You’ve set up your Amazon FBA business, and things have been going well, but now… you’re stuck. You want to grow your business—fast—but you have run out of hours in the day to spend on crucial tasks.
It’s time to hire a virtual assistant (VA).
Who knew so many minor, frustrating tasks would take up all your time? You’ve already done the smart thing and invested in tools like Repricier that give your products a competitive edge (Right?).
But with all the updating inventory, handling customer reviews, dealing with product research, and more, you’re bordering on burnout.
These are exactly the tasks you should be handing over to a skilled Amazon VA, so you can focus on doing what you do best: growing your business.
Yes, a VA will cost you extra money. But they will add value to your business and let you focus your attention on activities that help you earn more.
Some highly skilled virtual assistants can even take on tasks you are still trying to get your head around (like advertising) and offer a specialist service to help you scale your business even faster.
Sound good? Then let’s take a closer look at how a VA can help you supercharge your Amazon FBA business.
TL;DR
- A skilled Amazon VA can quickly help you to scale your Amazon FBA business.
- VAs can be trained to take on tasks including marketing, advertising, creating listings, handling customer service, dealing with fulfillment, and more.
- Most people hire a VA so they can focus on doing more of what they love while growing their business faster.
What Exactly is a VA?
A VA is a remote worker, usually a contract worker rather than an employee. You give them tasks to carry out, which are usually admin tasks, while you get on with running your business.
Businesses hire VAs for all sorts of tasks, from bookkeeping to sending emails to making phone calls. You may hire a VA in your own country or find one on the other side of the world.
An Amazon FBA VA is, as you might imagine, a VA specializing in tasks related to running an Amazon FBA business.
These are the same tasks you would expect a standard VA to do (e.g., primarily admin and marketing), but more focused on the specific tasks related to running an Amazon FBA business.
For example, they will have good knowledge of Amazon Seller Central and experience working with Amazon businesses, and you won’t have to explain everything from scratch.
Think of all those tasks you hate, that take up your valuable time, and you would rather hand over to someone else—that’s what VAs do.
Why Hire a VA?
You have skills that only you can do. But running your Amazon business involves smaller, more mundane, and more repetitive tasks. They take up time, they reduce enjoyment in your work—and you should hand them over to someone else.
You could easily pass on many tasks to a VA, leaving you to focus on the things you enjoy more, or the things that add value to your business and generate revenue.
Think about where you make the most money and where you should be directing your time and attention. All the other tasks you can hand over to an experienced Amazon FBA virtual assistant.
You may get to the stage where you simply cannot work any more hours and cannot grow your business. This is where you need to outsource. Rather than hire employees, with all the expense and hassle that entails, outsourcing allows you to scale quickly and affordably.
Overall, a VA can make running your business more enjoyable and profitable by allowing you to do more of what you love and less of what you don’t.
But it’s more than that—a good VA can also add value to your Amazon business.
Replying quickly to reviews, for example, can help to improve the customer experience and build trust. In addition, highly skilled Amazon FBA virtual assistants can get better results from, for example, advertising, than you could do yourself.
They also have a lot of experience with other Amazon businesses and can bring their insights to your business.
Key Ways a VA Can Help You Scale Your Business
Amazon VAs can carry out many tasks to help you scale your business faster. Here are some of the key tasks you can outsource.
Sourcing Products
Sourcing products can be time-consuming and laborious. But some VAs really know their stuff and can help you with all aspects of this.
Good VAs can not only carry out product research, pick up trends, research competitors, and present their findings to you. Many also do outreach, negotiate with suppliers, find bargains, order samples, test them out, and more.
They could even deal with your existing suppliers when you need to organize new stock or sort out a shipment.
A virtual assistant can look at your product listings to see how they perform, monitor sales trends, research competitors, and conduct data analysis. All of these time-consuming tasks can be handed over to a VA to free up your own time.
Create Optimized Listings
The listings are where you convince browsers to become buyers, and a good listing can make all the difference to your business.
Search engine optimization is important in the Amazon search engine, and listings should be optimized with the right keywords that take the A10 algorithm into consideration. A good virtual assistant (or someone willing to learn and train on the job) should be aware of the latest updates and good practices to follow.
They should know how to use the right keywords in the right places and in language that helps to convert shoppers into buyers, not just directing more traffic to the page but persuading visitors to buy.
Your virtual assistant could create your listings from scratch, or you might want to hire a VA to check your existing listings and edit them, suggesting improvements using their expertise. They could also track the performance of your listings and make suggestions for improvements.
Most sellers will use a keyword research tool to help them find the best keywords for their listings. You could find a VA with experience in your preferred software to hand this process over to them.
An effective listing also uses images and video, and a virtual assistant could help with multimedia to make your products stand out. You may even find a VA with photography or videography skills, or they might be able to recommend one to make your products look more tempting to customers.
Shipping & Inventory
Inventory management can be a big task. Get an Amazon virtual assistant to track inventory levels, make sure no units are missing, order products when needed, create inventory reports, and manage reports for you.
