Have you reached the point in your reselling or e-commerce business where you feel that you are spending too much time on repetitive tasks that you dislike, or that you feel are not leveraging your full suite of skills?
It may be time to hire a Virtual Assistant to help to free up your time.
But before you jump feet-first into the world of management by hiring your first team member, you have likely found yourself wondering what you would actually delegate to a VA once you’ve brought them onboard.
Here are 20 ideas to help you think through what to outsource to a VA. This is barely scratching the iceberg in terms of what is possible, but use this as a starting point!
Drafting Listings
If you are an Amazon seller, you can likely outsource your entire listing process to your VA if you get creative with your workflows, because you are most likely adding your items for sale within listings that already exist, which doesn’t involve photography and can therefore be done remotely.
However if you are selling on Poshmark, eBay or other platforms, there are still components of your listing workflow that a VA can do for you. Checking comps, handling pricing, and writing headlines and descriptions could all be done by a virtual assistant to free up your time.
Downloading and Summarizing Reports
As resellers, we are constantly downloading reports from our marketplace platforms to analyze sales. This is a repetitive task that should be automated. A VA can help with extracting all the reports you need, renaming the files, storing them, combining, editing the columns, doing calculations, and sending you a summary if needed.
Data Entry
Aside from managing your sales and inventory reporting, your VA could also help with extracting data from other sources and entering them into a table or spreadsheet that you specify. For example, if you wanted to research all of the prices that a rare item has sold for and build a table to look at averages, highs and lows, your virtual assistant could manually enter the data for you.
Sourcing Trip Route Planning
If you are planning a weekend sourcing trip out of town, leverage your VA to help with route planning. By providing some guidelines, such as the type of stores and items you need and the route you are traveling, you can ensure great results. Your VA can provide a list of stores, phone numbers, and addresses to check out while en route to your destination.
Social Media Management
Many virtual assistants have some experience in managing accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and other social networks. This can be a specialized role, but you can seek this experience during the hiring process. If you already have a VA that does not have much experience in these areas, you can still outsource many repetitive tasks to them by focusing intently on strong training and creating templates for the work. With some effort, you could get to a point where your VA is creating images, researching hashtags, writing post descriptions, scheduling, and many other activities related to social media growth and management.
Photo Editing
This one can be even more specialized than social media management, and not all Virtual Assistants will be strong at photo editing, because it is a highly artistic activity. However with proper training and specific instruction, you should be able to outsource some basic editing to any VA. You can also aim to hire a VA that has extensive experience with photo editing if you want them to fully own all of the editing requirements for your business without too much guidance.
Cross Listing
There are software tools to automate cross-listing between some platforms, e.g. automatically migrating your Amazon listings to your eBay store. However, those tools do not cover everything, and they can be expensive. In some cases, it may make more sense to work with your VA to build processes for cross-listing. With some work, you could create workflows where you list the item once, and your VA then migrates the same information and images to other platforms. Make sure to use bulk import and export tools where possible, to minimize the work involved and reduce mistakes.
Re-Pricing
Re-pricing your items is one of the repetitive tasks that many resellers dislike. However, it’s critical that you stay on top of this to make sure your items remain competitive as the market changes. Therefore this may be a prime area to fully outsource to your VA. If you are an Amazon seller, you may have an automated third-party repricing tool. These are great, but they also have blind spots that they can’t handle, due to Amazon’s API limits. A VA can help to make sure that your entire inventory gets fully reprised frequently.
If you sell on Poshmark, Mercari, eBay or Etsy, repricing can be a bit cumbersome. A VA can help with researching new prices to set for your items, and reprice your inventory for you to ensure that you remain competitive.
Customer Service
Answering customer emails and dealing with feedback is an area that can become cumbersome over time, as you grow your business. A VA can take this completely off your hands. Build out an FAQ to share with your VA so they know the answer to the most frequent questions that are asked. They can then deal with customer questions effectively, and send only the nuanced cases to you.
Quoting Profitability for Marketplace Deals
Many resellers use local marketplace sites such as Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist to find inventory to resell. A VA can help with this by monitoring these marketplaces daily and sending you the best deals that are worth your analysis. You can even work with the VA so that they can calculate the profitability of the items they see before sending you a curated list. Eventually, you could get to a point where your VA even contacts the seller of the item and negotiates a price for you before sharing the pickup information with you. Next level sourcing!
Creating Financial Statements
If you have a book keeper, you can ignore this one. However, if you’ve found yourself manually creating income statements and balance sheets for your business, then this is for you. Although it may seem highly specialized to create financial statements, there is no reason that this can’t be outsourced to a VA. Create templates in Excel to remove the ambiguity. Build your calculations directly into the templates. The VA therefore only needs to input the data to the template. Provide them access to download the reports that they need for revenue figures, and give access to your business expense tracker. With some work, you should be able to automate the creation of your financial statements.
