Common questions, answered honestly.

E-commerce Grand Masters is an Amazon-focused education and operations company. We help brands grow on Amazon in three different ways, depending on how much you want to do yourself and how much you want us to handle.

You can learn Amazon from us through our Academy courses. You can bring us in as strategic advisors through Consultancy. Or you can hand the entire Amazon operation to us through a Growth Partnership. The three options are designed so one of them fits wherever you are.

The company was started by three people who have each worked on Amazon from a different angle — one from inside Amazon itself, one from a major supplier negotiating with Amazon, and one as an independent brand selling on Amazon. That combined experience is what sits underneath everything we do.

Amazon, specifically. We're not a general digital agency and we don't do Shopify stores, Meta ads, or generic e-commerce consulting. We specialise in Amazon because it's deep enough and complex enough to be a career on its own — and because the people who work with us usually want real depth rather than a generalist.

If you need help with something outside Amazon — for example, a Shopify launch or a broader D2C strategy — we'll tell you honestly and point you elsewhere.

We work with brands globally. Between the three founders, we've handled Amazon operations across Europe and North America at significant scale, managed Amazon categories across the whole of Europe from inside the platform, and worked in executive roles across five continents. Whether you're based in the UK, the US, mainland Europe, or elsewhere — geography isn't usually a blocker.

Our three offerings serve three quite different people:

• The Academy is for founders launching on Amazon, early-stage operators building their first brand, career changers, and commercial professionals who want to learn the platform deeply. If you want to master Amazon yourself, this is the starting point.
• Consultancy is for founders, CEOs, COOs, and heads of e-commerce at established brands who are already running their Amazon operation and want senior input on a specific decision — international expansion, a repositioning, renegotiating with Amazon Retail, or rethinking your advertising model.
• Growth Partnership is for founders and CEOs of established 7-figure brands who want to hand off the whole Amazon channel to a senior team rather than managing agencies, freelancers, and in-house specialists themselves.

Because it's the clearest way we've found to explain how Amazon actually works. Amazon isn't a place where one lever wins the game. You're moving lots of pieces at once — pricing, advertising, content, inventory, reviews, promotions, organic rankings — and how well you play depends on how well you coordinate all of them.

Chess also makes the point that Amazon rewards patience and strategy, not quick wins. Most people who struggle on Amazon are trying to win with tactics alone. The people who do well understand the whole board.

The Four Pillars are how we organise everything we teach and everything we do in our engagements. They're a way of breaking Amazon down into the four things you actually need to understand:

• Pillar 1 — The Player. You, as the operator. How you make decisions, how you handle pressure, how you think about risk, and how you stay sharp when things get noisy.
• Pillar 2 — The Board. Amazon itself. How the platform works, how the algorithms behave, why it rewards some things and punishes others, and how the 1P (vendor) and 3P (seller) sides actually operate.
• Pillar 3 — The Pieces. The specific levers you can pull — profitable growth, organic traffic, paid ads, pricing, content, promotions, and so on. Each one behaves differently, like each chess piece has different moves.
• Pillar 4 — The Game. How you play the long version. Portfolio strategy, operational discipline, decision-making when things go wrong, and making sure the business keeps working as it grows.

Each chess piece in our framework represents a specific Amazon lever — a specific thing you can pull to move the business. We do this because it stops Amazon from feeling like a flat to-do list and starts treating it like what it actually is: a game where different moves do different things.

Some of the mappings we talk about publicly:

• The King is profitable sales growth. It's what you're protecting. Everything else exists to support it.
• The Queen is organic traffic — the most powerful piece on the board, because organic rankings compound and pay you for years.
• The Pawns are the levers most operators underestimate: content, pricing, promotions, portfolio structure. Individually they look small. Together they often decide whether you win.

The rest of the sixteen-piece mapping is inside the Academy. The short version for anyone curious: every piece matters, and you can't win by ignoring half of them.

Because tactics go out of date. What worked on Amazon two years ago doesn't always work now, and what works in the beauty category often doesn't work in household goods or supplements. A tactic list that was true last year becomes a trap this year if you don't understand why it worked.

