Guru has a growing network of talented freelance Amazon virtual assistants who can provide invaluable support in running an Amazon storefront efficiently and profitably. An increasing number of businesses are opting to hire remote virtual assistants to deal with admin, inquiries, stock monitoring, and order processing–giving them hours of time back each week!
If you’re unsure whether an assistant is right for your business, we’ll run through a few pointers, including what to look for in an Amazon virtual assistant who will be able to hit the ground running.
What Tasks Can an Amazon Virtual Assistant Perform?
What is Amazon virtual assistant? Virtual assistants are flexible and often have a specific skill set. You can review freelancers’ experience, knowledge, and abilities on their Guru profile before you proceed to be confident you’re picking the right professional for the tasks you have in mind.
Although you could delegate almost any administrative function to a virtual assistant, some of the most common responsibilities include the following:
- Research: Producing reports about product sales, customer visits, trending search terms or products, and competitor pricing
- Customer support: Answering incoming messages, following up on reviews, responding to requests for information, or providing product specification sheets or assembly instructions
- Product listings: Optimizing your Amazon listings is important to get ahead of the crowd–a virtual assistant can update text, add new imagery or videos, proof your listings, and adjust them to hit popular search phrases
- Campaign management: Managing your advertising campaigns, setting up each promotion, selecting appropriate terms, and monitoring progress and sales metrics
- Order processing: Confirming new orders, sending shipping information or tracking codes, reordering inventory, downloading postage labels, and marking orders as complete
- Translation: Translating your product listings into multiple languages to suit Amazon’s international reach
The best tip is to start by thinking about those tasks that take up most of your time and assign anything repetitive or that detracts from running your business to your Amazon virtual assistant.
How to Find the Right Amazon Virtual Assistant
Freelance professionals offer a wealth of knowledge and expertise. It is considerably more affordable to hire an Amazon assistant for a few hours per week than to take on a permanent employee. Each assistant might have a different focus or specialism, so it’s important to have a clear idea about the know-how and experience you’d like your freelancer to have.
There are two simple ways to filter potential freelancers on Guru, depending on whether you’re looking for one person to work with long-term or need an Amazon virtual assistant to help manage a busy workload during peak periods. Posting a project means you can specify exactly what you’re looking for, inviting qualified assistants to respond and provide a quote if they feel they are a good match.
You can also browse available professionals and review the information available on their profile, including past client reviews, and contact a specific virtual assistant you would like to work for you. Posting a job is normally the most effective option as you will then have the opportunity to evaluate each candidate’s suitability and discuss pay rates, turnaround times, and availability before making any decisions.
Training and Managing an Amazon Virtual Assistant
Any virtual assistant will need a little training before they can manage direct customer messaging functions, but this is likely to vary between businesses and the complexity of your products. There are three potential solutions:
- Training your new assistant, yourself
- Pay for a private training provider
- Hire a freelancer who requires little or no training
If you have a tight budget and would prefer to hire a more junior freelancer, they will need more training to get to grips with your brand, products, and services, although the advantage is that you will pay less per hour for their work. An experienced Amazon virtual assistant will be fully versed in Amazon FBA, Seller Central, listing policies, and the rating verification process, so this would be a better option if you need immediate help managing your Amazon store!
Whichever options you choose, be sure to discuss your management expectations, such as daily or weekly check-ins on Skype or Zoom, how you will delegate activities and tasks, and how quickly you expect your assistant to respond to new messages.
