Amazon is one of the biggest global marketplaces and a key sales platform for millions of businesses–but managing customer service, marketing, and administrative tasks can be a considerable time burden. Companies hire Amazon virtual assistants, who are experienced freelancers and work remotely to handle all the day-to-day tasks associated with running a successful Amazon storefront.
In this guide, we’ll answer some of the commonly asked questions about hiring a freelancer to support your Amazon store and the types of responsibilities they can take on.
What Jobs Can an Amazon Virtual Assistant Cover?
A lot depends on whether you hire a full-time Amazon account manager or need to outsource admin tasks for a few hours per week. Many companies hire a freelance virtual assistant during the busiest periods of the year (particularly the holiday season) to ensure they keep on top of sales and order shipping without forgetting to respond to return requests or customer inquiries.
What does an Amazon virtual assistant do? Their role might include the following:
Amazon Admin
Admin is one of the most time-consuming aspects of running a busy Amazon store. A virtual assistant can cover everything from replying to customers, flagging when stock is running low, monitoring sales numbers, and processing new orders as they arrive.
Hiring a skilled virtual assistant is ideal if you have a large volume of messages and orders to deal with each day, as you can delegate whichever tasks take priority and focus on managing the broader business.
Customer Support
Customer service can take up the bulk of the day, but it is essential to reply to every message, question, or request as quickly as possible to maintain strong review ratings. Some businesses defer to Amazon to manage customer support, but this can be a false economy as it may mean you miss an opportunity to engage with new buyers.
An Amazon virtual assistant can:
- Create response templates to make it quicker and easier to reply to standard questions or provide automated order updates
- Respond to new messages daily with accurate advice about products, shipping times, or return policies
- Acknowledge reviews–good and bad–and show a high level of attention to customer satisfaction
- Verify whether reviews are authentic, matching each rating to an order or reporting fake reviews to have them removed
- Managing refunds, processing exchanges, or dealing with customers unhappy with their orders for any reason
In most cases, once your virtual assistant is trained and familiar with your products, they can deal with all these customer service tasks independently and without further input.
Amazon FBA
Amazon FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) is a service where you stock your products at Amazon warehouses and the marketplace ships directly to your customer. While this can be a fantastic way of reducing warehousing costs, speeding up delivery times, and increasing your sales, it also commands significant administrative oversight.
For example, Amazon FBA will often require you to send specific numbers of each product to different warehouses, depending on demand, with detailed labeling, barcoding, and packaging rules.
Advertising Campaigns
An Amazon ad campaign can perform well and mean your products are shown to a far larger audience. If you choose to pay for Amazon advertising, it is essential you have a capable assistant to help.
Amazon provides a suite of advertising tools and options. A virtual assistant well-versed in marketplace ads can upload each campaign through Seller Central, research appropriate key terms (and which to avoid), and monitor ad performance.
Campaigns can be adjusted as you go, tweaking pricing, ad spending, and target customers, so picking up on positive or negative trends is important to maximize success and returns on your advertising investment.
Product Listings
The top-selling products on Amazon have in-depth listings with accurate dimensions, specifications, explainers, guides, and descriptions–keeping these listings 100% up-to-date can make a big difference to your sales and customer reviews.
High-quality product photography and videos are also powerful ways to boost sales. An Amazon assistant with knowledge of photography, editing software, or videography can be a distinct competitive advantage.
Inventory
Finally, one of the most important things to manage when selling on Amazon is your inventory. Run out of stock at a key time, and you’ll see sales plummet for the long term since buyers prioritize listings with recent sales history and reviews.
Hiring a freelance Amazon virtual assistant through Guru can be a great way of having another pair of eyes keeping watch over your stock levels, reordering as required, and ensuring you always have a continuous supply to keep your customer orders fulfilled.
