The traditional marketplace agency contract is built around an annual retainer. Twelve months. Monthly reporting. Quarterly reviews. Annual renewals.
It's a structure designed to make agency life predictable. It is not a structure designed to make your brand grow.
What the annual model rewards
Once an annual contract is signed, the incentive flips. Activity replaces outcomes. Reporting decks expand. Quarterly business reviews fill up with charts of impressions and reach. The conversation about "is this actually working?" gets postponed to renewal season — by which point you're already 11 months in.
Annual retainers are how marketplace agencies survive. They aren't how marketplace brands grow.
Why 90 days is the right clock
Marketplace platforms change faster than annual contracts can absorb:
- Amazon's fee structure shifts at least twice a year.
- Flipkart's category logic and BBD calendar resets quarterly.
- Quick commerce platforms iterate ad products on a 6–8 week cadence.
- Your own inventory position, margin profile, and category priorities change every quarter.
A growth plan that's locked for 12 months is, by month four, optimising for last year's reality.
How we structure the 90-day flywheel
Days 0–30 — Audit & Setup
Deep-dive on account health, catalogue, advertising, content, margin and competition. Defined success metrics. First listings and campaigns reworked. No vanity wins — actual hygiene.
Days 31–60 — Execution & Pressure-Test
Content, ads and ops run at full cadence. Weekly review. We pressure-test the strategy against real data, not the audit hypothesis. What works gets scaled. What doesn't gets killed.
Days 61–90 — Scale & Roadmap
Winning patterns get scaled across SKUs, campaigns and categories. Next 90 days planned with everything we learned. Outcomes reviewed against the goals defined on day one.
At day 90, the conversation isn't "renew?" It's "did we hit the outcomes we agreed to?"
Why this is harder for the agency, and better for the brand
90-day cycles mean we have to re-earn the engagement every quarter. There's no contractual cushion. If we didn't move the numbers, you can leave, and we'll have told you so before you noticed.
That's the point. It's how accountability gets built into the operating model — not bolted on afterwards.
If your current marketplace partner only reviews quarterly, you're losing one quarter a year
Book a growth audit. First 90 days, mapped to your category, with outcomes defined upfront.