How Virtual Assistants Can Boost Your FBA Business
When it comes to running an Amazon business, it’s easy to get bogged down by all the little (and large) tasks you need to complete on a daily basis. It can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re trying to do everything yourself.
What is an Amazon Virtual Assistant?
An Amazon virtual assistant is an assistant that can help you with your Amazon business, virtually, and from anywhere in the world. They can help you with a variety of different tasks, depending on the assistant’s individual skills and knowledge.
An Amazon virtual assistant can be likened to a regular personal assistant, except that they generally only help with online and computer-based tasks.
How Can an Amazon Virtual Assistant Increase Productivity?
The purpose of virtual assistants is to lighten your workload and take on a portion of your tasks themselves. This affords you, the business owner, more time to concentrate on other, more important matters that will help your business thrive. Two pairs of hands are better than one, after all!
Here are some of the tasks Amazon virtual assistants can carry out on your behalf:
#1 – Sourcing Your Products
Your products are what your Amazon business depends on. They earn you your income. Sourcing products to sell on Amazon can take time and effort. It’s not something to be done on a whim or half-heartedly. If you’re not able to dedicate enough time to research and source your products, hiring an Amazon virtual assistant may be the way to go.
Product sourcing can be broken down into three general categories:
- Research
- Negotiation
- Securing samples
Product research is a big part of selling on Amazon. It involves analyzing the best-selling products on the platform and researching keywords. This task can be time-consuming, but it’s a necessary one for optimum success. Not all products sell well, and some don’t sell at all. Your assistant will need to understand how to determine the amount of public interest in a product before buying it.
Negotiation skills will help to secure you the best possible price for your products. Someone who is confident and skilled in negotiation techniques will be able to assist you with this process, helping you save money on your product costs.
Securing samples so that you can make sure the product is up-to-scratch is essential. High-quality products have the potential to sell themselves. If you’ve gone private label, your brand will be recognized by the quality of its products.
Secure samples to test their functions, quality, and durability. If, for example, you are offering a guarantee on your products, you need to make sure that one (or preferably more) of them actually withstand the guaranteed time. Virtual assistants can help you with all of this.
#2 – Being the First Point-of-Contact For Customers
Good customer service is highly-valued among consumers. It gives them peace of mind that if something goes wrong, their concerns will be dealt with fairly and quickly. Conversely, bad customer service is off-putting and destroys trust in a company.
If you’re not able to commit a decent amount of time to respond to customer enquiries and dealing with any complaints or concerns, you may want to consider hiring a VA.
What Makes Good Customer Service?
When it comes to customer service, there are simple ways to tell the good from the bad. Good customer service will leave you feeling positive and confident about buying from a company. On the other hand, if you have a bad experience with a company’s customer service team, you will feel like you won’t want to deal with that company again. You won’t trust that they are looking after your best interests and you could also resort to leaving the company a negative review.
To supply your customer’s with good customer service you need to:
– Respond to customer queries quickly
– Be polite, courteous, and fair at all times
– Have an efficient procedure in place to deal with complaints and concerns
– Have clear guidelines for the way you operate your business and deal with your customers
– Reply to positive messages as well as negative ones
If you meet all these, your customers will feel valued and appreciated. A happy customer will likely become a repeat customer, and your brand and products will stand out from the digital clutter because of your exceptional customer service.
#3 – Managing Your Amazon FBA Account
Amazon FBA takes much of the pressure away from sellers. You can send your products to Amazon and they post them directly to your customers when they order from you.
Although this is a much more efficient and productive way of selling on Amazon, you do still need to keep track of your stock, package your products, and then organize postage to Amazon. You are also still responsible for printing return shipping labels before sending them to Amazon and tracking orders to make sure each unit is where it should be.
You need to know where every single product is at all times, whether it’s in Amazon’s inventory, or on its way to a customer. You, as the business owner, are responsible for these aspects.
Hiring an Amazon VA will free up a lot of time you would have otherwise spent on managing your FBA account. Of course, if you’re working with someone remotely, you will need to ensure there is a high level of trust between you and anyone handling your products.
#4 – Managing Your Amazon Affiliate Website
If you’re doing well on Amazon you might consider taking your business to the next level with your own Amazon-integrated affiliate website. With Amazon’s affiliate program, you can choose what products you sell on your website. This means that if you want to, you can promote and sell only your own products.
With your own website, you can really get stuck into the promotional side of things and treat your Amazon business as just that – a business! This means working on driving customers to your website, blog, and social media channels to gain more exposure for your brand.
Building, maintaining, and promoting a website takes a lot of work, but if you stick at it, the financial rewards can be enormous.
If you haven’t got a website already, you can build your own free website easily. You may then need a virtual assistant to manage, maintain, and market your website.
Virtual assistants can help you with a number of things involved in running your Amazon Affiliate site including:
– Checking all your products are consistently integrated into your website
– Writing regular blog posts and replying to comments
– Building an email list so you can launch an email marketing campaign
– Managing your social media accounts, including writing and scheduling posts, and running ads
– Running and managing Google ad campaigns
– Using Google Analytics to track your site’s progress and its visitors
Get More Done With Amazon Virtual Assistants
Amazon virtual assistants will supply you with the most important element you need for continuous business growth; time!
It’s vital that every cog in your Amazon business wheel runs smoothly. When orders increase, keeping up with all your stock, marketing efforts, customer enquiries, not to mention your accounts, can become overwhelming. You need to take a methodical approach to stay organized. A good VA will do the same so that you can continue to grow and increase your profits.
Author’s bio:
Jann Chambers is a blog writer with seven years of professional experience. She specializes in topics relating to web hosting, cloud computing, SEO, digital marketing and WordPress. Jann has derived her knowledge through a variety of projects that demanded thorough research and the completion of practical tasks.
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