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01 · At a glance
The engagement in one panel
- Client
- Veloforte
- Sector
- Natural sports nutrition: energy bars, gels, chews, protein, hydration, supplements
- Market
- Amazon UK
- Business model change
- Distributor-led Amazon Vendor Central (1P) back to a brand-owned Seller Central FBA account (3P), rebuilt by Lmo7
- Engagement
- Lmo7 Amazon Account Management: Retail Ops, Content and Ads
- Team
- Stephen Honight, Founder, Lmo7. Sheldon de Souza, Head of Amazon, Lmo7
- Client lead
- Steve Marson, Managing Director, Veloforte
- Status
- Ongoing monthly retainer
02 · The situation
Three phases on Amazon, and a decision to come back
Veloforte started on Amazon UK the way most challenger brands do, with their own Seller Central account. They then moved to selling through a distributor under Amazon's vendor model. On paper that took the work off a small founder-led team: someone else held stock, raised invoices and dealt with Amazon.
What the arrangement also took was control of the channel: the price, the listing content and sight of the brand's own performance data now sat with someone else. The decision to come back as a seller followed. The open question was who would rebuild and run the account, because the team did not want to become Amazon specialists to do it.
03 · Why brands go vendor, and why they come back
Why brands move from Amazon Vendor Central back to Seller Central
On Amazon Vendor Central (1P), Amazon or a distributor buys the stock and sells it as the retailer. The brand supplies product against purchase orders and has limited say over the retail price, the listing content and the promotional calendar. For a small brand the appeal is obvious: less admin, no inventory to manage on the platform, someone else handling the Amazon relationship.
On Amazon Seller Central (3P, FBA), the brand is the retailer. It sets the price, owns the listing through Brand Registry, sees its own sales and traffic data, controls advertising and keeps the retail margin. It also takes on the work: inventory ownership and forecasting, inbound shipments, settlement reconciliation, account health and the day-to-day catalogue operations that keep listings live and buyable.
Brands come back to seller when the loss of control starts costing more than the admin it saved. For a founder-led brand the practical answer is often a seller account run by a specialist partner, which is the model Veloforte chose.
04 · What Lmo7 did
Rebuild the account, then run the channel
The engagement had six objectives, agreed with Veloforte at the start: find new customers on Amazon; rebuild every listing so it is complete, correctly structured and written for Rufus recall; build out A+ Content; redesign the Brand Store; run ads to beat the ROAS target; launch the new lines; and leave the catalogue ready for the next phase of AI discovery, where shoppers ask an assistant rather than type a search.
Catalogue audit first
Before writing a word of copy, we audited the whole catalogue against Amazon's own data: every SKU, every variation family, every backend attribute. On a rebuilt account the listings carry the history of everything that has been done to them before, and Rufus (Alexa for Shopping) reads that data as it stands. Bars with the wrong unit of measure, chews recorded by piece count rather than weight, gels sitting in the wrong browse node, families whose children had drifted apart on the storefront: none of that is visible to a shopper, and all of it decides whether Amazon's systems can understand the product well enough to recommend it. The audit produced a prioritised fix list ranked by revenue at risk, and that list set the order of everything that followed.
Retail operations and catalogue health
Variation families rebuilt so each flavour and pack size sits under the right parent and shows as one listing. Unit counts, weights and structured attributes corrected so pricing per kilogram displays correctly and Amazon's category rules are met. Duplicate and orphaned listings cleared. Supplement listings brought in line with the health claims Amazon and UK regulation allow. Seller Support cases run through to resolution rather than left open. This is unglamorous work and it is the foundation of Rufus recall: the assistant answers from the attributes, and if the attributes are wrong or missing the product does not come up.
Content, A+ and Brand Store
Titles and item highlights rebuilt to Amazon's 75-character title limit introduced in July 2026. Bullets rewritten for two readers, the shopper and Rufus, so the questions an athlete asks about carbohydrate, sodium, caffeine and certification are answered in the listing itself. Q&A seeded with the questions Rufus is asked most about the category. A+ Content built out across the range and the Brand Store redesigned around how Veloforte's customers shop: by sport, by moment and by product type. Every piece was written to be lifted cleanly by a machine as well as read by a person, so the same content does two jobs.
