An advertising agent that follows your stock and your margin
Updated · By Ecomsellertool editorial team
An AI agent for Amazon PPC is software that reads your ad reports, decides which bids, targets and negatives to change, and makes those changes through the Amazon Ads API within limits you set. Ours, built on your own accounts, also reads each SKU's days of cover and margin after fees. Bid changes within your limits run on their own; budget changes come back to your team for approval.
- Amazon Ads charges no additional fee to use the Amazon Ads API; you pay for your campaigns and standard account fees (checked September 25, 2026).
- Amazon's performance-based budget rules raise a campaign budget when a metric such as ROAS passes a threshold. None of the metrics Amazon lists includes your landed cost (checked September 25, 2026).
- Amazon's Ads Agent is free and summarizes proposed changes before it acts. To start, it is open to advertisers with Amazon Marketing Cloud and Amazon DSP access (checked September 25, 2026).
- Walmart Connect's ads APIs are open only to Walmart Connect Partner Network partners, with full-service or reporting-only access (checked September 25, 2026).
- Teikametrics adds 3% of ad spend above $10K a month on its Advanced and Enterprise plans; Helium 10 Diamond customers pay a 2% management fee on PPC spend run through Helium 10 Ads (checked September 25, 2026).
- We have built on Amazon's seller APIs since 2017, including rule-based ad automation for TRAKTOR, Vista Funnel and Sun Company.
Ad performance per marketplace, against the previous period
See Growth OS ↗What the advertising agent watches, does and sends back
Trigger: A daily run once Amazon Ads reports land, an hourly check on Amazon Marketing Stream data, and any stock, cost or fee change that moves a SKU across a threshold you set.
| What it watches | What it does within your rules | What comes back to your team |
|---|---|---|
|
|
|
Steps that follow fixed rules
- Days of cover against lead time plus safety-stock days, per SKU
- Break-even ACOS from price, Amazon fees and landed cost
- Step limits, floor and ceiling bids, and an account-wide daily spend cap
- Lookback windows, minimum click counts and run frequency for each rule
- Protected lists of branded terms and campaigns the agent never changes
- Saving settings before a throttle or pause, and restoring them afterward
Steps that use an AI model
- A forecast of daily unit sales per SKU from noisy sales history, which sets days of cover
- A language-model check of each search term against the product before a negative or new keyword is proposed
- Detection of unusual spend, CPC or conversion swings in hourly data
- A plain-English note with each approval request, drafted by a language model from the evidence
Many PPC rules judge a keyword by ad metrics alone: spend, sales, ACOS. They cannot see that the SKU behind the keyword has 18 days of stock and a 50-day lead time, or that a freight increase last month moved its break-even ACOS from 32% to 24%. So they keep buying clicks the business cannot afford.
The advertising agent we build closes that gap. It runs on your own Amazon Ads and seller accounts, joins ad data with stock and cost data per SKU, and acts only inside rules and limits your team sets. It starts from the rules your team already uses and adds two inputs that Amazon's own bid and budget rules do not use: days of cover and margin after fees.
What does an AI advertising agent do on Amazon Ads?
It does the checks a careful PPC manager would do every morning, for every SKU, and writes the results back through the Amazon Ads API. Amazon describes the API as a route to "automatic bid and keyword optimizations" and always-on budget optimization, and it charges no additional fee to use it (checked September 25, 2026). The agent reads campaign, target and search-term reports, the hourly traffic and conversion metrics that Amazon Marketing Stream pushes through the Ads API (checked September 25, 2026), and your inventory and cost data.
Each run ends in one of three outcomes: a change made within its limits, a proposal sent to your team with the evidence, or nothing, because no rule fired. Every change is logged with the rule that caused it, the old value and the new value, so anyone can see why a bid moved. Most steps are fixed rules; a few use a model, and the table below labels each one. The agent is one of the AI agents we build on top of Ecomsellertool Growth OS.
How does margin after fees change the bid?
ACOS on its own says nothing about profit. A 28% ACOS can be healthy on one SKU and a loss on the next, because each SKU keeps a different share of its price after fees and product cost. Stock is the other input: the case for throttling ads on SKUs about to run out, and what Amazon already stops on its own, is on our page about inventory-aware ad spend. This section covers the margin half.
