The beginning stages are tight for any business.
Thankfully, as an Amazon dropshipper, starting lean isn’t an issue. You don’t have to hold any inventory nor do you have to ship it. But as you mold and tweak your methods, you’ll start bringing in more business than you know what to do with.
Dealing with five, six, and seven figures in sales is too much for one person to handle.
The solution? Find qualified yet affordable candidates to fill the customer service, ordering, and sourcing responsibilities you no longer have the time for.
Below is a detailed breakdown of how to effectively and affordably outsource work for your Amazon dropshipping business.
Outsourcing Customer Service Work
Amazon weighs customer satisfaction heavily, utilizing algorithms and metrics to monitor your level of service. Your Amazon dropshipping customer service rep should be literate with metrics and experienced at handling inquiries and complaints.
Outsourcing your customer service means no more sweating the smaller snafus. Focus on the bigger picture instead.
3 Questions to ask a Customer Service Candidate:
1. What company do you think offers the best customer service? Why?
2. Have you ever said no to a valued customer’s request? What happened?
3. What do you do when you have an issue that your policy doesn’t cover?
Pro Tip: Download our five-star customer service email templates for free.
Outsourcing Ordering Work
Inventory is tricky with no physical warehouse.
Your ordering rep is like your virtual warehouse manager — dealing with the various machinations involved in the comings and goings of various products. Communication skills are a must because coordination with suppliers ensures a customer’s product is promptly delivered.
When you find the right person for this job, you’ll no longer have to worry about having products on deck to meet customer demand. It’ll be taken care of for you.
3 Questions to ask an Ordering Candidate:
How do you organize and prioritize your work?
Has your attention to detail impacted any previous clients or companies? How?
How do you ensure accuracy with documentation?
Pro Tip: OAGenius allows your team to confirm shipments and upload tracking numbers automatically. Try it free!
Outsourcing Sourcing Work
Sourcing is a job that’s immersed in product research.
There’s a need to embrace the grind with sourcing work, as one meticulously assesses the Amazon catalog for the best prospective products for your business. Combing through data to create a list of appealing items is the work of an unsung hero. An intimate understanding of your products to weigh sourcing decisions is key in this role.
As the business owner, all you’ll have to do is assess the filtered-down list and choose the best items!
With the right candidate, you’ll save time and earn money on lucrative items!
3 Questions to ask an Ordering Candidate:
Is analyzing data a strength of yours? Explain.
How strong are your sourcing skills?
Have you ever gathered information from multiple sources? How did you determine which categories to source from?
Pro Tip: Try the Gravity product sourcing Chrome extension to quickly identify profitable products across all of the best supplier sites. Try it free!
Where to Find Workers for Outsourcing
Outsourcing your work can be hard on the budget — especially at the beginning stages of expansion. Take a measured, financially-focused approach to get the most bang for your buck.
A great tool to find people at affordable pricing is OnlineJobs.ph, where highly-competent and dedicated candidates in the Philippines can fulfill your outsourcing needs. You can get the help of a highly qualified Filipino virtual assistant for $2.75 an hour!
3 questions to ask remote candidates on OnlineJobs.ph or similar services:
Do you have another job? If so, where, and how many hours, are you working?
Have you worked for a foreign employer before?
Will you work from a home or an internet café?
How to Train Your Team
Virtual Assistants and other remote workers can’t be trained in person.
Loom is a work communication tool with instantly-shareable videos. It’s a free app that’s compatible with many of the platforms you are already using. Loom provides clear, visually-aided instructions to trainees—even if they’re on the other side of the world.
Consider this: 10 seconds of recorded video is equivalent to 81 seconds of typing. This means video tutorials are a much more efficient training tool than sending a chain of long-winded emails.
How to Schedule Your Team
Once you’re in charge of several people – instead of just yourself – one of the newer, trickier responsibilities you’ll be dealing with is scheduling daily tasks for your team.
An online tool, like Hubstaff, has features such as online timesheets, employee scheduling, and even online invoicing to ease the administrative side of your role.
It is important to clearly define the expectations you have for your virtual team. Outlining daily or weekly deliverables, setting concrete goals, and establishing deadlines are the keys to establishing a good working relationship. Once you find a successful workflow, it’s good to document it. You can use this document every time you need to onboard a new virtual assistant, saving you time along the way.
How to Analyze Results
Now that your outsourced Amazon dropshipping team is trained and properly scheduled, it’s time to measure performance.
OAGenius’s Sourcing Analysis tracks the overall productivity of your workers. The state-of-the-art software displays the number of listings your team members create, then analyzes the profitability of those listings. This is a great way to be sure the additional labor is achieving a return on your investment.
Sourcing Analysis isn’t the only feature that OAGenius offers Amazon dropshippers. There’s an abundance of predictive and analytical technology that’ll take your business to the next level. The best part is that you can try it for free!
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