Overview

A UK-based medical supplies distributor selling on Amazon UK and Amazon Germany, both via Vendor Central.

We took over the UK account in January 2025, before expanding the engagement into a full Amazon Germany launch in mid-2025.

Across 15 months of UK management and 10 months of Germany launch activity, both markets are now running at sub-16% TACOS, including a European marketplace built from zero on Vendor.

The Problem

When we took over the UK account, it wasn't obviously broken. Spend was going out, revenue was coming back, top-level metrics looked reasonable. ACOS was within range.

That was part of the problem.

The account was long-standing but not mature. Most of the paid activity was sitting on brand defence, bidding on the brand's own terms to capture demand that was largely going to convert anyway. That kept reported ACOS low, but it wasn't doing the work of growing the account. New customer acquisition was thin. The category capture and discovery campaigns that should have been pulling new shoppers in either weren't there or weren't given the room to do their job.

So the account looked healthy on paper but had effectively stopped growing. The infrastructure underneath the numbers needed rebuilding before any meaningful scale was possible.

A few months later, the client asked about Germany. They already had a strong off-Amazon business there, so the demand existed, it just wasn't being captured on the marketplace yet.

That was a different challenge entirely: new marketplace, no organic visibility, no review base, no ranking history, no existing data to lean on. It was also a Vendor Central launch with the catalogue still being built out across the launch window. That ruled out the usual "spend hard to force ranking" playbook. Born to Run wasn't available, so inventory flow was dependent on Amazon ordering rather than the brand's own decisions, and listings were going live in stages rather than all at once. Patience wasn't a strategic preference. It was the only option the model allowed.

Two separate problems. A UK account that needed restructuring around acquisition rather than defence, and a cold Germany launch that had to mature inside the constraints of Vendor Central.

What We Did

We started with the UK.

The campaign architecture was rebuilt across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display, with each campaign type given a clear commercial role. Brand defence, category capture and discovery were separated, budgeted independently, and judged against different success criteria. Brand defence was kept lean, enough to hold position, not so much that it was inflating headline ACOS while doing no real work. The budget that came back from that went into category capture and discovery, where the actual growth had to come from.

Keyword targeting was rebuilt around shopper intent. The question wasn't just "is this search term relevant?" It was "what type of shopper is behind this search, and what should we be willing to pay for that click?"

We also worked through the core listings, titles, imagery, infographics and A+ content, to make sure the new traffic had somewhere worth landing.

Reporting changed too. Weekly reporting became diagnostic: what changed, why it changed, what we were doing about it. Not just what the numbers were.

For Germany, the approach was different.

A new marketplace launch is not the same as restructuring a live account. In the early stages, the job is to generate enough traction for the listings to build relevance, conversion history and ranking signals. That job is harder on Vendor Central than on Seller. With no Born to Run, no direct stock control, and a catalogue still being built, every campaign decision had to assume the foundations underneath were still moving. The work was less about pushing the account hard and more about making sure that once a listing was ready, paid traffic could capture demand without wasting spend on listings that weren't yet stable.

That meant accepting a high ACOS in month one. The Germany account launched at 114% ACOS.

That is an ugly number in isolation, and we told the client to expect it. Trying to force a cold marketplace launch into a low ACOS target from day one, particularly on Vendor, with no Born to Run lever to pull, would have starved the account of the traffic it needed to mature. Anyone promising a profitable cold launch on a new Vendor marketplace is either underspending into invisibility or about to deliver no traction.

Category targeting campaigns went live early to bring in competitor and category traffic while organic visibility built underneath. Listings were localised for the German market, not just translated, reflecting how German shoppers search and compare, rather than copying the UK setup across.

We monitored the curve weekly. The first five months looked roughly as expected, ACOS gradually declining from 114% to around 60% as conversion data accumulated, but still well outside target. Then November happened. ACOS dropped from 60.1% to 31.1% in a single month, ROAS doubled, and CPCs started falling materially. That's the algorithmic inflection a Vendor launch is built around, the point where enough conversion history is sitting behind the listings for Amazon to start showing them to the right shoppers at the right cost. December held: 24.0% ACOS, ROAS 4.17. The decision wasn't whether the launch had worked, it had. The decision was whether to scale into the curve or wait another month to be sure. We scaled in.

The Outcome

In the UK, TACOS held at 14.5% across the full 15 months, with an ACOS of 33.0% and ROAS of 3.03x.

The gap between ACOS and TACOS is the part that matters. Paid activity was doing real acquisition work, at a higher headline ACOS than the previous setup, but the account was no longer leaning on brand-heavy bidding to flatter the numbers. A meaningful share of revenue was now coming through organically. Monthly ad sales grew 336% from January 2025 to the September 2025 peak. CTR settled at 1.0%, roughly three times the Sponsored Products benchmark.

In Germany, the account went from zero to €150k+ in revenue across its first 10 months. TACOS came in at 15.5% across the full launch period, dropping to 14.6% in Q1 2026. ROAS reached 3.04x, almost identical to the UK account, despite being a new market in a different currency with no existing Amazon history at launch and a catalogue still being built across the launch window.

The launch curve itself followed the pattern we wanted to see:

• ACOS fell from 114% in month one to 24% by month seven

• CVR grew from 6.6% at launch to 25% by Q1 2026

• CPC fell from €0.83 to €0.39 as conversion history improved

The strongest signal that the patience play worked is what's happened since. The Germany account has doubled its full year-one revenue in the first three months of year two alone. That's what compounding looks like when foundations get laid properly on Vendor, the curve gets steeper, not flatter, as the catalogue stabilises and the algorithm has more to work with.

Across both markets, TACOS is now inside 16%, with ROAS in the 3.0x range.

The fundamentals are now strong, so we can push harder.

Summary

The UK account didn't need more spend, it needed the spend reallocated from defending what it already had to acquiring what it didn't.

The Germany account didn't need an aggressive low-ACOS launch. It needed enough controlled investment to build traction on Vendor Central, and the patience to hold that line for ten weeks before the curve turned.

Two markets, two stages, one underlying point: most accounts don't fail because the wrong levers are being pulled. They fail because the right levers are being pulled at the wrong time, against the wrong target.