Find out how Amazon virtual assistants can help Amazon Sellers in boosting their business. Read this complete guide.
To succeed in the highly competitive market, Amazon sellers must work intelligently and invest ample effort. But naturally, one person (or one small team) can’t handle everything. One way to tackle this is to decide which priorities must be handled in-house and which can be delegated to third-party agencies (for instance, outsourcing bulk product listing, customer support, or review monitoring). Sellers can assign such responsibilities to an Amazon virtual assistant and eliminate the need for a full-time employee while saving money, time, and resource-power.
This comprehensive guide will help Amazon sellers get relevant information about Amazon VA, their responsibilities, advantages, and the right way to hire one.
Who is an Amazon Virtual Assistant?
An Amazon Virtual Assistant is a professional who assists sellers in managing and growing their Amazon business. They can handle time-consuming duties like adding product listing, addressing questions and problems from customers, and doing daily Amazon Seller maintenance tasks.
Having a VA for administrative responsibilities and repetitive tasks allows you to redirect your focus on core operations and scale up business performance. In addition, delegating side tasks and focusing solely on important tasks can help a company aim for a higher market position.
As these experts can do various tasks for Amazon sellers, we have mentioned a few of them below.
Tasks a Seller can outsource to an Amazon Virtual Assistant
1. Customer service tasks
Customer service is one of the secrets to running a thriving business on Amazon. Customers must come first, but you must also concentrate on other aspects of your business. To save your time and cost, an Amazon VA will take care of all the following tasks:
Virtual Assistants Handle customer queries
The virtual assistant for Amazon will be in charge of building relationships with customers by providing prompt answers to their inquiries. The VA can interact with customers through different modes:
- Phone calls
- Chats
- Text messages
- Emails
- Social media platforms
Create message templates
VA also offers the service of creating template messages to answer FAQs. These message templates help experts quickly respond to the customer’s feedback or comments.
Handling comments
Both satisfied and unhappy consumers will leave comments about your FBA business. In response to compliments, the virtual assistant for Amazon will thank the user and inquire if they require any more help. But there will also be some negative comments that need to be handled with politeness and sincerity. But if a seller handles the negative comment by himself, they may get demotivated and can get emotionally impacted as well. Thus to avoid such situations, hiring VA is a good option as they have the relevant experience handling such comments. They will also ensure that the customer’s feedback is conveyed to the seller’s team so that it can be worked upon.
2. Managing operational tasks
Managing product listing
Amazon Product listing is the most crucial process in selling; thus, one needs to do it carefully. There are different factors that the seller needs to focus on while uploading the product and creating the listing. A new seller will need to invest time and effort to learn the listing process from scratch and get expertise in the same. But a VA eliminates this problem by presenting their expertise. The virtual assistant from Amazon will check the product page regularly and assist in adding or updating information such as titles, product descriptions, photos, and pricing.
Must Read: Amazon Product Listings: Leverage Them The Right Way!
Keep track of the order process
Processing orders is a time-consuming process that needs a regular inspection. If a seller does it alone, they will realize most of their time is wasted checking the order, tracking down the order, etc. But the seller can take care of the other tasks that need their time and attention while an hiring Amazon virtual assistant handles the order processing.
Sending in FBA inventory, collecting Amazon barcodes for each unit, downloading mailing labels, tracking shipments, and inspecting units received are a few of the order processing procedures that an Amazon VA can do for you.
3. Marketing tasks
Market research is another component that contributes to an Amazon business’s success. Before starting your firm, you should conduct essential research on the goods you plan to offer. There are two important things to research before choosing the product to sell on Amazon one is the target audience, and the other is your rivals.
Instead of hiring a dedicated research team, if you hire VA, you will get high-quality information about the market trends, which products are at the top of the list, and who all are competing in the categories. They are experts in discovering the rivals and what strategies they are using to help you overpower them.
Data analysis by Virtual Assistant
Not only do VA indulge in in-depth research, but they are also well-versed in data analysis. The Amazon virtual assistant evaluates the findings of their investigation and determines how they might benefit from it.
Amazon ad campaign
As 70% of Amazon visitors don’t click after checking out the first page, running an Amazon ad campaign is one of the successful methods to grab the customer’s attention towards the seller’s product listing. But not all sellers know how to set up the campaign or run it successfully. Thus, hiring a VA is a smart decision. They create campaigns utilizing Seller Central’s tools, include negative key phrases to cut down on wasteful expenditure, analyze analytics to see how well your campaigns are doing, and alter your advertisements as required.