We focus on the underlying system — how Amazon works, why it rewards what it rewards, how each lever affects the others — so that when Amazon changes (and it always does), you can still figure out the right move. This is also why we're sceptical of courses built by people who scaled one brand once. One case doesn't teach you the pattern.

They're designed for three different situations:

• The Academy is for people who want to learn Amazon themselves. You take the courses, you do the work, we teach you the framework. €1,495 for one year of access at the Q2 cohort rate; rises to €2,495 from Q3 onwards.
• Consultancy is for people who are already running their Amazon operation and want expert input on a specific decision or direction. We advise, you lead. Engagements start at €12,000 for a 30-day strategic diagnostic and scale up from there based on duration and depth.
• Growth Partnership is for people who want to stop running Amazon themselves and have us run it. We handle everything — strategy, advertising, creative, customer service, operations, reporting. You stay involved at the strategic level; we handle execution. We don't charge a retainer — we take a share of the operating profit we generate. We earn when you earn.

A few quick tests:

• If you're launching your first product or your brand is still small — the Academy. You'll learn more in six months of the course than you'd get from almost any consultant.
• If you have an established brand, you're already selling on Amazon, and you're weighing a specific move (going into Europe, restructuring PPC, defending against a competitor) — Consultancy.
• If Amazon is already a meaningful chunk of your revenue and you're tired of coordinating agencies and freelancers yourself — Growth Partnership.

If you're unsure, book a call. We'll ask a few questions and tell you honestly which one fits. If none of them fit, we'll say that too.

Yes, and a lot of people do. Many Academy students come back later for Consultancy or a Growth Partnership as their brand scales. Some Consultancy engagements turn into Growth Partnerships once the scope gets big enough that advisory alone isn't practical any more. The three options are designed to work together over time, not as competing choices.

Both, deliberately. We believe the people who want to learn Amazon and the people who want to hand Amazon off aren't competing audiences — they're the same kind of people at different stages. The Academy exists so people can learn properly. Consultancy and Growth Partnership exist for the ones who decide their time is better spent elsewhere.

Amazon Grand Masters School is the first course we've built — a comprehensive, self-paced programme that teaches you how to think about Amazon and how to operate on it, from first principles to advanced strategy.

It's structured around our Four Pillars framework, so you learn the operator mindset, the platform itself, the specific levers, and how to play the long game. There are over 200 video lessons, most of them between 7 and 15 minutes long, so you can make real progress even with limited time each week. You get a full year of access.

Pablo Lapeña, Luca Marini, and Daniel Arenas. All three of us built the curriculum and all three of us teach in it. When you take the course, you're being taught by people with combined decades of operating experience: Pablo negotiated with Amazon for 15+ years from the P&G side, Daniel ran Amazon categories from inside the platform, and all three have scaled real businesses.

The course follows our Four Pillars, each with multiple modules:

• Pillar 1 — The Player. Mindset, analytical thinking, decision-making under pressure, strategic thinking, and the specific habits of good Amazon operators.
• Pillar 2 — The Board. Why Amazon is the way it is, how its algorithms and flywheel actually work, how the infinite shelf changes everything, and the real differences between the vendor (1P) and seller (3P) models.
• Pillar 3 — The Pieces. Profitable growth, organic traffic, paid traffic, content and pricing, brand reputation — each treated as a distinct lever with its own chapter.
• Pillar 4 — The Game. Portfolio strategy (which products to invest in and which to retire), operations (finance, procurement, fulfillment, returns), analytics (the metrics that matter and the ones that don't), and decision trees for the hard situations — losing the Buy Box, a product unexpectedly selling out, a new launch underperforming, a competitor launching against you.

The full lesson list isn't public, but you see every lesson as soon as you enrol.

The course is €1,495 for a full year of access at the Q2 cohort rate. The price rises to €2,495 from Q3, so enrolling in the May 2026 cohort means locking in the lower rate.

