Hire Virtual Assistants for E-commerce business

When you are running an eCommerce business, you may have enough questions as follows.

What are virtual assistant services?

What is the best place to hire a virtual assistant?

What do eCommerce virtual assistants do?

Where can I get a virtual assistant for eCommerce product listing?

When will be the best time to hire virtual assistants?

As a business person, it is not practical for you to spend maximum hours daily with your online store's backend requirements, even if the business is making enough money and profit. Hiring a virtual assistant for an eCommerce store gives you an extra pair of hands to tackle many challenging tasks and offers additional time to spend on more severe business expansion responsibilities.

The need for an eCommerce virtual assistant job is equally essential for start-up, developing, or developed online businesses. Generally, virtual assistance is a process where a remote assistant handles a business via a virtual medium. They can be located in any part of the globe, lending their services to businesses worldwide. You can hire virtual assistants to perform a variety of tasks that require specialized skills. An eCommerce virtual assistant is the one who can help you in dealing with your e-commerce business tasks.

Hiring an eCommerce virtual assistant is always a smart choice as it proffers numerous advantages.

1. Firstly, it saves a lot of time for the business owner; it spares you from hiring full-time employees to handle the online store.
2. Virtual assistants would be taking multiple companies' responsibilities simultaneously to be better informed, updated, and skilled at the tasks outsourced to them.
3. A virtual assistant can contribute best to the research and development of your e-commerce business.

What Can You Outsource to an E-commerce Virtual Assistant?

You cannot trust all the responsibilities of an e-commerce website into the hands of a virtual assistant, although he would help you manage some significant tasks. Here are just some of the functions that you can hand over to a virtual assistant:

Outsource Product Data Entry

Every e-commerce store includes a list of brands and lakhs of products. Therefore it is complicated to manage new adding products, existing product updates, discontinued products removal, etc. Once you commit with a team, you only have to provide a data source or your vendor portal to collect the product info. An efficient virtual assistant can help you with proper eCommerce product listing and management of your online store.

Ecommerce Order Management

An eCommerce virtual assistant can also support processing orders. They can make order entry, shipment, and invoice stress-free for you.

1. Capture the order
2. Order confirmation from manufactures
3. Let the customer know about the order status
   • Estimated Ship Date
   • Who the carrier is
   • Back-ordered items
   • Discontinued / Cancelled item
4. Follow up the orders with the manufacturer
5. Request tracking from vendors
6. Quality in service ensured by the following parameters
   • Ensure quality in service by catching any discrepancies in the order before it reaches the customers
   • Bridge the gap between client and customer to avoid unnecessary issues.
   • Follow up with the vendor regularly and update the client's system
   • Quick, Safe, and Effective service

Here eCommerce virtual assistant helps you to make your business more professional without any drawbacks

Inventory Management

Making inventory management safe in VA's hands with expertise relieve you from the tension of profit loss due to improper stock management. Monitoring stock levels, updating and highlighting available stocks on the website, and taking care of replenishing products, etc., can be outsourced to a virtual assistant in confidence.

Updating Website

After you set up an e-commerce website, it is essential to manage it consistently. With the help of a virtual assistant, you can ensure that the site is best at creating comfortable shopping experiences. To update web pages with products, images, prices, services, copyright dates, news, team members, etc., a virtual assistant can help with great expertise.

Customer Service

Having a dedicated customer service wing is crucial in providing a good customer experience and ensuring customer loyalty. You can hire virtual assistant to answer phone calls or emails. It saves a lot of money by not hiring full-time customer support employees.

Social Media Management

Social Media Management is an area that cannot be compromised for any E-commerce firm. A Virtual Assistant can handle the Social Media pages, reply to comments, promote pages, curate content, and perform other community management tasks.

Research for Product Price Market Analysis

Sell your products in different marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Channel Advisor. A detailed market search is a must. If you are processing Product Per Click, regularly research competitors' prices and product listing particularities, you can seek a virtual assistant's help.

When will be the best time to hire virtual assistants?

There is no rush to hire Virtual Assistants even before you start a business or immediately after you commence your operations. You will only get a clearer picture of when your business is executed. Within two or three months after beginning your business, you will know the areas you need external help and manage independently.

Here are some guidelines that could help you while hiring a VA.

• Familiarize yourself with part and parcel of your business so that you know what kind of help you need. It also helps you to give training to virtual assistants before handing over the responsibility quickly.
• When you feel like you could do more significant, more important things if you had time, that is the cue to hire a VA
• You should be in a position, budget-wise, to hire a virtual assistant. Even though it is cheaper than hiring full-time employees, you still need some disposable income to pay the VA. According to the present eCommerce data entry pricing structure, you can employ 170 hours VA from an outsourcing company at $600 to $700.00 for a month.
• You may not need a full-time employee for your business. Sometimes you would only require a few hours of help every day. Examine your business thoroughly and discern how much help you need.
• Suppose you are an already established business and are encountering overwhelming success or working more than 9 hours in your office. In that case, both these situations call for the assistance of a virtual assistant.
• For almost all eCommerce businesses, customer service, adding new products, catalog management, orders, inventory, customer management would be the areas that would require more attention and effort. When you have multiple areas that need help, get help for more essential areas before any other.
• After handing out the responsibilities, monitor them regularly. Scrutinize and make sure that you are benefitting from virtual assistant.
• Reduce your operating costs by avoiding unnecessary recruitments and placements of employees while outsourcing most tasks to VAs.
• Boost your online shop productivity by utilizing experts' service and clear the channel of profits for your e-commerce business.
• Expand into additional sales channels with efficient and enthusiastic eCommerce services providing the team with excellent industrial exposures.

How to Hire Your First Virtual Assistant

Just like hiring a full-time employee, you need to carefully screen the virtual assistant to ensure that he/she is trustworthy and right for the job. Document your process thoroughly and have a good grip on the topic to inform and teach the virtual assistant properly.

When you hire a virtual assistant for Social Media Management, Customer service, or similar tasks where you communicate directly with the customers, vendors, or partners, make sure that you provide the pre-approved script and canned replies for common queries scenarios.

For example, when the customer requests to know the status of an order or ask generic questions. The key to effective delegation is to research thoroughly and anticipate common issues that could come the customers' way. That way, you can give a prompt reply to customer queries and have a remedy to address the issue.

Ensure that your virtual assistant does not have to develop his response or solutions every time a customer raises a query. Write out these to the virtual assistant in the format: "IF X happens, THEN do Y."

Managing Your Virtual Assistant

Regularly review the work and make that it is on par with the standards and worth the money you spend on him/her. Establish a communication channel such as Skype, Hangouts, Trello, Slack, Smartsheet, Zoho, Favro, Asana, regular daily work report, emails, or your internal communication systems to communicate with your virtual assistant regularly and to keep them updated about the process.

Trust is a big part of this relationship between you and your Virtual Assistant or Outsourcing service provider. You potentially trust your virtual assistant with the life and existence of your business. So do not divulge sensitive company information immediately after you hire the virtual assistant.

Let the person earn the trust and share information such as login credentials for your accounts or passwords to Social Media profiles only after you are entirely sure of his/her loyalty.

Your objective behind hiring a virtual assistant is to save time and money for your business. The success of hiring a VA, therefore, lies in the money and time you saved.

What tasks should you never outsource to an E-commerce Virtual Assistant?

Virtual assistants may be experts at many things, but something's in business that is not very good to outsource. Especially for a start-up business, you should never contract out the most crucial responsibilities like marketing, advertising, sales, and strategy planning that matter most in your business.