Keyword Research
Keywords are crucial for resellers and e-commerce business owners. This is how our items get found. Whether we are trying to get found on a broad search engine such as Google (e.g. with a Shopify store), or on a selling platform such as eBay, Amazon or Poshmark, our items will still be found via a search. Users will enter a query for the items they are looking for, and everything that follows hinges on the search engines ability to deliver our items for that search query. We increase our chances by using keywords.
Your VA can help with researching the best keywords to use in your listings. You can then include those keywords as tags, in your titles, or in your descriptions. Build specific processes for your VA to find keywords and add them directly to your listings. This is a great investment, and after some time you should be able to re-use the best keywords and reduce further work required.
Online Arbitrage
Online arbitrage is a method of sourcing inventory entirely online. Since it’s online, your VA can do it if they know how. Some elements of online arbitrage can be complex, but there are many tools out there to simplify it. With strong guidance and training, your VA can conduct the research and curate a list of opportunities for your review. Over time, you could get to a point where your VA is making actual buying decisions and sourcing inventory for you.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to get customers, suppliers and partners in business today, and although those of us who sell primarily on online marketplaces don’t need to email people to get sales, an email marketing strategy should still play some part in your big picture as you scale. If you wanted to build a consignment model, for example, where you sell items for other people, email marketing can be a great way to build trust and rapport with potential partners.
Managing your email list, drafting newsletters, and responding to queries are just some of the many tasks in this category that can be outsourced to your virtual assistant.
Removing Inventory
If you are an Amazon FBA seller, or if you use a fulfillment service, then this one is for you. As you watch the calendar and await those dreaded long term storage fees for your items in Amazon’s warehouses, you will undoubtedly need to do some inventory removals. This can be a cumbersome (and boring) task, but it is easily outsourced.
Your VA can help by checking your inventory for items that no longer meet your profitability requirements, or checking for items that are about to reach their long term storage fees, and arranging for those items to be removed from your inventory.
Buying Supplies
Although it’s hard for your VA to know how much tape you have remaining, or whether you need new boxes or Polly bags, there are still ways to build processes whereby your VA can take ownership over procuring the supplies you need for your business. For example, you can set a specific timeframe for your VA to automatically buy replenishments for your supplies, e.g. once every two months. The items would then show up at your door, and you’ve now removed the need for you to worry about researching the best prices and completing orders.
Over time, you will learn how often you need to order supplies, and you can get more accurate with this automation. Note that Amazon offers a way to ‘Subscribe’ to items and complete automatic re-orders, so leverage that where possible, but if you buy your supplies from other websites, your VA can bring the same benefit.
Research and Training
Here’s an interesting one. If you value taking online courses and watching videos to continuously learn but you feel that you never have the time, you can leverage your VA in this area. For example, you could ask your VA to watch a training video or take an online course and make notes. You could then quickly check over the notes to get the highlights from that course. Or you can ask your VA to walk you through the things they learned by giving quick summaries to you on a call.
Some highly successful entrepreneurs leverage VAs in this way to accelerate their ability to learn. After all, we all have a finite number of hours in every day. Even if you do allocate plenty of time to reading and learning, perhaps you want to learn even more than that time permits. With some work, your VA may be the answer.
It’s worth noting here though that we recommend all serious entrepreneurs to make sure to carve out their own time for reading.
Blogging
If you maintain a blog for your reselling business, this can be an area where your VA will help a lot. Writing can be a cumbersome and time-intensive task. Outsource some of the initial drafting and research for your posts to your VA. You can free up a lot of the time required to get a post started, and make sure that you spend your time fine tuning and completing the writing.
Video Editing
If you are building a reselling business with your own website, e.g. on Shopify, or if you create videos on Instagram, Facebook or YouTube as marketing for your items, then this may be a good option for you. Video editing takes a lot of time, and may be one of the best things to outsource as it will remove a lot of work. Video editing is also highly specialized, so you may be able to hire someone who is even better than you at creating the videos you need, if you look carefully.
Email Management
Is your email inbox a complete mess? Is it filled with automated emails, marketing junk, and an assortment of other types of clutter?
Work with your VA to create rules for email management, and outsource it. Over time, you can build processes to make it so you don’t need to monitor your inbox directly any more, if that is what you want. A VA can ensure that nothing important gets missed, and they can respond on your behalf where possible. Through outsourcing the management of your email, you can free up tons of time in your day.
We hope you found this valuable. Check us out on Instagram (@resellingtips) for frequent quick tips to help you with your reselling business.
Now, over to you! What other things do you outsource to your VA, or what would you like to outsource in the future? Comment below to let us know!
