If you run a brand and you've looked for help on Amazon, you've probably met both characters already.

The distributor who promised the world, bought a container of stock, discounted it when it moved slowly and disappeared when you asked about your listings. And the agency with the glossy deck, the 18-month contract and the monthly report that somehow always found a positive angle, whatever the sales figures said.

Both exist for a reason, and both fail brands the same way. Neither one is properly on the hook for whether your brand actually grows.

That gap is why Orellana exists. We're an Amazon brand management agency in the UK, but we were built as a hybrid: part distributor, part agency, accountable like neither usually is. This piece is the honest version of why, including the bits that don't flatter our own industry.

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What the distributor gets wrong

A traditional distributor buys your stock. That's the relationship. Once the purchase order clears, their incentive is to move units, and the fastest way to move units is to cut the price.

So the sequence plays out the same way every time. They win the buy box on price. Other resellers match them. Your other retailers see the Amazon price and demand the same terms. Within a year the product is sitting at a price you'd never have signed off and nobody can tell you why.

Ask that distributor about your main image, your A+ content or the unauthorised seller who appeared on your listing in March, and you'll get silence. They sell boxes. The brand is your problem.

We've seen where this ends. One brand we took on had 27 different sellers on its listings. Twenty-seven. Not one of them had ever spent a pound on advertising or fixed a single photo. We got it down to two sellers, just Orellana and the brand itself, and the neglected lines grew 22% once someone actually owned them.

Agencies fail differently

The agency model has the opposite flaw. An agency doesn't buy your stock, so it carries none of your risk. It charges a retainer, and the retainer arrives whether you grew or not.

That's not an accusation of bad faith. Plenty of agency people are talented and care about the work. But incentives are gravity. When the money is guaranteed, the energy goes into keeping the client, not growing the account. Hence the 18-month lock-ins, the reports built to reassure and the strange fact that the recommendation is nearly always "increase the ad budget", the one lever that makes the agency look busy without costing the agency anything.

A brand owner once put it to us simply: "I've paid them a retainer for two years and I genuinely can't tell you what changed."

That sentence should be impossible to say. In our industry it's common.

The problem underneath both models

This is the idea our whole business orbits.

Most brands think their Amazon problem is a marketing problem. It almost never is. It's a control problem. Too many sellers. Eroded pricing. Listings nobody owns. Reviews scattered across duplicates. Ads pouring money onto pages that were never going to convert.

A distributor can't fix that, because fixing it slows down box-shifting. An agency won't fix that, because channel control is slow, unglamorous work that doesn't show up in a monthly PPC report. So the one thing that would actually change the brand's trajectory sits permanently in nobody's job description.

We built Orellana to make it our job description.

What the hybrid actually looks like

In practice, the model is simple to describe and hard to copy.

We take on a brand's Amazon channel and run it as if it were our own business. Content, images, A+ pages, the brand store. Advertising with a ring-fenced budget that in most cases never existed before. Distribution and pricing discipline. Removing sellers who shouldn't be there. All of it under one roof, with one party answerable for the result.

And we're paid on growth, not on showing up. If the brand doesn't grow, we don't do well. That single design choice removes most of the arguments brands normally have with their Amazon partners, because there's nothing to argue about. We want exactly what you want.

The results follow the model, not the other way round. A personal care brand whose flagship listing had been taken over by a third party saw sales rise 700% in eight weeks once we reclaimed it. A sports brand arrived with more than 50 broken and duplicate listings, and after we rebuilt the catalogue its rating went from 4.2 to 4.5 without a single new review, just from merging the ones that already existed. A certified product that had been losing to cheaper uncertified rivals broke into its category's top ten within a month of a proper launch.

Different brands, different categories, same pattern. Good product. Lost control. Everyone told them to spend more on ads. The real fix was taking the channel back first.

The honest bit: we had to change our own model too

Candour cuts both ways, so here's ours.

Orellana started closer to the classic distributor shape, buying stock and selling it through our own account. It worked, but we noticed the same tension we criticise in others: capital tied up in inventory is capital not spent on growth, and a partner holding your stock has a quiet incentive to prioritise the products they've paid for.

So we evolved. For most brands now we run the channel through the brand's own account. The brand keeps the cash flow and owns the asset. We do the work and get paid on the outcome. Less comfortable for us, better for the brand, and honestly better for us too, because the relationships last.

If your current partner has never once restructured their own model in your favour, ask yourself why.

What to demand from any Amazon brand management agency (UK or otherwise)

You don't need to hire us to use this. Whoever you're evaluating, put these questions to them.

• Who exactly is accountable if sales fall, and what does it cost them?
• Will you control who sells my product and at what price, or just work around the mess?
• What happens to my listings, my content and my ad account if we part ways?
• How are you paid, and does that payment depend in any way on my growth?

A distributor will go quiet on the second question. An agency will go quiet on the last one. Anyone worth working with will have straight answers to all four, and won't need an 18-month contract to feel safe giving them.

One more: ask to see a before and after they're proud of, with numbers. Not a testimonial. Numbers. If they can't produce one, you've learned what you needed to.

Why this matters more in the UK

A quick word on geography, because it shapes how we work. The UK Amazon shopper is not the US Amazon shopper. British buyers are suspicious of the cheapest option, they check you out in a second tab and they judge you the moment the box is opened. A channel run on discounting reads as disposable here, which is exactly why on amazon.co.uk price control and premium presentation stop being luxuries and become the whole strategy.

Most of the advice brands consume is written by American 3P sellers for American 3P sellers. Running UK and European channels from inside the market is a different discipline, and it's ours.

Where that leaves you

If your Amazon channel is tidy, priced where you want it, run by people whose pay depends on your growth, then genuinely, keep going. You're in the minority and you've earned it.

But if you're reading this with a listing you don't fully control, a price that keeps sliding or a partner you're paying without quite knowing why, the problem is probably the model you've been offered rather than your product or your marketing.

We don't do lock-ins and we don't chase. But if you'd like a second pair of eyes on your channel, we'll tell you honestly what we see, including if the answer is that you don't need us.

Send us your channel