It takes more than one person to run a successful online store. There’s just plain too many things to do and not enough hours in the day to get them done. While you might find yourself cringing at the idea of handing over any of the reins of your company to a virtual stranger, the time wasted by micromanaging your web store is limiting the rate of growth your company’s experiencing, not to mention the toll it’s probably taking on your personal life.
Here’s just a few all-too-important daily online store tasks you can outsource to your VA with the utmost confidence – all done remotely in the cloud:
Online Order Processing
As a business owner, you might feel like it’s your job to handle every order that comes into your store personally. However, this is a repetitive task that you can have someone doing for pennies-on-the-dollar when compared to the time deficit they cause. You can use the additional time saved working to improve your online storefront, secure more vendors, and seek out new and profitable product/service lines to help expand your business further.
Teach your virtual assistants to sniff out up-selling and cross-selling opportunities when they interact with customers via phone, live chat and email, to rake in even more profits.
Customer Service
Service level is a factor that’s monumentally important to nearly all customers. There are so many time-consuming elements required for an online store to be profitable while still gaining a reputation for offering good customer service.
Whether presale or after the sale, a virtual assistant can handle all your frontline customer service requests, in real time, via all cloud tools available. They can deal with customers who’re on the verge of buying but still have questions, handle returns and exchanges, along with managing all other customer questions and complaints while you do more important things.
Inventory Management
Inventory is a huge concern in any retail business. Let your VA use cloud collaboration tools to monitor stock levels and update your inventory to reflect what’s truly available in real time. Once certain agreed-upon thresholds are met, give them authorization to order more to keep levels where they need to be. Let them be your virtual lifeline between you and your dropshippers, monitoring the supplier’s stock levels and adjusting your store’s online inventory to avoid ordering issues with your consumers.
Website Admin and Maintenance
Basic web admin tasks like making blogposts and responding to comments in the comment section of your store can be done by almost any virtual assistant, regardless of their experience level with a minimal amount of training needed. More sensitive tasks, such as coding, design and maintenance can be still done by a qualified VA, such as the one from 247VirtualAssistant.com, much more cheaply than if you were to hire office staff or freelancers for the same tasks. Let them deal with the hassle of updates gone awry, clean up broken links, deal with sourcing and editing images, and make sure all copyrights, disclosures and coding is up to date on the site.
Marketing
Spreading your brand all over the Internet is a monumental task. One that can take up a lot of your personal time, in addition to money. Let VAs do all the down-and-dirty work like creating and submitting social blasts, press releases, guest posting, blog commenting, forum interaction, and video editing. Find the right assistant who has experience marketing in your niche and they’ll often have a large list of influential contacts that can help them market your business better than you could on your own.
Of course, you could keep doing all these jobs yourself. But why would you? How much is your time worth? Nearly every successful entrepreneur that exists today has got to where they are by learning to delegate and use cloud software to automate and simplify things, not micromanage. Hire yourself a virtual team and you might just become the next Internet success story!
