eBay Seller Virtual Assistant

Managing an online business is tough especially on a very competitive marketplace like eBay. When selling on eBay, there are many things that need your attention like order processing, customer support, and inventory management — and they need to be dealt with simultaneously. It’s definitely not a one-man job. If you want to maintain a stable eBay business and eventually grow your online store, you need a little help. That’s what an eBay virtual assistant is for.

An eBay specialist can work on a lot of the background tasks involved in running a successful online store. They work remotely to ensure that your eBay account is in excellent shape and that your customers get the best service.

As of mid-2019, eBay has 1.3 billion listings, 25 million sellers, and 182 million users worldwide. These staggering figures prove just how competitive selling items on eBay is. Not only do you need to have high quality items in your store, you also need exceptional customer service, amazing product photos, keyword-enriched product descriptions, up-to-date market and competitor research — the list goes on.

If you’re wondering whether hiring an eBay assistant is beneficial for your business, spend a few minutes answering these questions:

1. Are you spending most of your day creating listings for your store?
2. Do you have inventory and orders backlog that you just can’t tackle?
3. Have you lost a customer or two because you were too busy to respond to them quickly?
4. Do you feel like your items lose out on the market because they weren’t priced competitively?
5. Are you thinking of adding new product lines to your store but don’t have the time to do product sourcing?
6. Do you want to market your business on social media or through online paid ads, but don’t know how to do it?
7. Are you certain that you need help managing your eBay store but can’t afford a full-time employee?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, then you definitely need help from an eBay assistant! An eBay virtual assistant can take the tedious tasks off your hands so you can focus more on things that contribute directly to growing your business.

An eBay specialist’s main role is to help you manage every aspect of your eBay store. However, it can be useful to learn the specific things they can do for your business so that you can assign individual tasks to separate VAs as you scale your business. Initially, you might find that it’s easier and more economical to hire just one VA to do everything, but any business that’s set on growth will need more people with specialized roles.

As you scale your business, you can hire a virtual assistant who specifically creates the listings for your eBay store, someone who does data entry and keeps track of your inventory, and someone who works on your customer service. One of the best things about hiring virtual assistants for these tasks is that it’s easier to scale and adjust your staffing solution to your current needs as opposed to hiring full-time employees.

Here are some of the most common eBay VA services:

• Order and Inventory Management

Let a virtual assistant do eBay listings management for you to ensure that your store is always sufficiently stocked. An eBay seller VA can also manage order cancellations, inventory details, and act as a liaison between you and your supplier.

• Customer Service

Customer satisfaction is vital in every business. You need to make sure that tracking orders, replacements, and refunds are in order. You can hire an eBay virtual assistant to provide chat, phone, text, or email support to your customers to ensure top-notch customer experience.

• Product Sourcing

Finding the right products to sell is just as important as selling them. However, it can be a very time-consuming process. Have your eBay seller VA comb through your product options whether you’re doing dropshipping, private label or white label, wholesale or online arbitrage.

• Documentation and Reporting

Need a hand in preparing monthly reports or filing important documents? You can let that task be handled by an eBay seller VA too.

• Listing Optimization

An eBay seller can help you make your eBay listings more discoverable and enticing by adding keywords and improving your product descriptions. You can also task your VA with editing your product photos to make them more appealing to buyers.

• Marketing and Promotion

Every business needs to be promoted in order to reach more customers. You can hire a virtual assistant who is proficient in marketing to help you with this. A VA can help you write blog articles for your website so your customers can learn more about your products.

You can also hire a VA to manage your social media marketing and reach out to influencers who can help endorse your products. A virtual assistant can also help you with email marketing and even paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google, and other platforms.

• Product and Market Research

To grow your eBay store, you need to do some research about new products and market competition. An eBay seller VA can also help you with that. They can find more products for you to sell or research your competitors to ensure that your items are well priced.

An effective eBay seller VA needs to be knowledgeable about the platform and the tools and software needed to perform the job well. Although you can train them on the specifics of how you use these tools, they at least have to have a basic understanding of them so you can hit the ground running as soon as possible.

There are also a lot of soft skills that a good eBay virtual assistant needs to have. The most important skills to look for depend on the exact tasks you’re hiring a VA for. If you’re hiring a customer support eBay VA, you want someone who is patient and has great communication skills. If you’re hiring someone to manage your inventory, you want someone who is very organized and attentive to details.

If you’re hiring an eBay VA to do more specialized tasks such as content writing, graphic design, SEO, or social media management, make sure that they have sufficient training and experience in those fields too.

When availing eBay account mangement services, it’s important to partner with a reliable virtual staffing company. For instance, at 20four7VA, we provide eBay training to all our eCommerce virtual assistants before they are eligible for client endorsement. This is to make sure that they’ve got the necessary training to get started immediately.

Now on to the hiring process. The first thing you need to prepare is a list of the tasks that you’re going to delegate to them. This will help us prepare a job description and do accurate skill-matching with the eBay Seller VAs in our database.

Another important list that you need to prepare is the list of tools and software that your potential VA will be using to help manage your online store. It’s generally good practice to hire someone who is already familiar with some of the software you’re using so you can skip the training period for this part. As industry leaders, we’re also well-equipped to help you train your VA should you need it.

Once you have a handful of candidates to choose from, it’s important to interview all of them. Their resume can show you their training and work experience, but a video interview allows you to gauge if they have the right attitude for the job as well.

The process doesn’t stop after you have chosen a candidate. To ensure that your chosen VA can truly help your business, you need to prepare a good onboarding process to familiarize them with your tools and processes. At 20four7VA, we help our clients with the onboarding process to make everything as smooth as possible. We also have dedicated Customer Support Officers who do VA monitoring to ensure that VAs are doing their work effectively.

At 20four7VA, we have a straightforward pricing system for hiring an eBay seller VA. Pricing is based on two things: the contract hours and the skill level of your desired eBay seller assistant.

If you’re just looking for an eBay virtual assistant to do basic admin and data entry work, you can hire a Tier 1 eBay VA for as low as $77/wk for a 10-hour per week contract. You can check out our eCommerce virtual assistant page for more information about VA tier levels and prices.