A fractional Amazon director, and the questions to ask first.

The published offers agree on the shape. Chameleon Collective, which sells the model in the UK, says its Amazon managers work "typically one to three days a week". Fractionus says the same of ecommerce directors: "Most engagements run one to three days a week", with a heavier first month. The job inside those days is the plan, the numbers, and the decisions about catalogue, advertising and stock.

What none of the offers we read before writing this page says is who does the daily work. Bids, search terms, negatives and budgets move every day on an account of this size, and stock moves every week. One to three days covers the decisions. It does not cover the Tuesday afternoon when a campaign runs out of budget and nobody is in. So the first question for any fractional lead is a plain one: on the days you are not working for us, who changes the bids, and who do we pay for that?

Elite X Recruit, a UK ecommerce recruiter, puts a Head of eCommerce at "£75,000 to £110,000" in its 2026 salary guide, and says "London typically pays 15 to 25 per cent above national averages". At the exchange rate our pricing page uses, that band is roughly $102,000 to $150,000, before employer costs and recruitment. That is the salary a fractional director is priced against, and it is the reason the model exists. Our view is that a brand at £50,000 a month on Amazon struggles to carry that for one channel.

The part-time price is harder to pin down, because nobody publishes one. As of 2 October 2026, ITJobsWatch reports "not enough information available from job vacancies posted within the last 6 months to determine the median E-Commerce Director daily rate in England". We found the same gap for Amazon specialists when we compared agency and in-house costs: you will be negotiating a day rate without a reference price. That post sets our own fee against a London salary line by line, and the rate card itself is published.

Before anything else, settle what happens to the accounts. Amazon has said how it wants this done. An Amazon staff post on the Seller Central forums, titled "Quick Tip: Seller Account User Permissions", says: "All external contractor or companies that are not part of your company must be added as authorized partners. Do not add them as your secondary account users." The same post says "Don't share your password with other people" and to grant "the minimum permissions required for them to do their job". Seller Central's own help pages sit behind the login, so check the current wording on your account's User Permissions page.

In practice that means the brand stays the primary user, and a fractional director or an agency is let in, never handed the account. The same rule applies to advertising. Sponsored ads accounts and any DSP seat should sit under the brand's own entity, which is the ownership question we set out for DSP and one of the things an acquirer will ask about. A part-time lead who set things up in their own name has made themselves hard to replace, whether they meant to or not.

The offers frame this as inside against outside. Chameleon Collective puts it this way: "An agency runs your ad account from the outside, usually for a percentage of spend. A fractional manager owns the whole channel from the inside, profit included." That is a fair description of a lot of agencies. But the two things that matter are who is senior on the account and what they are paid on, and neither depends on the label.

Take the pay first. A percentage of advertising spend is a pricing model, and it rewards spending more. Our commission is charged on sales, on Ordered Product Sales as Seller Central reports them, so a bigger advertising budget does not pay us more. On seniority, the work here is founder-led: the person on the first call is the person who runs the channel, with no account team in between, which is the main thing a brand buys a fractional director for. The difference is that the same person also runs the daily work across five disciplines, with software watching the account between decisions and the judgement staying human.

It also works alongside a brand's own people. With MUUSH we guided the launch and briefed the internal team on the content strategy, and the account was profitable in under six months. And it is meant to last: the account behind our headline case study has been with Ted since 2023.

There is no day rate on our rate card. The fee is a monthly retainer sized by your catalogue plus a commission on sales that steps down as sales grow, so you are paying for the channel to be run rather than for days in a diary. The initial term is twelve months, then rolling. If you want a senior person for a few days a month on short notice, to set a plan your own team will carry out, that is a fractional director, and you should hire one.

Advertising spend, content production and Amazon's own fees are not in our fee. You pay them directly, so the fee is only ever for the work, and every number in it is on the pricing page in dollars as well as pounds.

Chameleon Collective says "Many brands run fractional until the Amazon P&L clearly supports a permanent leader". We agree, and the arithmetic is worth doing. Build Grow Scale puts the point where building in-house becomes economically justifiable at $15m to $20m in annual Amazon revenue, roughly £11m to £14.6m at our pricing page's rate. Below that, one hire cannot cover the job and a whole team costs more than the channel can carry. Above it, or once Amazon has become the business rather than a channel inside it, an internal team starts to make sense, and plenty of brands run one alongside outside help.

Whoever you hire, us included, agree on day one what you will hold on the last day. The brand is the primary user on Seller Central, and every outside person is an authorised partner who can be removed. The advertising accounts and any DSP seat are in the brand's name. The campaign and search-term history lives in the account, not in someone's spreadsheet. The weekly reports are saved where the brand can read them. And there is a one-page plan for the next quarter that someone else could pick up. If a fractional director or an agency will not sign up to that list before the first invoice, you have learned something useful.

If you want to see how your own account measures against that list, it is part of what the free audit covers.