Step 1 (days 1–3): floors, caps, landed costs and permissions in Setup
The first step with a Marketplace FTE is custom onboarding, because the role is only as honest as its inputs. In the Setup tab, with the ftes.ai team, the owner records the price floor per SKU, the sponsored-ads cap per marketplace, the landed cost per SKU that makes margin after fees a real number, the fulfillment method per marketplace, and the claims the listings may never make. The marketplace permissions are granted per account with the scopes the role needs and nothing more.
The baseline is recorded at the same time: suppressed listings today, Buy Box share on the top SKUs, ad spend last month, and gross sales, which will be replaced by margin after fees as the headline from the first review onward.
Step 2 (days 4–7): review the channel audit in the Listings tab
The second step is the channel audit, which the Marketplace FTE runs on connection and reports in the Listings tab. For every marketplace it lists suppressed listings with the failing field, degraded listings with the missing element, SKUs where the Buy Box is lost and what changed, SKUs advertised at a loss after fees, and inventory mismatches between the store and the marketplace. Everything is ranked by revenue at risk using the store's own sales.
The owner's job is to read the ranking, confirm the landed costs the margin lines depend on, and set the order of work. Suppressions come first by default because each one earns nothing until fixed.
Step 3 (days 8–21): approve fixes and the first bids in Approvals
The third step is the proposals in the Approvals tab, in the order the audit set. Suppression fixes come first: each shows the suppression notice, the failing field, the corrected listing drafted from product data, and the rule check it passed. Listing quality fixes follow. Then the first sponsored-ads changes: bids raised on terms that converted at a margin, bids cut or terms negated where spend produced nothing, each inside the cap with the margin of the SKU shown.
The owner approves, edits or sends back with a note. Send-backs become remit rules, such as a term that must always be negated or a SKU that must never be advertised. Review takes minutes because the evidence is on the screen.
Step 4 (days 8–30, daily): watch suppressions and spend in the brief
The fourth step runs daily: the morning brief in the Today tab lists new suppressions with the field named and a fix proposed, Buy Box changes with the cause, ad spend so far against the cap per marketplace, and inventory mismatches flagged before they oversell. Reviews and questions that need a reply appear as drafts; anything sensitive appears as an escalation.
The cap is enforced by mechanism, so the brief never reports it exceeded; it reports the share used and any campaign that was throttled to stay inside it. The owner sees the channel's state in a minute without opening a marketplace console.
Step 5 (day 30): the margin review in Performance and the autonomy decision
The fifth step is the monthly review in the Performance tab. Its headline is margin after fees per SKU and per marketplace, with every input stated: price, referral fee, fulfillment fee, storage, attributed advertising, landed cost. It lists suppressions recovered and the time each took, Buy Box share against the baseline, ad spend against the cap and the margin it produced, and the SKUs that lost money after fees with a proposal for each: reprice inside demand, change fulfillment, or stop advertising.
The autonomy decision follows the record. Suppression fixes with a clean approval record are usually promoted first; bid adjustments inside a range may follow; price changes, new campaigns and anything near a floor stay gated, and the floors and caps never move on their own.
What does done look like after 30 days?
Done after thirty days with a Marketplace FTE looks like no suppressed listings older than a day, a Buy Box report the owner reads with its causes, ad spend that never exceeded the cap and is judged by the margin it produced, and a margin table per SKU that the owner trusts because the inputs are theirs. It also looks like a remit that has grown by the rules the send-backs taught it.
Done does not look like a gross sales headline. The first honest margin table often shows a favourite SKU losing money after fees, and the review says so, with the arithmetic, and proposes what to do.