There are so many behind-the-scenes steps that those who want to grow their Amazon business easily find themselves exhausted with all the tedious, time-consuming tasks.
That’s where virtual assistants are worth their pay and will most likely help you boost your profits even higher.
Even sellers who already use tools like Tactical Arbitrage find that the right virtual assistant can help you get the most out of your online selling efforts.
As an Amazon seller, we end up juggling many different tasks. Some days we feel like everything is a circus, and we have far too many difficult tasks to keep it all straight.
Here’s the good news:
You don’t have to do it all yourself!
To compete in the most competitive marketplace online, you’re going to end up wanting some help. If you’re looking to start a new business or expand your current one, then it’s probably time to consider hiring a virtual assistant to help you level up.
I know, I know. The thought of this often makes a solo seller feel as though they would lose control over their growing business by turning over any of the work to someone else.
But, the truth is that selling online successfully involves a lot more than simply listing an item and waiting for it to sell.
As scary as it may sound to think of handing over any amount of control of your online business, the truth is that hiring a virtual assistant to help may be the best thing to happen to your budding online entrepreneur endeavor.
Let’s start with the basics to determine whether an Amazon Virtual Assistant (VA) is right for you.
What Is An Amazon Virtual Assistant?
An Amazon VA (Virtual Assistant) is someone who works remotely to make sure your Amazon Seller account is doing great. They often take care of the most time-consuming tasks which vary depending on your personal business model.
A virtual assistant is not an in-house, full-time employee. They work as self-employed contractors. So, you get all the benefits of having an assistant without having to worry about some details and paperwork of hiring employees.
Determine what tasks are taking up far too much of your time, and hire a virtual assistant to help. Use their services for a few hours a week, or hire additional virtual Assistants to perform specific tasks. How you choose to benefit from the work of a VA is up to you.
The important thing to remember is that they are there to help free up your working hours so you can focus on growing your Amazon business instead of all the tedious tasks robbing your time.
Benefits Of Hiring An Amazon VA
An Amazon Virtual Assistant comes with many benefits to you when you hire them. Mainly, they take care of the most tedious, time-consuming tasks to free up your working hours for other aspects of running and growing your online business.
What you hire them to do will depend on what you need help with. If, for instance, your favorite part of the workday is shopping to find a good deal on merchandise to sell, then don’t hire a virtual assistant to do this.
If you feel like you’re spending way too much time listing or maintaining your Seller Central account, they can help with this.
If you are frustrated because you feel like you are spending all of your waking hours on product sourcing, listing, packaging, and dealing with customer service, you could use a VA.
If your head is constantly swirling with tedious tasks to the point that you never have enough time to focus on how you want to run your business, it’s time to seek the help of a Virtual Assistant.
If you have received a lot of customer complaints because of poor response time or other bad experiences, hire a VA to field these comments and head them off at the pass so they don’t happen in the first place.
Are you ready to grow your online Amazon selling business? If you feel overwhelmed with all the day-to-day workloads of listing and fulfilling orders, an Amazon VA can help.
Before you hire your VA, ask yourself:
- What takes up most of my time?
- What tasks are overly monotonous?
- What tasks could someone else do better than me?
Common Tasks That An Amazon Virtual Assistant Perform
The right Virtual Assistant can come alongside you and your business model and fill the gaps. Any task that is draining your energy or distracting you from the bigger picture can be handed over to a VA.
Some common tasks that Amazon Virtual Assistants perform include:
Product Sourcing Arbitrage and Research
One of the most important time-consuming tasks you do as an Amazon seller is to source the right product to sell. Getting it right from the start by choosing the best items to list will make a difference in success or failure.
Thankfully, there is software like Tactical Arbitrage that helps make this part of your work easier. But, even with this helpful tool, imagine if you had an assistant who knew how to read the data and run the Tactical Arbitrage program?
Every Amazon seller runs their online sales according to their own preferences.
Some have the VA do their product sourcing which involves more than running out to the latest sale to pick up some merchandise.
Training a virtual assistant to perform proper arbitrage can be worth its weight in gold. Tactical Arbitrage provides you with advanced matching algorithms that search more than 1,000 stores to source items suited for you to track, buy, and resell as well as helpful analytical data sellers find valuable in scaling their Amazon business.
Tactical Arbitrage software is easy to use or to train your Virtual Assistant to use so you can spend your time focused on running and growing your Amazon sales.
The software scrapes many online stores to compare prices based on certain criteria that you set. Customize Tactical Arbitrage to go to work for you.
Train a VA to use Tactical Arbitrage software to immensely scale your Amazon online arbitrage business. Have them look closer to access detailed data directly from the results page.
Add price modifications to get accurate ROI calculations and report back to you. The Virtual Assistant can also provide you with vital insights into selling trends and what competitors are selling so you can use the information to improve your business model.
With software programs designed to help sellers like you and an assistant who knows how to modify it for your business needs, you will literally be making money in your PJs while you sleep.
Some arbitrage, sourcing, and research tasks may include:
- Work with Tactical Arbitrage software to research items and source products
- Source wholesale products
- Look for trending products
- Research reputable suppliers
- Research products
- Research promotional and discount strategies for marketing
- Manage promotions
- Set up drop shipping
- Research competitors
- Negotiate with suppliers
- Secure sample products
Customer Service Tasks
There is nothing that can take the steam out of your efforts than angry customers. But, you don’t have time to spend hours on customer service. Let a Virtual Assistant handle this.
A Virtual Assistant is helpful in answering questions from your customers and handling all customer service tasks. They can also solve any issues that may arise that are all part of customer support duties.
With such attentive customer service duties, they are able to up-sell your products and get a feel for what the customers really want. With a VA who is a customer service specialist, you will be more likely to receive positive customer feedback.