There are three ways to pay:

• In full — €1,495 upfront.
• Instalments — 2 instalments of €747.50 via Klarna, at no extra cost.
• Scholarship — we run two full scholarships per cohort. If you genuinely can't pay, get in touch. Apply with one paragraph about why you belong here.

Because we think the people who would benefit most from learning Amazon properly are sometimes the ones least able to pay €1,495 upfront. Two scholarships per cohort is a deliberately small number — enough that real people get real places, small enough that it doesn't change the quality of who's in the course. We'd rather award two serious scholarships than ten half-serious ones.

Yes — a 7-day review period. If you don't see the value in 7 days, we talk. No forms, no red tape.

We talk through each request rather than running an automated refund flow because the course is built for people who'll do the work, and we want refunds to go to people who genuinely tried the material — not to people testing for free. In practice, if you've engaged with the course and it isn't right for you, you'll get your money back.

Yes. The course includes evaluations, exams, and tests across each Pillar, and you must pass them to receive the certificate. The certificate isn't a payment receipt — it's a verification that you've understood the material and demonstrated it. We treat it that way deliberately, because a certificate that anyone can get for showing up means nothing.

Yes. Amazon Grand Masters School is the first school under our Academy brand, and we're planning more. A TikTok Grand Masters School is part of the roadmap, and there will be more after that. We don't have public launch dates for anything beyond the Amazon school yet — we'll announce when we do.

Consultancy is senior advisory work for founders and commercial leaders who are already running their Amazon operation and want experienced input on a specific question or decision. You stay in charge; we sit alongside you, help you see things clearly, and give you our honest recommendation.

It's not an implementation retainer, it's not a monthly PPC audit, and it's not a generic "we'll optimise your account" arrangement. If that's what you want, we'd point you either to the Academy (for learning the tactics yourself) or to a Growth Partnership (for full operational handover).

The three of us lead every Consultancy engagement directly. You won't be handed off to a junior after the sales call. When you hire our Consultancy, you're hiring Pablo, Luca, and Daniel — the same three people whose experience you're paying for.

Most engagements follow the same three stages:

1. A scoping call. About 30 minutes. We'll ask about the business, the stage you're at, and the specific question on the table. If we think Consultancy isn't the right fit — maybe the Academy would serve you better, or maybe you need a Growth Partnership instead — we'll say so on the call.
2. A written diagnostic. Once we've agreed to work together and done the initial discovery, we give you a document that names the problem clearly, lays out the options, and tells you what we'd recommend. Written in the kind of language you can take straight to a board if you need to.
3. The work itself. Scoped to the decision, not to a retainer. Could be weekly check-ins for a month, could be a project over a quarter, could be ongoing input as you execute. When the work is done, it's done — we're not trying to manufacture reasons to keep the engagement running.

Engagements start at €12,000 for a 30-day strategic diagnostic and scale to €40,000+ for full 90-day transformation programmes. We don't publish a public rate card — pricing is scoped per engagement because the shape and duration vary.

For context: McKinsey charges €500,000 for an e-commerce strategy written by analysts who've never run a brand on Amazon. We charge a fraction of that — and we've been on every side of the table ourselves.

The way to get a real number is to book a scoping call. In 30 minutes we'll usually know whether this is a fit and what a reasonable engagement would look like.

The decisions where senior input genuinely changes the outcome. Examples:

• Expanding into new Amazon marketplaces — Germany, France, Italy, the US, and so on
• Repositioning a brand or restructuring your product catalogue on Amazon
• Renegotiating commercial terms with Amazon Retail if you're a vendor
• Rethinking how your PPC or DSP programme is structured
• Defending against a new, well-funded competitor launching in your category
• Deciding whether to build an in-house Amazon team or bring in an external partner
• Due diligence on an Amazon-heavy brand you're thinking of investing in or acquiring

It's a good fit if:

• You're a founder and your brand is already on Amazon, and you're weighing a significant move
• You're a commercial or digital lead who needs senior input before committing serious budget
• You're a COO or head of e-commerce with a team in place, and you want a second opinion from someone who has made the same call at scale

It's probably not the right fit if:

• You're just launching on Amazon — take the Academy course, you'll get more out of it
• You want someone to run the operation for you — that's Growth Partnership
• You want a one-off PPC audit — the Academy covers the tactics in more depth

A Growth Partnership means we run the entire Amazon operation for you. Strategy, advertising, creative, customer service, operations, reporting — all of it. You stay involved at the strategic level, but the day-to-day execution sits with us.