Break-even ACOS is the share of the price left after Amazon fees and landed cost, before any ad spend. Amazon fees here means the referral and FBA fulfillment fees per unit, which Amazon's fee estimate for the SKU gives you. Landed cost means product, freight, duty and inbound costs per unit, which usually live in your purchasing records or ERP.
Break-even ACOS = (price − Amazon fees − landed cost) ÷ price
Take two SKUs that both show 28% ACOS in Campaign Manager. SKU A sells at $40 with $12 in fees and $12 landed cost, so it keeps $16 before advertising and breaks even at 40% ACOS. SKU B sells at $25 with $9 in fees and $11 landed cost, so it keeps $5 and breaks even at 20%. At 28% ACOS, an average ad-attributed order on A carries $11.20 of ad spend against $16 of margin, a margin ACOS of 70%. On B it carries $7.00 against $5, a margin ACOS of 140%, or about $2 lost on each of those orders.
The agent bids each SKU toward its own target ACOS, set below its break-even, and reports TACOS next to it, so your team can see when a SKU's ads are building organic sales and raise its target on purpose, for example during a launch. When landed cost or an Amazon fee changes, the agent recalculates break-even and asks your team to approve the new targets before it bids to them.
Which rules run on their own, and which need approval?
This is the guardrail table we start from. Read each row as one rule: what triggers it, what it changes, the limit it cannot cross, and whether a person approves it first. Your team sets every threshold and limit; the defaults are conservative until the change log earns your trust. "Rule" means a fixed calculation or threshold; "model" means a step that uses a machine-learning or language model.
| Rule | Trigger | What the agent does | Limit you set | Alone or approval | Rule or model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Low-stock throttle | Days of cover below lead time plus safety-stock days, with a shipment inbound | Lowers bids on the SKU's keywords and targets; keeps its top-converting exact-match terms | Maximum cut per run; floor bid | Runs alone | Rule, fed by a model forecast of daily sales |
| Stock-floor pause | Cover below the hard floor, or below the throttle point with nothing inbound | Pauses the SKU's Sponsored Products ads and saves their settings | Only that SKU's ads; other products in the campaign keep running | Runs alone | Rule |
| Restock restore | Inbound shipment received and cover back above the throttle point | Restores the saved bids and ad states | Back to the saved values, never higher | Runs alone | Rule |
| Sponsored Brands swap | A SKU featured in a Sponsored Brands creative falls below its throttle point | Proposes a creative that features in-stock products | New creative also passes Amazon's ad review | Needs approval | Rule; a language model drafts the note |
| Margin ceiling | ACOS above the SKU's break-even over the lookback window | Lowers the bid toward the SKU's target ACOS | Minimum clicks before acting; maximum step per run; floor bid | Runs alone | Rule, using price, fees and landed cost |
| Headroom scale-up | ACOS well under the SKU's target and cover above twice the lead time | Raises bids toward the target | Ceiling bid per target; account-wide daily spend cap | Bids alone; any budget increase needs approval | Rule |
| Budget move | Budget freed by throttled SKUs while deep-stock campaigns run out of budget early | Proposes moving budget between campaigns, with the numbers | The account-wide daily cap is never exceeded | Needs approval | Rule; a language model drafts the note |
| Wasted search terms | A search term passes your click threshold with no sale | Adds it as a negative exact match in that ad group | Branded and protected terms are never negated | Alone when the relevance check is clear; unclear terms come back | Model relevance check, then rule |
| Cost or fee change | Landed cost or an Amazon fee estimate moves break-even by more than the tolerance you set | Recalculates break-even and target ACOS and lists SKUs now above it | Targets change only once approved | Needs approval | Rule |
| Unusual swing | Hourly spend, CPC or conversion rate outside its expected range | Alerts your team with the evidence and holds its own changes on that campaign | No cuts or increases without a person | Alert alone; any fix needs approval | Model (anomaly detection) |
The limit types in this table are ones we have shipped. The rule engine we built for TRAKTOR gives each rule a lookback window (today, yesterday, 7 or 14 days), a run frequency from hourly to weekly, and minimum and maximum limits on budget changes, and it logs the old and new budget of each run. The Vista Funnel rules attach only to the campaigns and products named, move keywords between positive and negative targeting, and log the target, rule, old value, new value and time. Both are rule-based automation we built, not agents. For more rules you can copy, see our library of Amazon PPC bid rules.