Your Virtual Assistant can help with customer service duties through phone calls, live chats, email, or texting. They can also manage your social media accounts to promote products and connect with customers.
Some customer service duties may include:
- Answering customer questions
- Commenting on reviews, both positive and negative
- Replying to positive customer feedback and negative feedback
- Manually shipping FBA units
- Creating removal orders
- Locating past orders
- Confirming FBM orders
- Canceling FBM orders
- Refunding orders
Social Media & SEO
With all of your sales online, it’s important to have someone who knows what they’re doing manage your social media and marketing. This is going to require someone who understands keywords and SEO
Search Engine Optimization in order to boost your rankings and get noticed.
Some of the tasks that a social media manager may do include:
- Keyword research
- Setting up advertising campaigns and Optimizing sponsored ads
- Social bookmarking
- Moderating social media followings
Amazon Product Listing
Obviously, in order to sell an item on Amazon, you will need to first list it. Listing products is time-consuming. Let your Virtual Assistant handle this.
A Virtual Assistant can list your products which will free up your time to focus on building your business.
Part of successfully listing products comes down to a well-written description and professional-quality product photography.
Hiring a VA who is a skilled content writer or photographer will boost your sales.
Some Amazon virtual assistant jobs for product listing may include:
- Product creation
- Oversee multi-variation listings
- Optimize listings to boost rankings through SEO
- Product Photography
- Photo editing of product images
- Write product description and create titles
- Monitor product listings
- Monitor product pricing
- Enhance listings
- Research keywords to reach more customers
- Competitor analysis
- Product Research
- Specific market research
Seller Central Account Tasks
An Amazon Virtual Assistant is able to help with so many aspects of your Amazon account to make sure you keep up the standards.
Account tasks may include:
- Set up your seller account
- upload listing information to Seller Central
- Product review monitoring
- Feedback management
- Helping customers with order questions and customer queries
- Performance metrics tracking
- Generate reports using seller central tools
- Conversion and Profitability KPI tracking
- Getting your account reinstated if it has been suspended
- PPC & Ad campaigns
Enhanced Brand Content Creation
Amazon offers a feature called Enhanced Brand Content. This feature allows sellers to upgrade their listings with rich content.
When you hire a Virtual Assistant, they can help you get this setup and stay on top.
Inventory and Order Help
Hire an Amazon Virtual Assistant for order processing & fulfillment and overall inventory management.
They will manage your Amazon inventory to make sure it is always accurate and handle returns in a timely manner along with any refunds that need to be processed on the Amazon marketplace.
Here are some of the inventory and order tasks they may perform:
- Fulfilling orders
- Sending in FBA inventory and checking how many units are in FBA
- Downloading Amazon barcodes and shipping labels
- Tracking shipments
- Checking units received
- Order Refund Tracking
- Shipment Refund Tracking
- Managing shipping labels
- Coordinating logistics
- FBM management
- Coordinate inventory with suppliers
- Coordinate warehouse storage
- Fulfill orders
- Product procurement
Website Development
You might even want to set up a dedicated website for your online sales business. To do this right, you will need a web designer and a web developer.
Virtual Assistants are able to:
- Design the website
- Manage the database
- Site optimization
- Technical aspects such as setup of Amazon Web services environment
Amazon Virtual Assistant Hiring & Training Tips
You have options with where to find your Virtual Assistant to hire. Once they are hired, excellent training will be the most important next step.
Here are some helpful hiring and training tips as well as how to handle the interview process to get you off on the right foot without wasting valuable time.
Hiring
You have choices as to where to find a VA to hire. Just be sure to look for a potential hire on a trusted eCommerce virtual assistant service provider platform.
Some placement agencies weed out their applicants well to make sure they have gone through sufficient training programs that are specifically intended for Amazon sellers.
Make sure they are part of the Amazon Seller Provider Network or Amazon SPN.
Create a job post asking specific questions to weed out those who don’t seem to be a good fit and focus on the top choices.
Once you have a handful of potential applicants, arrange a video call with each one.
A few places to find some qualified help include:
- Amazon Service Provider Network
- Virtual Assistant agency
- A freelancer platform like Onlinejobs.ph, FreeUp, Freelancer, Upwork or Fiverr
- Hire directly
As you start weeding through possibilities, make sure the Virtual Assistant you hire has:
- Good internet connection
- Excellent communication skills
- Gives attention to detail
- Possesses exceptional time management skills
- Has great organizational skills
- Is able to follow instructions that fit with your business model
Expect to pay at least $3-$5 per hour if you hire from overseas and at least $15 if you hire someone from the states.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to find one person to do everything. Many sellers hire different assistants with varying skills to cover the bases.
Training Tips
The Number One helpful tip for training an assistant to help is to establish excellent communication. Layout everything from the start that is expected of them.
Be specific and make sure everything you communicate is understood.
The more intensive training you provide, the better.
- Make a training video that clearly lays out the important points of how you want the job done.
- Be specific. For instance, don’t just tell them to source products. Explain exactly how you want this done.
- If you do things a certain way, your assistant will need to learn how you want it done. Make sure you communicate how you want it done so it is understood from the beginning.
- Determine how you will track their time spent working and how and when they will be paid.
- Determine what holidays or vacation time off will be accepted. Keep in mind that if you hire someone from outside your country, their holidays will be different from yours.
Final Thoughts
If you’re looking to start a new business or expand your current one, then you might want to consider hiring a virtual assistant.
When you combine the help of a Virtual Assistant with customized software like Tactical Arbitrage, you will find that you suddenly have more time to focus on growing your business even more.
Get started today with the help of Tactical Arbitrage, a software whose purpose is to help Amazon sellers find arbitrage deals online or through wholesalers.