Most guides to Amazon aggregators are still describing 2021. The funding totals, the buyer lists, the multiples they quote. None of it survived 2024.
This covers what aggregators actually do, which ones still write cheques, what your brand is worth now, how offer structure quietly moved risk onto sellers, and what to fix before you take the call.
How this was put together:
- Buyer status and acquisition criteria checked against current acquirer lists, not recycled from funding-boom coverage
- Multiples given as ranges by revenue band and channel mix, because a single headline multiple is the most misleading number in this category
- Deal structure described the way offers are written now, including earnout terms that barely existed four years ago
Disclosure: Xneeti manages Amazon accounts, including brands getting ready to sell. Everything here applies whether you work with us or not.
By the end you will know whether selling makes sense this year, and what your brand would need to fix to attract a serious offer.
What an Amazon aggregator actually is
An aggregator raises institutional money, buys profitable third-party Amazon brands, and runs them together under one operating team. It builds nothing from scratch.
The bet was simple. Buy a brand at three times earnings, run better advertising and tighter sourcing, and the same brand becomes worth more than you paid.
Almost every buyer wants FBA and private label. FBA means Amazon already handles storage, shipping and returns, so the buyer inherits a supply chain that mostly runs itself. Private label means the brand and the supplier relationship transfer with the sale, rather than someone else's wholesale permission that may not survive the handover.
Worth saying plainly, because the pages ranking for this term blur it. An aggregator is not a broker, not an agency and not a partner. They are buying your business outright.
What happened to the aggregator boom
This section exists because the articles ranking for this keyword quote a market that peaked five years ago, and sellers still walk into calls expecting those numbers.
The mechanism matters more than the headlines. Aggregators bought on borrowed money at high multiples and assumed pandemic growth rates would hold. Then integration turned out to cost far more attention than anyone had budgeted, growth normalised after 2022, and the cost of the debt behind every purchase went up at the same time.
For sellers the result is fewer buyers, harder diligence, and a smaller share of the price landing on closing day.
Good brands still sell well. The buyers just changed, and more of them now sit outside the aggregator category entirely.
Who is still buying Amazon brands in 2026
Ranking the top five aggregators is close to pointless when the list turns over every few quarters. What lasts is knowing which type of buyer fits a brand your size.
Razor Group is the largest remaining buyer after absorbing Perch. Thrasio, SellerX, Berlin Brands Group and Essor are still acquiring, though selectively and inside specific categories.
Here is the part most sellers miss. An aggregator is now one bidder, not the market. In plenty of categories a strategic buyer will pay more for the same brand.
Three questions before you talk terms with any of them:
- When did you last close a deal, and how many have you completed in the past twelve months?
- What share of your earnouts have paid out in full, and can I speak to a founder you acquired?
- How is the acquisition funded, because an unpaid earnout from a distressed buyer is a real outcome and not a hypothetical one
What your Amazon brand is actually worth
Every offer rests on one of two earnings figures. Comparing a multiple on one against a multiple on the other is the fastest way to misread an offer, and sellers do it constantly.
SDE is the bigger number. So a 3x SDE offer and a 3x EBITDA offer are not the same offer, and the second one is usually worth more.
Look at the two middle rows. That is the same profit priced differently, and the only variable is channel mix. Revenue that survives an Amazon suspension is worth more than revenue that does not, and every buyer prices that gap whether they say so or not.
What moves your multiple up:
- Twenty-four months of stable or growing sales, with no pandemic-era peak the brand never got back to
- Profit spread across three to five SKUs, since single-ASIN concentration gets discounted hard by every buyer type
- Margins above 20%, because 15% is treated as the floor rather than a good number
- A registered trademark, Brand Registry, and an account with no suspensions, IP complaints or review manipulation history
- Supplier diversity and documented tariff exposure, now a standard diligence question rather than a footnote
Treat ranges as a starting point, not a quote. Category, growth direction and deal structure move the final number more than the headline multiple does.
How the deal is structured, and where the risk sits
The multiple gets all the attention. The structure decides what reaches your bank account, and the two have drifted a long way apart since 2021.
The structural problem with earnouts is one no competing page says out loud. An earnout pays on performance you no longer control. After closing, the buyer sets the advertising budget, the price and the reorder timing, and each of those moves your final payment without anybody acting in bad faith.
Negotiate minimum advertising spend, inventory commitments and pricing floors into the agreement, not into the conversation.