The thing that makes it different from a normal agency retainer is how we get paid. We don't charge a retainer at all — we invest the first months working on your brand, then take a share of the operating profit we generate. If the account grows, we grow. If it doesn't, we don't earn. Our revenue is tied to yours, by design.

The whole operation. Specifically:

• Commercial strategy — how you're positioned in your category, how you price, when you promote, whether to expand internationally, and how to handle Amazon Retail if you're a vendor.
• Advertising — full Amazon Ads across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and DSP where it makes sense. Bid management, keyword work, audience targeting, and making sure the advertising actually serves the commercial plan.
• Creative — main images, A+ content, Brand Stores, and video. Built from performance data and iterated, not designed once and left to decay.
• Operations — inventory planning, FBA inbound flow, case management when Amazon throws things at you, and compliance.
• Customer experience — customer messages, reviews, refunds, and listening to what customers are telling you so you can improve the product or the listing.

We don't charge a retainer. We invest the first months working on your brand, then take a share of the operating profit we generate — nothing else. We only earn when you earn.

The reason we built it this way is simple: a normal agency retainer pays the agency the same whether the account grows or not. That's a bad incentive. In our model, if we aren't growing your account, we're not making our upside either. Our interests and yours are aligned by design.

Specific numbers — the percentage structure, the baseline we measure from, NDA terms — get worked out in the scoping call, because every partnership is sized to the business.

The three of us set the commercial direction, sit in the monthly strategic reviews, and make the big calls. Behind us is a working team of specialists — category leads, PPC operators, creative leads, analysts, customer-experience managers — who handle execution.

The important promise: there's no handoff to junior people once a contract is signed. Senior thinking is part of the daily work, not something reserved for quarterly reviews.

Typical onboarding takes three to four weeks. In that time we:

1. Do a full audit of your existing Amazon account — what's working, what's leaking, what's at risk
2. Build a commercial roadmap for the first 90 days so you know what we're going to do and why
3. Transition each function — advertising, creative, operations, customer service, analytics — onto our team

You stay in the loop throughout. We don't do black-box handovers.

Full visibility. Specifically:

• Dashboards you can check whenever you want
• Monthly strategic reviews with a founder in the room
• Written performance reports every month
• Quarterly commercial reviews where we step back and look at the bigger picture

We report the way we'd want to be reported to — clearly, honestly, and with enough detail that you can ask sharp questions.

Yes. We've been running full-scope Amazon operations for long-standing partners for multiple years. We don't name specific clients publicly because we treat client relationships as confidential unless they've explicitly agreed to be named — and most haven't.

What it means practically: the playbook we're applying to your account isn't something we're figuring out in real time. It's something we've refined through years of operating real accounts, and you benefit from every lesson we've already learned elsewhere.

It's a good fit if:

• You're a founder or CEO of an established brand, and Amazon is already meaningful revenue — or you believe it should be — and you're tired of juggling multiple vendors to make it happen
• You're a commercial or operational leader at a 7-figure brand, and your in-house team has hit the limit of what it can do alone
• You've thought seriously about building a full internal Amazon team, and you've decided that a partnership with aligned incentives is a better use of time and money

It's probably not the right fit if:

• You're just launching your first product on Amazon — start with the Academy
• You want senior input but you want to stay in the driver's seat — that's Consultancy
• You want a one-off audit or help with one specific piece of the puzzle — that's also Consultancy

Amazon is what we do. If you have a significant Shopify, D2C, or retail presence as well, we're happy to have a conversation about whether a partnership still makes sense — sometimes yes, sometimes we'd recommend Consultancy instead. The honest answer depends on how big Amazon is in your overall mix.

