By Ted Gibson — RippleEffect
RippleEffect is now listed at number 8 in Nova's Best Amazon Agencies directory, a ranked list of 119 agencies, with a full review page covering what we do, what we charge and the brands we are built for.
Nova is an Amazon analytics platform rather than a marketing publication, which is the part worth knowing. It sits on top of a seller's own Seller Central and advertising data and turns it into the numbers most brands cannot get out of Amazon directly: profit and loss at SKU level, advertising performance, inventory and FBA position, BSR movement, search query performance, and portfolio views for brands running several accounts at once. It describes itself as the data layer for fast growing brands and agencies, and says it is used by more than 3,000 sellers, agencies and brands. Its directory exists because the people using the software keep asking the same question, which is who should run this for me.
The useful thing about the list is not our position on it. It is the shape of the field. Of the 119 agencies, 81 are American and 15 are British, and we are the second UK entry to appear. If you are a UK brand who has spent an afternoon reading "best Amazon agency" articles and come away with a shortlist of firms quoting dollars, working American hours and citing case studies from marketplaces you do not sell on, that ratio is the explanation. Most of the lists are US lists, and the search results do not tell you so.
Nova led our entry on price, which we would not have predicted. Their editorial calls us "one of very few entries with a rate card a buyer can check before a sales call", and across 119 agencies that is a low bar which almost nobody clears. Ours is published in full: a monthly retainer sized by catalogue, plus commission in marginal slices at 4% on the first £25,000 of monthly sales, 3% to £75,000, 2% to £150,000 and 1.5% above that, with a calculator so you can model the fee before you speak to anyone. That is a claim you can disprove in about ten seconds, which is the only kind worth making.
What a listing is not is verification. Nova labels the figures on our page as the agency's own reported numbers, "presented here as reported rather than independently verified", and that is exactly the right label. We have argued before that this market runs on self-published statistics quoted as if they were benchmarks, with no neutral source anywhere behind them, and it would be a poor look to make an exception the week a directory prints ours. So read a directory the way you would read any list, as a way into a shortlist rather than the end of one, and then run the three checks that actually separate the entries: whether the price is knowable before the sales call, whether the case studies name the client, and whether the person at the first meeting is the person who will do the work. The free account audit is where you find out about the third.