Ready for the next phase of AI discovery
Rufus is the first AI assistant to sit between Veloforte and its Amazon shoppers. It will not be the last: Alexa for Shopping, ChatGPT and the agents that buy on a shopper's behalf all draw on the same product data. The rebuild was done with that in mind. Structured attributes complete and correct, one clean variation family per product, bullets that state carbohydrate, sodium, caffeine and certification as facts an assistant can quote and Q&A that answers the question before it is asked. That is what AI recall depends on, and it is why the catalogue audit came before everything else.
Advertising built around demand shape
Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands managed weekly, structured around Veloforte's seasonal demand curve and with new-customer acquisition as an explicit objective alongside efficiency. Blended ROAS from March to September 2026 was 6.3 at 15.9% ACOS. Efficiency ran higher in spring, with ROAS between 7.3 and 8.5 from April to June. It settled at 5.1 to 5.4 in July and August as spend rose by around half to fund reach. That is the intended trade when the objective is new customers rather than the cheapest possible sale.
New product launches
New lines including MagnesiumPro, Nero energy chews and the Limon and Rosso energy gels were listed and launched on the rebuilt account, with Vine enrolment used to seed early reviews.
Operating rhythm
A weekly call with the Veloforte team, a weekly written note on what changed and a shared handoff log so nothing depends on one person's memory.
05 · Results
What changed
| Metric | Result | Period |
|---|
| Blended ads ROAS (ACOS) | 6.3 (15.9%) | March to September 2026 |
|---|
| TACOS (ad spend as a share of total sales) | 6.6% | March to September 2026 |
|---|
| Organic share of sales | 62% | January to September 2026 |
|---|
| Buy Box won | 94% | April to July 2026 |
|---|
Read together, the numbers describe a healthy account rather than a rented one. Six in ten pounds of sales arrive without an ad, which is what a clean, complete catalogue does once Amazon's systems can read it. The listings win the Buy Box almost every time a shopper lands on them. And the ads that do run return more than six pounds for every pound spent while the brief is to find new customers rather than harvest demand that already exists.
Figures from Amazon Seller Central and Amazon Ads data for the Veloforte UK account, read September 2026. Ad figures can restate for up to 28 days under Amazon attribution rules.
"We'd been on Amazon as a seller before, then moved to a distributor and the vendor model because it took the admin off our plate. What it also took was control: of our pricing, our content and our own numbers. Coming back as a seller was the right call, but it's a lot of work for a team our size. Lmo7 rebuilt the account, fixed the catalogue and now run the channel with us week to week. Just as important, they've set us up for what comes next. More of our customers are going to find us through Rufus and AI assistants than through a search box, and our listings are built for that now. Before we made the move we spoke with five or six companies who all offered similar support services but despite some very strong pitches, Lmo7 stood out immediately with such a clear migration and growth plan along with giving us confidence in a changing world that they'd already embraced and started to exploit AI that we'd be in safe hands. Sales were ahead of our expectations quickly and we expect a long-term relationship to develop."
Steve Marson, Managing Director, Veloforte.
06 · What changed for the business
What a seller model gives Veloforte that vendor could not
Veloforte now set their own prices, own their listings through Brand Registry, see their own sales and traffic data and keep the retail margin. The trade is the operational load, and that is the part Lmo7 carries: catalogue, compliance, ads and account health, reported weekly.
The next stage is about using that control for the shift that is already under way: shoppers asking Rufus and other AI assistants what to buy rather than scrolling search results. That means keeping the catalogue data clean as Amazon's rules change, tracking how Rufus describes and recommends the range, widening Q&A and content coverage where recall is weak and launching new products into an account already structured to carry them. Each of those is only possible because the brand, not a distributor, now holds the account and its data.
The Lmo7 Agency - AI Search and Ads for Consumer Brands | UK-based | Serving Global Brands
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