What is an Amazon Virtual Assistant?
An Amazon Virtual Assistant is someone that helps you in running your Amazon business. The services provided by the Virtual Assistants are quite broad and vary with the skills of every individual. In other words, it means looking after all the tasks that a business owner can assign you. Your tasks and responsibilities can include advertisement, hunting products for their stores, and customer service, etc.
Why do people hire Amazon Virtual Assistant?
Many e-commerce businesses on Amazon are run by a single person. Due to this, they often suffer from productivity overload.
- Task Management: They might hire you to do the tasks they find difficult such as resolving answering emails, customer queries, or following up on the sales tab.
- Support: A business owner might need support with skills they don’t have. For example: Photoshop, Web Development, and Data Analysis.
- Cost-effective: Hiring someone remotely on a per-hour/project is the best choice for small business owners. It also reduces other costs such as renting an office space and paying bills etc.
- Minimum Employee Obligation: Since a virtual assistant works as an independent contractor, the employers are only responsible for paying their fixed rate plus they can cut the taxes and employee benefits cost.
- Convenience: Through virtual assistants, business owners can target other important tasks that boost their growth.
How to become an Amazon Virtual Assistant in Pakistan:
A positive development for our e-commerce sector is that Amazon has included Pakistan in its list of approved sellers, according to some sources.
If you want to become an Amazon Virtual Assistant in Pakistan, you must follow these steps to succeed as an Amazon Virtual Assistant:
Step 1 – Take proper Amazon VA Training:
To become an Amazon Virtual Assistant, you must know everything that an Amazon VA knows. For that, you must take proper Amazon VA Training. You can join any institute that teaches all the things about Amazon VA:
- Manage an Amazon Account.
- Understand all the data research tools for Product Research and Product Sourcing for Amazon.
- Order Fulfillment tasks (Inventory replenishment to shipping FBM orders to customers).
- Providing customer service (Handling Returns, Refunds, Reviews, and Inquiries).
- Management of an Amazon Listing (Inception to Optimization).
- Amazon PPC (Advertisement campaign Management for Amazon).
- Product Launch and Ranking.
Step 2 – Choose Your Business Structure:
The answer to ‘Which business structure should I choose’ will depend upon a variety of different criteria including:
- Where your business is physically located?
- What types of clients will you be working with?
- What VA work will you be doing? What skills do you already have?
- How responsive can you be to your clients?
- How will your income be changing as you will switch to full-time employment?
Step 3 – Decide Which Virtual Assistant Services You Will Offer Your Clients:
Deciding on services is an important point for many new Virtual Assistants. There’s no rulebook anywhere that says you have to stick with only one specific service offering once you start.
When we talk about Amazon VA, everyone thinks it’s about checking email, managing their client’s calendar, returning phone calls, doing administrative work.
These things can be included but there are plenty of other virtual assistant services you can offer as well, such as web design, social media management, travel arrangements, copyediting, etc.
Step 4 – Decide on Your Pricing Structure:
When you’re deciding/setting your rates, it should make it worth your time. Time and money are the most important factors. Other things that you must keep in mind are:
- You’re not an employee. You’re a subcontractor.
- You also aren’t granted any benefits (no sick days, paid vacation, health insurance, or retirement contributions)
- You’ll have an overhead that must be covered. It includes things like office expenses, some software subscriptions, etc.
Step 5 – Establish Your Online Presence:
If you’re going to be working online and providing virtual assistant services from your desired location, you must have an established online presence.
To get started as a virtual assistant, you can establish your online presence with the following options:
- VA-dedicated social media profiles.
- A resume.
- A Hire Me page.
Step 6 – Land New Clients by Pitching and Networking:
The final and most important step towards launching a new VA business is finding your first few clients. Getting from client number 0 to 3 takes a lot more dedication and hard work than getting from 3 to 6. The difference seems to be a result of time, experience, exposure, and confidence. Once these four elements mix, the growth process becomes easier.