenue the whole model was built on is sitting inside Subscribe & Save, where you cannot see the customer, cannot email them, cannot change the cadence and cannot stop Amazon changing the terms. That is not a growth channel. That is a landlord.
So the first work is arithmetic, not listings. Contribution per SKU after the referral fee, the FBA fee for its actual size tier, storage, returns and the discount Subscribe & Save takes off the top — compared against the same unit sold on your own store to a customer whose second order costs you an email. That comparison usually reorganises the catalogue: trial sizes and single units go to the marketplace where discovery happens, and the multi-packs, refill programmes and club tiers stay where the margin and the list are.
Then we run the channel properly, because a badly run Amazon account is worse than none. Brand Registry enrolled before anything else so you can act on hijacked listings and counterfeit units. A parentage structure that keeps reviews attached to the right variations instead of scattering them. A+ and Brand Story modules that carry the same argument your product page makes. Sponsored Products, Brands and Display judged on TACoS against contribution margin rather than a flattering ACoS number, and buy-box or suppression issues found by us before support finds them for you.
This metro's product mix pulls in three different directions and a single channel policy fails all three. Refill and supplement brands face the Subscribe & Save problem head-on, and the honest move is usually marketplace-exclusive pack sizes and starter kits that do not compete with your own subscription pricing, plus package inserts and registration incentives to bring the reorder home the legitimate way. Consumer hardware coming out of SoMa and Dogpatch has the opposite issue: Amazon has no reservation, deposit or staged-payment mechanic, so a pre-launch device simply cannot live there — the store runs the launch, and the marketplace listing goes live when there is stock in a box, with review velocity in the first weeks mattering more than the launch-day spend. And DTC wine, which is a real part of this metro's commerce economy an hour north, is effectively closed to third-party marketplace sellers in the US; club and allocation revenue stays owned, which is fine, because that is the healthier place for it anyway. We also say the quiet part in the room: marketplace revenue on a deck reads as traction and is worth less per dollar than owned revenue, and any investor who has looked at a cohort chart already knows it.
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a San Francisco brand’s realities.
Full service detailTitles, bullets, backend search terms, variation parentage and category nodes rebuilt across Amazon Seller or Vendor Central, TikTok Shop and Walmart. Suppressions and stranded inventory fixed at the cause, not resubmitted.
Brand Registry enrolment, A+ and Premium A+ modules, Brand Story and Storefront pages built to each platform's image and copy specs. Produced inside this service because the formats are fixed.
Campaigns split by intent and margin band, converting search terms promoted to exact, negatives maintained weekly, and targets set from contribution margin instead of a category average.
FBA against FBM modelled per SKU on size tier, storage, return rate and reimbursement recovery. Some products should never enter a fulfilment centre, and we name which of yours.
Catalogue sync, listing compliance, sample seeding to affiliates, and live and video commerce, run as a mechanic of this channel rather than as a separate affiliate programme.
SKU allocation, MAP and pricing alignment, marketplace-only bundles and pack sizes, plus the permitted paths home: package inserts, Brand Registry tools and platform-allowed follow-up.
We do not work off a rate card. Every San Francisco engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedListing quality, suppressions, buy-box history, variation structure, the fee and returns reports and ninety days of search terms. You get the findings whether you hire us or not.
Parentage, titles, backend terms, imagery and A+ rebuilt before any spend moves. Advertising a listing that converts badly buys traffic for whoever else is in the carousel.
Which SKUs sell where, at what price, in what pack size, agreed with you in writing. The marketplace should not be bidding against your own store for the same order.
Sponsored campaigns rebuilt by intent and margin band, with ACoS and TACoS targets derived from contribution per unit after referral, fulfilment and return costs.
Weekly search-term mining, monthly fee and reimbursement review, and the insert and registry mechanics that give a marketplace buyer a reason to reorder on your site.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.