Review generation
Reviews play a very important role in the customer’s buying process. Research also suggests that 95% of online shoppers read reviews before buying any product. Thus, Amazon sellers need to work hard to get a positive rating from their customers. But many sellers are clueless about how to get positive reviews from customers. For the right guidance, sellers can hire a VA to contact customers through email to follow up and get feedback on their purchases. VA also asks for their genuine opinions by sending them newsletters and social media messages.
How can virtual assistants help ease an Amazon seller’s stress?
1. Save operational costs
A 2020 research found that using virtual assistants instead of in-house employees can result in operating cost savings of up to 78%. By hiring Amazon virtual assistants, sellers may simply reduce the power and other utility expenditures because they won’t take up any room in the workplace. Contrary to a full-time, in-house team where you need to pay for office space, regular income, and other perks, you simply pay for the exact service you need and the period for which you hire VA.
2. Save hiring and training costs by hiring Virtual Assistants
In addition to operational expenditures, owning a firm entails hiring and onboarding charges. To find talent, employers frequently turn to their human resources department or recruiting firms, and these processes take time and money.
VA sellers can eliminate this pain as they already have relevant training and experience to handle the process carefully. Sellers don’t have to spend extra bucks on the training sessions, material, and trainers to get the employee onboard. Research has also suggested that hiring VA instead of in-house employees keeps the attrition rate of the business to a minimal level, saving further costs.
3. Increased efficiency and productivity
Virtual Assistant works remotely, so they don’t have to waste time traveling to the office daily. As a result, they have more time on their hands and are able to work at their leisure with flexible hours. Hence, they don’t have to worry about completing hours; rather, they just have to focus solely on providing quality work to their client. Research has shown that virtual employees are 20-25% more productive than employees who work from the office.
Furthermore, with more productivity, virtual assistants offer higher work efficiency. Inefficiency occurs when you spend more money than necessary cost to get the same outcome. For example, due to mismanagement of inventory, Amazon sellers have a huge stock of products piled up in the warehouse, which leads to significant maintenance costs. The longer you use the warehouse the more you have to pay for it leading to unnecessary expenses.
Hence, you can solve this issue by employing a VA to assist you in keeping track of your inventory. A VA will efficiently plan to ship the products in smaller batches but more frequently; this will help you eliminate your surplus inventory, eventually lowering costs.
4. No Need to Buy Tools and Software
To compete with the existing Amazon players, sellers need access to relevant software and tools. But sellers might hesitate to purchase them as they are available on a subscription basis. However, when the seller decides to outsource Amazon service to a VA agency, they don’t have to worry about buying these tools as these companies already have access to the latest tools for finding, launching, and selling items on Amazon.
5. Smooth design and editing work
A virtual assistant from Amazon can create product visuals, enhance existing information, edit photos, and carry out several other designing activities. As VA knows that a consumer is more inclined to acquire appealing products, they will edit the photographs of the product in the required way.
6. Improved conversion Rate
Your conversion rate might be significantly increased with the help of an Amazon virtual assistant. Your Amazon VA will take care of all the ways to increase conversion rate like:
- SEO-optimized product listing
- Promoting your product through Amazon ads
- Transforming Product images into high-quality ones
- Conducting research on price
- Increasing positive customer rating
- Evaluating your competition
7. Higher peace of mind
You need not worry about running your Amazon business if you have a virtual assistant from Amazon by your side. Everything from adding new goods to your account to keeping track of your inventory and maintaining customer support will be handled by your Amazon personal assistant. You will experience better peace of mind because you know your account is being handled by experts who have extensive experience in this field.
Conclusion
The number of sellers on Amazon is growing dramatically. This growth has led to many opportunities as well as massive competition in the online marketplace. Sellers who want to survive in the race need to make smart decisions with proper implementation. One of them is to hire Amazon experts who can manage their Amazon accounts from scratch. Hopefully, this post gave you the information needed to land the right VA for your Amazon business.
Jessica Campbell is an eCommerce Consultant and a Professional Content Strategist at Data4Amazon, a leading organization providing end-to-end Amazon consulting and marketplace management services. For over 7+ years, she has been writing about best practices, tips, and ways to enhance brand visibility and boost sales on the Amazon marketplace. So far, she has written several articles on Amazon listing optimization, Amazon SEO & marketing, Amazon store setup, Amazon product data entry and more. She holds 12+ years of copywriting experience and has helped thousands of businesses and Amazon sellers build their presence in the marketplace, reach new customers, and register better sales & conversions through the power of a well-built copy.
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