What is an Amazon Virtual Assistant-Is it Necessary

What is an Amazon Virtual Assistant&Is it Necessary?

Achieving success as an Amazon seller is a great feeling, but it sometimes brings its own set of problems. Often, sellers don’t have the time to complete all the tasks necessary to stay on top of their orders.

For this reason, a lot of sellers choose to hire the services of an Amazon Virtual Assistant in order to help them deal with everyday tasks, particularly at busy times of the year like the festive season.

What is an Amazon Virtual Assistant?

An Amazon Virtual Assistant is somebody who works for you remotely and takes on a number of different tasks for your Amazon business.

Amazon Virtual Assistant roles vary but, duties can include general administration, content creation, product sourcing, and customer support.

Amazon Virtual Assistants are usually hired on a freelance basis and can be employed either full-time or part-time.

As well as taking on specific duties, a good Amazon Virtual Assistant will be willing to lend a hand with a number of ad hoc tasks that may be required during the course of the employment.

An Amazon Virtual Assistant can be a great help to sellers in terms of taking on mundane everyday tasks, leaving the seller free to focus on scaling the business.

Do You Need a Virtual Amazon Assistant?

Before committing to hiring an Amazon Virtual Assistant, there are a few things you need to take a look at.

The most important of these is deciding whether or not you actually do need an assistant.

Before going ahead, it’s a good idea to take a long hard look at your daily, weekly, and monthly duties and activities to find out which tasks are taking up a lot of your time.

By examining this, it may be the case that there are areas in which you can streamline your activities to save valuable time, in which case you may not need an Amazon Virtual Assistant.

If this is not the case, then its time to look at the pros and cons of hiring an Amazon Virtual Assistant:

Virtual Amazon Assistant – The Pros and Cons

The Pros
  • Time – An Amazon Virtual Assistant can save you lots of time by taking on a number of time-consuming tasks, thus leaving you free to concentrate on growing your business.
  • Skills – Hiring an Amazon Virtual Assistant can give you access to a set of skills which you may hold yourself, such as book-keeping or content writing.
  • Affordable – Employing an Amazon Virtual Assistant can be a lot more cost-effective than hiring an on-site assistant.
  • Convenient – An Amazon Virtual Assistant can take on the dull or annoying jobs that you prefer not to do yourself so that you can concentrate on more rewarding tasks within your business.
The Cons
  • Cost – When you hire an Amazon Virtual Assistant, you’ll usually be agreeing to commit to paying for a certain amount of hours per week – which you’ll need to honor regardless of sales made during any given week.
  • Stranger danger – Hiring a Virtual Assistant can be something of a leap of faith as the transaction is usually conducted online and you won’t have the opportunity to get to know the person ‘in real life’ before committing to the hire.
  • Honesty – Although there is time-keeping software available to help you keep track of your Virtual Assistant’s work you will, to an extent, need to rely on the honesty of your assistant in terms of recording the hours that he or she has worked.

How to Find the Right Amazon Virtual Assistant

Finding an Amazon Virtual Assistant can be tricky but, don’t worry, you just need to know where to look.

Before you begin your search, it’s important to be clear about your expectations.

For this, you’ll need to ask yourself the following questions:

  • What qualifications should your Virtual Assistant have?
  • What skills should your Virtual Assistant have?
  • What experience should your Virtual Assistant have?
  • What personal qualities should your Virtual Assistant have?

By identifying the answers to these questions, you can then create a profile for your ideal candidate and search for the ideal one you want.

At least, a professional should have the following skills:

  • Know how does the Amazon platform works and be attentive to its rules.
  • Be proficient in writing skills and listing optimization
  • Well handle any manner of customer service problems
  • Know how to do product research and sourcing
  • Be good at promotions and marketing skills

After finding your assistant, you will need to do the following.

How to Train Your Virtual Assistant

If you’re extremely lucky, your new Amazon Virtual Assistant will hold a recognized accreditation as a Virtual Assistant and will have relevant experience.

