Entrepreneurs worldwide sell on Amazon, striving to beat the competition, your business included. Growing your Amazon business to maximize revenue and profits and stay ahead of the game requires time and attention. Tasks such as replying to comments, answering questions, fulfillment, and creating product listings take ongoing diligence. If these and other tasks become too time-consuming, consider hiring an Amazon Virtual Assistant.
An Amazon Virtual Assistant is a remote assistant who helps you manage your FBA (fulfillment by Amazon) business. Services include those mentioned above and many more, ranging from routine work such as answering questions to managing inventory, supplier relations, marketing, and advertising.
Before starting your search for an Amazon Virtual Assistant, determine the functions that take up the most of your time, are tedious, and that someone else could do better than you. This way, you know what experience and expertise to look for in an Amazon Virtual Assistant.
Below are some of the top tasks you can hire an Amazon Virtual Assistant to perform which will free up your time, allowing you to focus on scaling and growing your FBA business.
Customer support-focused Amazon Virtual Assistant
Customer service is one of the most important aspects of a successful Amazon business. It can also be one of the most laborious tasks. By delegating customer care to an Amazon Virtual Assistant (AVA), you can provide a service level that helps differentiate your FBA business and boosts customer satisfaction.
1. Customer response templates: It’s vital to respond to customer inquiries, and Amazon gives you 24 hours to do so. Develop standard responses that apply to most customer inquiries to save time and enable you to respond quickly.
2. Answering questions asked: A swift answer can be crucial to a buyer ready to make a purchase decision. It also builds consumer trust in your business and products. Select an AVA who can easily become knowledgeable on your product and answer questions quickly, courteously, and professionally.
3. Responding to reviews (both positive and negative): Choose an AVA with a strong customer service background to respond to positive and negative reviews. They should be available to swiftly and adeptly respond to negative reviews, ideally within minutes of the review posting. Consumers today expect answers to reviews, both negative and positive. If you don’t respond promptly and completely, customers may think you don’t care.
4. Matching orders to reviews: Have you ever received a bad review without knowing what went wrong? Matching orders to reviews allows you to identify the customer and contact them to resolve the issue.
5. Following up on negative customer reviews: Don’t panic if you receive a negative review. An experienced AVA will develop a game plan based on guidelines you’ve developed, then respond. Is there a solution that may result in an updated, positive review? Did the customer misunderstand something about your product?
6. Manually shipping FBA units to customers: When you sell with Amazon, you can send your inventory to Amazon for fulfillment and pay the fees, or you can ship it yourself. If shipping products yourself takes too much time, but you’re not ready to offload fulfillment to Amazon, consider hiring an AVA to do the job.
7. Managing stock and removal orders: There are times when removing unfulfillable merchandise or moving inventory to a non-Amazon warehouse is required.
8. Handling refund/exchange requests: Customers request refunds and exchanges for various reasons. Perhaps the product arrived damaged, or it doesn’t suit their needs. When choosing an AVA to perform these functions, look for someone who knows how to deal with them appropriately, including partial refunds when warranted.
9. Confirming FBM (fulfilled by the merchant) orders: This is a must-do when you’re selling through Amazon. Amazon will not pay you for an unconfirmed order.
10. Canceling FBM orders: If you don’t have stock to fulfill an order, cancel it and notify the customer as soon as possible.
11. Managing inventory levels: Proper FBA product inventory management is essential to your success. The goal is to avoid overstocking and tying up too much money in inventory while preventing stockouts that affect fulfillment and lower revenue potential.
Product sourcing and vendor relations
There are a few strategies Amazon sellers use to grow their business. One way is by expanding product selection. It requires upfront analysis, testing, and planning, but done correctly, product expansion can lead to a significant increase in revenue. It’s vital to choose an AVA with product sourcing and vendor relations experience to handle this for you.
12. Sampling, contracting, invoicing, and manufacturing: Finding the right products to sell requires product research and obtaining samples to test and contrast. Once you select a product, you’ll negotiate terms with the manufacturer or supplier and manage to invoice. An AVA can perform some or all of these functions for you.
13. Private label product sourcing: If you want to establish your brand versus reselling others’ brands, consider private label products. These are products you can label and market under your brand.
14. Supplier relations: A proactive, forward-focused approach to supplier relations versus only reacting when a problem arises builds a successful relationship and is integral to managing your supply chain.