Three of us, each with a different angle on Amazon:

• Pablo Lapeña was a Senior Director at P&G, where he ran the Amazon Europe commercial relationship for over 15 years, handling annual negotiations across 10 countries. Outside of P&G, Pablo has also built and scaled multiple 7-figure brands of his own, across Europe and North America. He knows Amazon from the supplier's side and from the independent founder's side.
• Luca Marini spent his earlier career in executive roles at P&G and Samsung, working across five continents. His focus is scalable systems — how to build e-commerce operations that keep working as they grow, in different markets, against different competitors.
• Daniel Arenas, our Partner & Main Advisor, was a Senior Category Leader at Amazon itself, running big Pan-European categories from inside the platform. Before that, he worked on iconic brands like Pantene and Braun at P&G. Daniel knows how Amazon thinks about sellers, because he was the person making those decisions on Amazon's side.

Because between us we've worked on every side of Amazon. Most advisors have sat on one side — they've sold on it, or they've bought from it, or they've worked inside it. We've done all three at the same time for years. That combined view is hard to replicate, and it changes the kind of advice we can give.

Pablo brings the perspective of the biggest kind of Amazon supplier — a P&G-scale operator negotiating commercial terms at the highest level — plus his experience as an independent brand builder. Luca brings the executive and systems view from P&G and Samsung. Daniel brings Amazon's own internal view. Put together, we can see a problem from three angles at once.

Yes. All three of us built the curriculum and all three of us teach. We didn't bring in guest instructors or licence material from other course creators. Everything in Amazon Grand Masters School comes from our own experience operating on Amazon.

Yes. In Consultancy, we are the work — clients talk to us directly, not to account managers. In a Growth Partnership, we set commercial direction, sit in the monthly reviews, and make the strategic calls; the working team handles day-to-day execution under that direction. Either way, you're not buying a brand name and getting a junior. You're getting the three of us.

We treat Amazon as one system, not a list of disconnected tactics. The things that actually set the ceiling on your business — how you're positioned in your category, how you price, how your portfolio is structured, how paid and organic reinforce each other — are strategic. The tactical work (PPC bids, keyword harvesting, creative iteration) is what delivers against that ceiling.

What this means in practice:

• We don't optimise for vanity metrics. ACOS targets, ranking positions, and review counts are all means, not ends. The end is profitable growth.
• We start with commercial strategy, not with tactics. Category positioning, pricing architecture, and portfolio decisions decide what's possible. Tactics deliver against that.
• We treat paid and organic as one system. They reinforce each other. Splitting them across separate teams is a common way to lose money.
• We take the unglamorous work seriously. Inventory planning, case management, compliance, customer experience — these aren't back office. They're commercial levers.

We think of PPC as one lever among several, not a standalone discipline. Specifically:

• Start from the commercial plan, not the ACOS. PPC should serve the business objective — growing share, defending a position, launching a product — not chase a number that looks good in isolation.
• Full funnel. Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and DSP where it makes sense, coordinated as one audience journey rather than four disconnected campaigns.
• Build to rules, not to intuition. Account structure, keyword harvesting, bid management, and audience targeting should work mechanically, so the results are repeatable rather than dependent on one operator's daily mood.
• Align paid with organic. Paid search and organic search reinforce each other. A PPC team that doesn't know what's happening with organic rankings is leaving money on the table — often a lot of money.

Creative is a commercial lever. It's not graphic design for its own sake. Main images, A+ content, Brand Stores, and video are built against performance data and iterated over time. The best creative on Amazon is creative that's been tested, measured, updated, and tested again. The worst is creative that was designed beautifully once and left alone for two years.

It depends on your category, your price point, your margin, and how much control you need. Both models are legitimate.

1P (you sell to Amazon wholesale, Amazon sells to the customer) usually suits established FMCG-type brands with strong margins and the scale to negotiate good terms. 3P (you sell directly to the customer on Amazon's marketplace) gives you much more control over pricing, content, and strategy, which matters a lot for most smaller and mid-sized brands. A hybrid model is often the right answer.