If not, however, you may find that you will need to train your new assistant yourself.

While the idea of training somebody virtually may seem daunting, in reality, it’s more straightforward than you might think.  

Video Calls

In 2020, the entire world was glued to Zoom as the pandemic swept across the globe and, this can be a really useful tool when training your Virtual Assistant.

Learning Software

An online training tool like Go.Whatfix can help you to train your assistant and to monitor progress as you go along.

To make the training process easier, it’s a good idea to put together an enrollment pack containing details of all of your processes and systems as well as laying out the job description and obligations of the Amazon Virtual Assistant.

This works well as the assistant is able to study these materials before beginning working with you which, therefore, streamlines the ‘on-the-job’ training process.

How to manage your Amazon Virtual Assistant

Once you’ve on-boarded and trained your Amazon Virtual Assistant, it’s time to focus on a day to day management.

When hiring a new assistant, its always best to be extremely up-front regarding your rules and expectations and, the following should be defined:

  • Working hours – The hours that you expect the assistant to work. If you require your assistant to work the same hours as yourself (e.g, 10am to 6pm) this should be specified at this stage  
  • Communication – How you prefer to communicate with the assistant and, how often.  This will help to minimize frustration if you prefer to communicate once a day rather than receiving emails every five minutes
  • Documentation – How shared documents will be stored and accessed
  • Discipline – The penalties that will be levied for contract breaches such as not fulfilling the necessary work, missing deadlines or not hitting targets

Where to Find a Virtual Assistant

There are lots of places you can look when it comes to finding an Amazon Virtual Assistant and, some of these are as follows:

Managed Service Providers

Managed marketplaces like Wing are a great place to find an Amazon virtual assistant. For a monthly fee, they provide you access to top pre-vetted talent. 

When you hire through a managed provider, you don’t need to worry about onboarding and training—the company does that itself. You can also scale as necessary and hire as many assistants as you need.

Specialist Agencies

If you’re short on time, a specialist agency such as

virtualassistantuk.org/vaaphilippines.com/  and 2ndoffice.co/ can help you to find candidates with the skills and experience that you’re looking for; however, you will incur fees for using services like these.

Freelance Websites

These sites can be a really valuable resource for finding an Amazon Virtual Assistant and are easy and affordable to use.

Unlike specialist agencies, you’ll generally pay only 10% of the hiring fee when using these sites and, some of the most popular of these are:

People Per Hour – Used by a huge number of people worldwide, People Per Hour is incredibly user friendly and a great source for finding Virtual Assistants.

UpWork – Trusted by over five million customers across the globe, UpWork has an impressively large talent pool and lots of great features.

Onlinejobs – Based in the Philippines, around 22,174 freelancers sign up to this site every month. Onlinejobs has a basic package which you can use for free and two paid packages at $69 and $99 per month.

Jungle Scout Market – Dedicated to all things Amazon, you will definitely want to bookmark this site as a handy directory for staff, tips and other resources.

Worksome – A lesser-known but no less useful site, Worksome is jammed full of 100% vetted candidates, including Amazon Virtual Assistants.

Job Sites

When looking for your new Amazon Virtual Assistant, you shouldn’t overlook the more traditional job sites as these often contain a wealth of talent.

Some of the best of these are:

Indeed – Responsible for a staggering 65% of all job hires in the USA, Indeed is one of the most popular job sites in the world and allows you to look for personnel by posting a job by job title and location.

Glassdoor – Originally a review site for businesses, Glassdoor is a great resource for seeking new talent.

Conclusion

An Amazon Virtual Assistant can be an amazing asset to your brand and can really help to free up your time so that you can focus on growing your brand.

When looking for a Virtual Assistant, it’s always a good idea to thoroughly research a candidate including looking at reviews and references before making a commitment.  

While there are some fabulous candidates out there, sadly there are also some not-so-great ones and, you can save yourself a lot of time, money, and hassle by making sure that you do your homework properly before hiring.

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