An earnout is also a bet on the buyer still being solvent in two years. Recent history says that is not automatic.
Compare offers on cash at closing first, then on the realistic earnout rather than the maximum one. A lower headline number with more certainty behind it often pays more in the end.
The acquisition process, step by step
Expect sixty to ninety days from signed letter of intent to funds in your account, and longer with a private equity buyer.
Diligence goes deeper into advertising than most sellers expect. Buyers ask for twenty-four months of campaign-level history, placement and search term reports, and the spend behind every ranking SKU. If you have never pulled those exports yourself, our walkthrough of the Amazon Ads Dashboard covers where they sit in the console.
Exclusivity is the moment your leverage disappears, and two of the three articles ranking for this term barely mention it. Signing the letter of intent usually means you stop talking to other buyers while this one spends two months deciding. They can still walk away at the end of it.
So run your competitive process before the letter of intent. After it, you have one buyer and they know it.
Expect an attempt to renegotiate during diligence. Clean books are the only real defence against a reduced offer at week seven.
Going direct, using a broker, or running a process
Three routes exist. The right one depends less on the fee than on whether you can create genuine competition for your brand.
Competition is the actual variable. An unsolicited offer with a three-day deadline is a negotiating structure, not a compliment. Without a second bidder in the room you have no way of knowing what the number should have been, and the buyer is counting on that.
Direct deals are not always worse. They close faster, and on a small deal a saved fee is real money.
How to prepare your brand in the twelve months before you sell
You cannot control the multiple environment. You can control what you hand a buyer, and that decides which end of the range you land in.
Advertising is the least understood item on that list. A buyer reads your ad spend the same way they read your margin. Profit propped up by heavy spend to hold rank gets discounted, because the headroom they are paying for has already been spent. Our Amazon PPC Ads guide covers the campaign structure side, and if you want to sanity-check whether your spend is high for the category, the breakdown of Amazon Ads Cost has current CPC and budget benchmarks.
The flip side is worth more than most sellers realise. Untouched growth levers are part of what a buyer is paying for, and a brand that has never run video or never tested the full Amazon Sponsored Ads range still has obvious upside on the table. Our guides to Amazon Video Ads and Amazon Ads for Scaling Brands cover the two levers buyers most often name in diligence.
Owner dependence is the quiet one. If every bid change and reorder decision runs through you, the buyer is acquiring a job. Documented processes, a team, an agency, or Amazon Ads Software doing the daily work all move the brand closer to turnkey, and turnkey prices higher.
Twelve months is the useful window. Buyers look at trailing twelve-month performance, so a change made in month ten barely registers in the numbers they underwrite.
Every item on that list also makes the business better to own. Preparing to sell and then deciding not to is a perfectly reasonable outcome.
When selling to an aggregator is the wrong move
Sometimes the right answer is not to sell. No page competing for this keyword will tell you that, because most of them are written by people who make money when you do.
Burnout drives more exits than valuation does, and it is the worst reason to accept a low offer. Being tired of Seller Central is an operating problem, not a valuation event. Sellers who sell at the bottom of the range usually do it because they wanted the work to stop, not because the price was right.
If the brand is sound and the exhaustion is with the daily work, the question is who runs it rather than who buys it. Our comparison of Amazon Ads Management Services and the shortlist of Amazon Product Ads Management Companies are both reasonable places to start that search.
How Xneeti helps you exit at a higher multiple
The items that move a multiple are margin, advertising efficiency, rank stability and inventory reliability. Those are the same items Xneeti works on every hour the account is live.
Bids adjusted by hour, day and placement against your own conversion patterns. N-gram analysis pulling wasted spend out of search terms before it shows up in an ACoS report. A reorder flagged against supplier lead time before the stockout, not after it. Listings updated for A10 and for Rufus, which now decides what a growing share of shoppers even see.
Across managed accounts that has averaged a 50% reduction in TACoS and 30% revenue growth. Falling TACoS with rank intact is exactly the pattern diligence rewards.
Every account also gets a dedicated strategist who owns it and reviews what the AI does. Amazon Ads Verified Partner and Amazon SPN Partner, built by ex-Amazon and ex-Google teams, managing 80+ accounts.
If you are twelve months out from an exit, the work starts now. Book a demo and we will show you what your advertising and inventory data looks like to a buyer.