Product listing optimization
Optimizing product listings is one of the most crucial, foundational elements of a successful Amazon business. If you don’t closely follow Amazon’s specific optimization guidelines, your products’ ability to be fulfilled by Amazon or appear in their search results, becomes limited. Product listing optimization is an ongoing, labor-intensive, must-do task that requires a dedicated resource, such as an AVA, as you grow your business.
15. Creating an Amazon product listing: An Amazon product listing is the product page you make for each item you’re selling. It contains product information, title, and images. The success of your FBA business hinges on getting this right.
16. Writing copy for your Amazon listing: Copy that is unique and attention-grabbing while being concise and informative is one of the keys to a successful FBA business. Look for experienced copywriters who can create this kind of content while also focusing on keywords for SEO (search engine optimization), which we’ll cover later.
17. Create enhanced (A+) Content: Amazon’s A+ Content helps differentiate your product and make your brand stand out in their busy, competitive marketplace. To take advantage of everything A+ Content offers, you need to know how to use it and design content that compels visitors to choose and trust you as a seller and your brand.
18. Email marketing copy: Use emails to build closer relationships with buyers, boost sales by encouraging click-throughs that lead to conversions, and prompt feedback and positive reviews. You’ll need to develop an email strategy and find a copywriter with the skills to oversee the campaign and accomplish your goals.
19. Optimize product listings (title, description, images): Everything you present and how you present it to potential buyers in the Amazon marketplace matters. Optimizing elements of your product listings, such as the title, description, and images, help you stand out from the competition and drive sales.
20. Keyword research for product listing (including getting them into the copy): Keywords are words and short phrases that searchers use for search queries. Amazon uses keywords to determine which listings appear at the top of their marketplace search results. Including top keywords and phrases in your product listing helps searchers easily find your product.
21. Optimizing backend keywords: Backend keywords appear at the end of your Amazon listing. Amazon uses them to help the right products appear in relevant search results.
22. Optimizing Images: We are a visual society that relies heavily on images when shopping online. High-quality images not only help you stand out from the competition, they affect your sales and Amazon rankings.
23. A/B testing product images and copy: How do you know which images and copy will result in the most sales? Consider using A/B testing, the process of showing two variants of the page to different predefined visitor segments during the same time frame to determine what version drives more conversions.
Fulfillment specialist
As an FBA business, you must adhere to Amazon’s guidelines to get credited for your sales, maintain your FBA status, and ensure a positive customer experience. If your products go out of stock, you can lose your FBA designation. Although it’s possible to get it back, when you’ve lost your status, your product is not included in Amazon’s search results, which can have a massive impact on revenue.
24. Sending FBA inventory: Sending FBA inventory is time consuming. Offloading this task to an AVA frees up your time so you can focus on what you do best—growing your business.
25. Shipping: Shipping labels and Amazon barcodes are required for each item you ship. Downloading these for each unit is another tedious task you can delegate to an AVA.
26. Tracking and confirming receipt: Know where your shipment is along the route and when the items are delivered. If the buyer doesn’t receive an order, you can request Amazon to investigate.
27. Inventory management: As mentioned earlier, diligent inventory management is critical for an FBA business.
Advertising
If you’re aiming to build brand awareness and boost sales and revenue, Amazon advertising and external advertising options such as Google Ads, social media ads, and Microsoft Advertising may be right for you.
28. Set up ad campaigns: Whether you’re going to use Amazon ads or external digital ad campaigns using Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, or all three, an AVA with the expertise required to create and monitor these campaigns helps you increase conversions and get the most out of your ad spend.
29. Keyword research: We previously highlighted the importance of keywords and optimizing backend keywords. Ensure your AVA inputs negative keywords into your campaign, too, so your product isn’t seen when specific keywords are used in search queries.
30. Setting up Amazon audiences: Create a custom audience for your Amazon ads to target buyers in the right segments.
31. Analyze campaigns: Campaign analysis, which digital advertising supports by providing reports and metrics, enables you to make insightful, data-driven changes in your advertising.
32. Ongoing campaign optimization: Sometimes, launching a new campaign isn’t necessary if you monitor and optimize an existing campaign to best drive brand awareness and sales.
Next steps
As you can see, there are many tasks to be performed with an FBA business, and the advantages of using an Amazon Virtual Assistant are substantial. If you have a considerable amount of work across a wide range of tasks that require different AVA skill sets, you may decide to contract multiple AVAs. Regardless of the number of AVAs you need to successfully run your FBA business, it’s vital to select the right AVA to meet your needs. Upwork has the largest pool of proven, remote Amazon FBA specialists you can hire for all the tasks outlined in this guide, and more.