When a product is ready to ship, your VA can also create shipping plans, print shipping labels for suppliers, download barcodes, and coordinate shipments with suppliers.
Customer Service
One area where virtual assistants can really make a difference is customer service. It’s easy to forget about this when you’re focused on your sales and finances, but customer service is essential.
One way to do this is with reviews. How do you handle negative reviews? What’s your process? You could train up a VA to do it to save you the hassle. They can then seek out negative reviews and respond, sorting out the situation.
A good virtual assistant can ensure the user experience is positive for customers and help to get more positive reviews. From creating effective message templates to answering questions, leaving comments on reviews, and sorting out refunds and replacements, there are many tasks a skilled VA can take on.
Customer support is integral but time-consuming when you do it in-house. So having someone who can take care of it for you makes a lot of sense. It’ll be a huge time saver for you, allowing you to do something more productive to grow your business.
Amazon Ads
If you are running ads to get more eyes on your products, an Amazon VA can be a great help. Running ads can drive targeted traffic and boost sales, but sorting out the ads can be a lot of work.
In this case, you need a virtual assistant who has a good understanding of how ads work on Amazon. They should be able to set up campaigns using Seller Central, know all about things like negative key terms, and understand how to create powerful ads that are attractive to shoppers.
Even better if your virtual assistant could monitor analytics to determine which ads are performing well, decide where changes should be made, monitor ad budgets, and take the whole thing off your hands.
Fulfillment
With an Amazon FBA business, Amazon looks after most of the fulfillment, so that’s not something to worry about.
But you may want to try FBM, or perhaps you have plans to launch your own online store along with your Amazon business. In this case, a VA can help with order fulfillment and processing.
Even if this is something you’re only considering in the future, it’s a good skill for your VA to have to help you grow your business even more.
FBA Reimbursement
Amazon FBA has a reimbursement policy, but it’s quite time-consuming and can be a real hassle. Still, it’s relatively easy, and it is exactly the sort of task a virtual assistant can do for you.
Let your VA deal with filing for reimbursement, tracking claims, and following up with customer service—all those tasks you hate doing yourself.
Marketing
Marketing your business is a big area. We’ve already touched on Amazon ads and reviews, but there are lots more ways to market your business.
Promotions and coupons, for example. If you run regular promotions and provide coupons for products, this can be an excellent way to make more sales. Consider hiring a virtual assistant to promote your coupons for you.
For example, a VA can research Facebook coupon groups, contact the owners, and get your coupons in front of the right people.
Your VA can also take on any other social media marketing you need. Get your VA to do all the networking, replying to comments, publishing posts, connecting with customers and shoppers, boosting likes, getting more shares, advertising on social media, creating videos, and more.
Influencer marketing is another area you can focus on. Do you have time to connect with influencers? Probably not. But if one big influencer recommends your products, this can lead to a huge sales boost. A virtual assistant can reach out, negotiate terms, follow up, track results, and more to take it all off your chest.
VAs can also help you prepare for big sales events like Prime Day, where you may want to start planning months in advance. You could hire a VA to focus purely on this sales weekend to help you make the most of it.
Reporting
Amazon reporting is a time-consuming task, and keeping up with your accounts is perhaps not the part of your business you love the most.
A skilled virtual assistant can go through your reports and do all your bookkeeping for you. You can automate the process to a certain extent by syncing your Amazon account with your bookkeeping software, but a VA can definitely provide you with a helping hand.
How to Hire a VA?
Hiring a VA is a relatively painless process, and there are many places to find them. Start by looking at Upwork and Fiverr, two of the biggest freelancing marketplaces, to see what’s available.
Wing Assistant is another great place to find VAs for eCommerce. Most virtual assistants here are overseas in countries like the Philippines.
You should also have a good idea about which tasks you want to be completed. For example, some VAs may be better at marketing, while others focus more on admin, so you might want to hire a few.
How Much Do VA’s Cost?
VAs charge different rates depending on their skills, experience, and location.
Many VAs work in countries like the Philippines and have excellent skills and rates up to about $10 per hour. VAs in the United States tend to cost more, with an average hourly rate of $16.46, but expect to pay anything up to $25 per hour.
Hiring a VA overseas might be ideal for your business, but just be aware of the time difference and potential language barriers.
Some VAs might sell a package of hours per month, like 20 hours a month. Others may make themselves available when needed, so you spend more one month than another.
Conclusion
Hiring an Amazon VA can be great if you want to scale your online business. Start by thinking about the tasks you would like to outsource and which tasks you want to focus on more. Are there tasks someone could do more effectively than you?
Spend your time on revenue-generating tasks, the things you do best and enjoy the most. Outsource the minor tasks to a VA, the things that take up your time, that you don’t enjoy doing, and that require fewer skills.
Hiring a VA can help you grow your Amazon business fast so you can take it to the next level. So start thinking about the tasks you could hand over to an assistant, and look for a VA today.