How is this different from a PPC tool or an agency?
Amazon already gives you a lot for free. Its budget rules raise a budget on a schedule or when a performance metric such as ROAS passes a threshold. Sponsored Products has had schedule-based bid rules in the console and the API since November 2023, and the console added event-based bid rules in January 2025. Amazon's Ads Agent is free and "summarizes all proposed changes before taking action"; to start, it is open to advertisers with Amazon Marketing Cloud and Amazon DSP access, and its page says nothing about inventory or product cost (all checked September 25, 2026).
| Option | How it works (quotes are from each company's own page) | When it is the better choice |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon's bid and budget rules | Free rules that raise bids or budgets on schedules, events and ad metrics such as ROAS, click-through rate and conversion rate | A small catalog with steady stock and similar margins across SKUs |
| Amazon Ads Agent | Free; a conversational assistant in the Amazon Ads console that proposes changes you review, open at first to advertisers with Amazon Marketing Cloud and Amazon DSP access | You already run Amazon DSP and Amazon Marketing Cloud and want help with campaigns and audiences inside Amazon's console |
| Teikametrics | Pricing from $149 a month billed annually up to $10K monthly ad spend, then custom pricing plus 3% of ad spend over $10K; its platform page says it can "sync advertising with real-time inventory signals" and offers profit-based advertising across Amazon, Walmart and TikTok | You want a ready platform with inventory signals and optional managed services, and pricing tied to ad spend suits you |
| Helium 10 Ads | Diamond plan at $279 a month billed yearly, listing "Rules-based ad automation and dayparting", with "a 2% management fee on PPC spend managed through Helium 10 Ads" (Helium 10 pricing) | You also want Helium 10's research and listing tools in one subscription |
| Pacvue Agent | An agent in Pacvue's commerce media platform, launched April 14, 2026, that converts recommendations into "approval-based execution with defined guardrails"; at launch it covers Amazon Ads (Pacvue's announcement) | An enterprise retail-media team already running its ads on Pacvue |
| An Amazon ads agency | People who run strategy, launches, creative and the account day to day | You need strategy and creative handled, not only rules |
| A custom agent on your accounts | Rules your team writes, using your own stock, lead times and landed costs, on your own Ads and seller accounts | Your margins vary widely by SKU, stock sits across FBA and your own warehouses, or you want the rules and the log in your own systems |
Competitor details come from each company's own pages, checked September 25, 2026, and we are one of the options in this table. A general AI assistant is another route: Amazon announced its Ads MCP Server in open beta on February 2, 2026, for Amazon Ads partners with active API credentials (checked September 25, 2026). Through it an assistant can create and update campaigns and run reports, but it still cannot see your landed cost, your 3PL stock or your lead times unless someone connects them.
The trade-offs of tools against an owned system are laid out in our comparison with a SaaS tool stack. If you want custom Ads API software without an agent on top, for example a reporting portal or a bulk bid editor your team runs by hand, see Amazon Advertising API automation. If a tool already manages some of your campaigns, the agent can leave those alone and still read them for margin checks.
Which ad platforms and data does it connect to?
On Amazon, the agent works with Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display through the Amazon Ads API, and reads inventory, orders and fee estimates through the Selling Partner API. It also reads your warehouse, 3PL or ERP stock and your purchase orders, the same data our inventory and replenishment agent uses.
Stock rules only work if the agent knows which campaigns advertise which SKU. When we built the Truskin ads portal, Amazon's Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display reports had no ASIN column, so we mapped each campaign to the ASINs it advertises to get accurate spend and sales per product. The agent keeps the same kind of campaign-to-SKU map.
On Walmart, access decides what is possible. Walmart says its Walmart Connect ads APIs are available only to Walmart Connect Partner Network (WCPN) partners, who work on their advertisers' campaigns with either full-service or reporting-only access; reporting-only partners cannot create, edit or optimize campaigns (checked September 25, 2026). For IVCSR (Innovative Digital Sales) we built software that brings Amazon and Walmart sales and ad data into one system, with campaign management across both and rule management. For a new Walmart build we confirm the access route during scoping; without full-service access, the agent's Walmart rules come back to your team as recommendations.
