What is a Virtual Assistant (VA)

A virtual assistant is someone you hire to do tasks for you. They are typically from other countries such as the Philippines. They can do tasks such as sourcing products, listing new products, updating inventory, including COGs into software like seller board or inventory labs, replying to Amazon reviews, and more! Within this guide, you will be well-informed on where to find VAs and what to assign them to!

Where can I find Virtual Assistants?

There are a few places where you can find VAs. Some of the most popular sites are places such as Fiverr and UpWork. These sites are extremely popular for hiring third part talents in many different industries such as design, coding, and similar. However, these are also great resources to find VAs. Another very popular site that many people gatekeep is OnlineJobs. This site is a Filipino website that hires locals there. You can very easily find VAs and filter them out by criteria or skills you need from them. The only downfall is that there is a fee you have to pay in order to reach out or post a job listing. However, the benefits are very worth it because it's a great source to find VAs. Personally, when finding VAs to work for me, I will always resort to the online jobs website compared to popular sites like Fiverr and Upwork.

What kind of tasks should VAs be doing?

When hiring VAs, you want to make sure you leave yourself with more time to scale up. Doing tedious tasks is something you can easily hire a VA to do. Some examples of these tasks are shown below. • Listing New Products When listing new products, you can have your VAs apply to sell the item and include some basic information. This basic information can be anything from how many units you have when doing FBM. You can also have them assign a max quantity you want to sell per order and similar. This may seem like a task that is quick and easy but when you are adding many new items it can take up a lot of your time and is tedious. • Updating Inventory If you have sold via FBM, you already know that when a customer purchases an order and cancels it that it will still deduct it from your inventory. So make sure your inventory is up to date so you aren't showing OOS on a product you may have many of. Your VA can easily view canceled orders and cross-reference them to make sure the inventory shown on the seller central inventory page is correct. • Dealing with Customer Feedback and questions When you are selling heavily via FBM, you will have to deal with answering customer questions. As you scale up, this may be very demanding and something you simply do not have time for. By hiring a VA, you can easily have them answer all customer feedback and questions. • Inputting Relevant Information in Selling Software Many sellers are using software such as inventory labs, seller board, or one of the many repricers. When doing so, you want to make sure that your COGs and min/max price are up to date. This allows for everything to be synced and your reports are as accurate as possible. If you have hundreds of products or more, doing this will take a long time after cross-referencing it to your invoices and receipts. • Create a Product listing This section is not something that many people will use but it is huge for private-label sellers on Amazon. Making product listings is not an easy task due to the comprehensive information that Amazon asks for. Teaching a VA how to do this will save you a ton of time. Although this will not apply to everyone when it comes to private label there are a ton of other things VAs can do for you that benefits you more than other sellers who practice online/retail arbitrage and wholesaling. • Optimizing Product Content When making a listing on a product, it's very important that the content is optimized for SEO. Having good informative information will allow your product to rank very well on search engines such as Google. Let's say you own a company that sells a bagel cutter. You want to make sure that the content is really good so when someone googles bagel cutter, your product listing comes up! Constantly updating and optimizing this content can take time and is needed to be done. So you can hire a VA that has good experience with making SEO content!

How to protect your business?

When hiring a VA, you will want to make sure you limit their permissions on their account. You have to think of them as being someone you cannot trust. You never want to give a VA more access to your accounts then you need to. These accounts you may give a VA access to is Seller Central, Inventory labs, Sellerboard, and similar. Some information you should be hiding is your banking info, how much money you are making, and similar. Keeping then in the loop for only essential information is way you keep your business afloat and doing well!