Two of the three founders have deep 1P experience — Pablo from years of P&G's commercial relationship with Amazon Europe, Daniel from the Amazon side — so we can talk this through with a specific view on your situation.

Yes. Alongside the Four Pillars, we've built a set of frameworks for specific problems — portfolio strategy, content structure, pricing approach, PPC account design, and decision trees for the hard situations (losing the Buy Box, a product running out of stock, a launch underperforming, a competitor attacking your category). These aren't published publicly — we teach them inside the Academy and we apply them in client work.

Amazon is changing quickly in how it uses AI — for search, recommendations, pricing, and on the seller-tooling side. Our view: AI doesn't change what matters most. The four things (the operator, the platform, the levers, and the long game) are still the four things. What AI changes is how fast the levers can move and how much of the execution can be automated. Operators who understand the fundamentals will adapt fine. Operators who memorised a tactics playbook without understanding why the tactics worked are going to struggle, because their playbook won't survive the speed of change.

Three things, really:

• Craft. We think operating on Amazon well is a craft. It takes time, practice, and care. This is why the course is deep rather than short, why we don't promise get-rich-quick results, and why we take the small things seriously.
• Accessibility. The skill of operating well on Amazon shouldn't be locked behind a wall of money. That's why we offer instalment plans and run two full scholarships per cohort. This matters to us, not as marketing but as practice.
• Alignment. When we're paid, we want to be paid in a way that means we win only if you win. That's why Growth Partnership is structured the way it is — our upside is tied to your growth, not to a flat retainer.

• We don't do hype marketing. No "10x your revenue," no "quit your job," no fake scarcity countdowns. If that's the tone you want from your consultant, we're not the right team.
• We don't hide conflicts of interest. If we think the Academy is a better fit for you than Consultancy, we'll say so. If we think a different firm would serve you better than us, we'll say that too.
• We don't hand you off to juniors once the contract is signed. Senior people stay involved at every tier.
• We don't name clients publicly without their permission. We have long-standing partnerships with real brands, but we treat those relationships as confidential by default.

Not currently. We've run full-scope Amazon operations for long-standing partners for years, but we don't publish the names or specific results unless the client has explicitly agreed. Most haven't, and we respect that. We'd rather earn trust through the credentials of the three founders and the way we structure our offerings than through logo walls.

No. We work strictly within Amazon's Terms of Service. No fake reviews, no manipulation, no anything that would put a client's account at risk. Real growth on Amazon comes from working with the platform, not against it — and most shortcut tactics eventually get accounts suspended, which is the worst possible outcome for a client.

Email us at atyourservice@ecommercegrandmasters.com. One inbox, all three reasons you might reach out — Academy enrollment, Consultancy enquiry, or Growth Partnership enquiry. We'll route your message appropriately.

For Consultancy or a Growth Partnership, the quickest path is to book a scoping call — either through the contact forms on the relevant page or by email.

We don't publish a phone number. Scoping calls and ongoing client work happen over scheduled video calls, and the first touch is always email. This lets us make sure the right person picks up the conversation — rather than someone guessing which of the three of us your question is for.

We work globally. Between us we've operated across Europe, North America, and further afield — 10 countries of Amazon Europe from the P&G side, Pan-European categories from inside Amazon, and executive experience across 5 continents. Whether you're in London, Madrid, Milan, New York, or somewhere else — geography usually isn't the problem.

English is our main working language, and we use British English in anything we publish. Between the founders, we also speak Spanish and Italian. If a specific language is important for your engagement, flag it on the scoping call and we'll sort out the right setup.

Pablo, Luca, and Daniel. We're not owned by a larger agency network, a holding group, private equity, or a media company. What you see is what you get — built and run by the three of us.

No. We're an independent company. Amazon doesn't own us, sponsor us, or endorse us. We've been on the platform side (Daniel at Amazon) and on the supplier side (Pablo at P&G negotiating with Amazon) — that's prior professional experience, not a current partnership.