Strategic Account Services (SAS) - Worth It?

Having had a couple of years worth of experience with the US and UK/EU programmes, can give you some clarity on the your question.

First, the EU programme lags behind the US equivalent by quite some ways, though this is not too surprising as it's the case for most things on Amazon selling - USA is the cutting edge, then gradually things are replicated to the rest of the markets. This is reflected in the delivery of the programme, the reporting and the features.

First, you'll get a monthly Business Review which is likely not going to tell you much that you don't already know - revenue for the past month, inventory performance, listing quality I find very useful, emerging topics / betas is also handy for being informed. One issue with this is that the reporting and data doesn't normally settle until week 2 or 3 of the month, so you're often discussing things that may be as aged as 6 weeks - a lifetime on Amazon sometimes.

If you're just going in to it for the 'Premium Selling Partner Support' (aka PSPS), you're likely not going to get good value for your money. It's still 'offshore' let's call it. A couple of new escalation paths will open for you - one being a Primary Case where you can escalate issues that have hit a dead-end elsewhere, the other being a third support option for creating cases - Help > SAS Support.

Unfortunately, both paths still have the usual problems with different Agents not grasping or understanding certain issues which may leave you even more frustrated than standard support paths, due to the expense of the programme.

As an example, we had a very positive experience having ASINs reclassified for GPSR attestation last year and had 100% success on some 50+ ASINs - the agent was calling with updates every couple of days, being very proactive in reaching out to internal contacts and taking extra time to explain some internal processes. This was a good outcome and made the programme worthwhile.

However, a subsequent case this year with an identical request but a different agent saw 0% success, with wildly different outcomes on identical child ASINs - some were 'attest' enabled and some were denied. This was very frustrating and didn't feel anything like 'premium' support. Weeks of explaining the issue repeatedly, referring to the old case, and clarifying misunderstandings resulted in extended delays and ultimately disappointment.

Your SAS / Account Manager representative can also pull levers that are not normally available, I think this would very much be down to your relationship with them and then dependant on their own relationships within Amazon, as well as be largely dependant on the type of support or insights you may need.

If you're not tasking them with requests, then you'll likely just get what others have mentioned - some keyword reports, ASIN opportunities and pricing info which is not terribly useful if you're a brand owner.

One last thing is that you'll get access to the 'Premium Services' (SAS self-service tasks) which can be pretty useful for requesting your own reports as well as the Listing Execution Services. The latter is useful if you've got problematic listings and you're worried that changing things may inadvertently get yourself a violation - eg if you get a parent ASIN deleted for some inconsistency and you may be hesitant to rebuild it, you can throw your file over to that team who will build it for you, albeit iit takes a bit of time. Then if anything does go wrong you are shielded from the policy implications, as it was completed internally.