What have we built for Amazon advertising before?
Sun Company is rule-based automation we built: it compares organic and paid rankings, moves a search term to negative when the product already ranks organically and to positive when it does not, automates keyword bids at night, and reports blended ACOS across Amazon DSP and Sponsored Ads. TRAKTOR and Vista Funnel added rule engines with action logs, and IVCSR added Walmart sales and ad data. For Amazify we built software whose margin-aware metrics engine computes margin ACOS per SKU and per campaign, with proposed fixes fed into an operator's queue rather than applied on their own. Below is one account's campaign screen from that build. It shows what the software does, not a result.
Per-campaign ACOS, ROAS, CTR and CPC with period comparisons
Read the Amazify case study ↗Ecomsellertool builds and deploys this agent on your own Amazon Ads and seller accounts. We start from the advertising and reporting modules in Growth OS, connect your stock, lead times and landed costs, write the rules and limits with your team, and run every rule in approval mode until you decide which ones may act alone.
Who owns the rules, the data and the code?
You do not rent the rules from us. The agent runs on your own Amazon Ads and seller accounts, and its rules, thresholds and change log are your data. You keep your accounts, your data and the custom code we build; the Growth OS base is licensed to you. If you stop working with us, your accounts, data and custom code stay with you; the Growth OS base continues under its license terms. We never buy your inventory or sell under our own accounts: you stay the seller.
The agent works only through the official APIs on accounts you authorize, and it is designed to follow Amazon's Agent Policy. Budget changes, new targets and anything unusual come back to a person on your team with the evidence and a proposed next step. Every change the agent makes is in the log, so your team or your agency can review it, reverse it or tighten the rule behind it.
Where should you start?
Start with the free 24-hour diagnostic. You connect Amazon with Login with Amazon, no password is shared, and you get a report within 24 hours of connecting, on business days. We only read data; we never change listings, prices, stock or ads. The report shows where your account has operations gaps, which tells us which rules to set up first. If you already know you want the agent, schedule a call and we will map your rules with the people who set bids today.
Frequently asked questions
Will an AI advertising agent lower our total ad spend?
Not necessarily, and we do not promise a number. The agent stops spend that your stock or margin cannot support, such as bids on a SKU about to run out or targets above break-even. It can also raise bids on deep-stock SKUs with margin headroom, so total spend may go up while the share spent on losing or thin SKUs goes down.
Can we start with the agent only making recommendations?
Yes. Any rule can be set to come back to your team for approval instead of acting. You can run every rule that way first, compare the proposals with what your team would have done, and then choose which rules may act on their own within their limits.
Does the agent replace our PPC manager or agency?
No. It runs the repetitive checks your rules describe and keeps a log of every change. Strategy, launches, creative, new campaign structures and budget decisions stay with people, whether that is your in-house team or an agency. Agencies can work from the same log and approval queue.
Can the agent run alongside Helium 10, Teikametrics or Pacvue?
Yes, as long as each system manages different campaigns. Two systems changing the same bids undo each other's work, so we either split campaigns between them or set the agent to recommendations only on campaigns another tool manages. The agent can still read every campaign for reporting and margin checks.
What access does the agent need?
Authorization for your Amazon Ads profiles through Login with Amazon, SP-API authorization for inventory, orders and fee estimates, and your landed costs and lead times from your purchasing data or ERP. Nobody shares a password. On Walmart, the Walmart Connect ads APIs are open only to Walmart Connect Partner Network partners, so what the agent can change depends on the access route we confirm during scoping.
Does it work with Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display?
Yes for reporting and for bid and budget changes, which the Amazon Ads API supports. Stock rules need to know which products each campaign advertises, so the agent keeps a campaign-to-SKU map. A Sponsored Brands creative that features a low-stock SKU is swapped only after your team approves the new creative.
How is a custom advertising agent priced?
Each agent is scoped in an architecture doc with a fixed price and a go-live date before work starts. Your ad spend and campaign costs are billed by Amazon or Walmart as usual.
