Have you ever thought about leaving a 9-5 corporate job that pays you a small salary? Do you often crave the freedom and mobility of having a remote online job? Are you an introvert who avoids human interaction and feels comfortable working on your bed? If yes, then it’s time to make your dreams a reality by becoming an Amazon virtual assistant. With this job you can set your own timings, bend the rules to fit your schedule, and earn loads of money. Sounds exciting? Then, follow this guide to find out how to become an Amazon Virtual Assistant.
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As the name suggested, an amazon virtual assistant is someone that remotely helps you successfully run an Amazon business. The services provided by the Virtual Assistants are quite vast and vary with the skills of every individual. In other words, it involves looking after all the tasks that a business owner can delegate to you. Your tasks and responsibilities can include hunting products for their stores, customer service, and advertisement etc.
Most of the e-commerce businesses on Amazon are run by a single person who is often suffering from productivity overload.
Task Management: They might hire you to do the tasks they find tedious such as resolving customer queries, answering emails, or following up on the sales tab.
Support: On the other hand, a business owner might need support with skills they lack, for example: web development, photoshop, and data analysis.
Cost effective: Hiring someone remotely on a per-hour/project basis costs a fraction of hiring a full time employee thus making it the ideal choice for small business owners. It also reduces the overhead costs such as renting an office space and paying bills etc.
Minimum Employee Obligation: Since a virtual assistant serves as an independent contractor, the employers are only responsible for paying their fixed rate thus cutting the taxes and employee benefits cost.
Convenience: Through virtual assistants, business owners can focus on important tasks that boost their growth. An efficient virtual assistant can significantly cut down an entrepreneur’s workload.
If you are planning to virtually sell your services to Amazon Entrepreneurs, then here are a bunch of most in-demand skills for a virtual assistant job.
1. Amazon Product Hunting
Probably one of the most required and basic services as it requires extensive research and market analysis. Solo-Entrepreneurs who have their plates full consider this task to be a waste of their time and prefer to outsource it. Most importantly, because the success of an ecommerce business depends extensively on the quality, profit margin, and trending product.
Your job will be to find the winning product that doesn’t break their bank while generating higher sales. Here are few characteristics that constitute a winner-product but it may vary as per seller own criteria:
Note: Product haunting criteria is subjective to Amazon Programs (FBA, FBM, Wholesale etc) and always vary seller to seller because they have their own set of attributes.
2. Sourcing and Logistics
You can source products on Amazon through various means such as drop shipping, wholesalers and manufacturers. Having decided on the product, the next step is to identify potential suppliers and manufacturers. The most common portal for sourcing and delivering products to Amazon Warehouse is Alibaba.com. While finding a supplier make sure they can be trusted by checking their profile status, for example do they have trade assurance? What kind of reviews do they have? And Do they have a Gold Suppliers Badge? Etc. These are a few steps you can take to avoid frauds and scams.
Logistics include figuring out the legal restriction, contract writing and signing, patent infringements, shipping and customs costs, and safety regulations. All of this requires some experience and extensive research, so don’t try to rush it.
3. Listing Creation
After months of hunting and sourcing the product, now is the time that Amazon VA will create a listing of product on Amazon. After this, customers can buy the product and start generating revenue. Your job here is to create a compelling, detailed, and optimized listing to drive maximum traffic.
These are a few things to keep in mind while creating listings for your seller.
4. Advertisement (PPC) on Amazon
One of the highly sought after and highly paid skills for the Amazon VAs as the number of PPC (pay per click) advertisement experts are relatively low. Amazon offers a PPC advertising model, where a small fee is charged to the advertiser when a customer clicks on the ad. CPC the cost per click depends on the keyword competition and search volume which you can find out via tools like Jungle Scout and Helium-10.
Sponsored Products ads, Sponsored Display Ads and Sponsored Brands are the three types of advertisements offered by Amazon. To learn about all types of advertisement models and the process of running an advertisement, you can enroll for the Amazon Advertisement Certification for free.
5. Ranking on Amazon
SEO stands for search engine optimization and sellers hire SEO experts to increase the ranking of their product on Amazon search results. As the ranking increases, so do the sales resulting in increased revenue.
For this job, you will have to study the search algorithm of Amazon in detail along with learning effective keyword search.
6. Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is a vital aspect of running any business, and Amazon is no different. This step is a very early part of the process and comes before product listing. For this task, you will be asked to compare the products with the ones offered by the competitors. This includes, price comparison, auditing your competitors’ product listings, reviewing their branding, checking their reviews, and studying their targeted keywords etc. All these insights allow you to create a product listing that stands out among the competition.
7. Customer Service
Customer services include tending to and resolving any queries raised by the customers before, during, and after buying your product. Responding to their questions via email, and phone calls will be required to keep them satisfied and happy.
8. Inventory Management
It is the process of tracking, storing, and shipping products to satisfy customer demand quickly and efficiently. Inventory management is a very important part of the process as the excess or shortage of product might affect the storage cost and customer satisfaction respectively.
There are two ways of efficiently managing an inventory; the traditional method is to keep a tab of shipping and storage using excel sheets or the more automated approach is to use a third-party inventory management software’s supported by Amazon.
Note: Other than above main skills, there are some more skills within umbrella of Amazon Services which Amazon VA can explore.
The question is: how do you find out all of this information? Well don’t worry, here are a few tools that can be beneficial for gaining these valuable insights while mining the best products.
Jungle Scout
Starting with Jungle Scout, the ultimate Amazon research tool that goes to the deepest and darkest dungeon of this digital rainforest to find the winning products for you. Apart from this, its features such as Niche Hunter, Product Tracker, Product Database, and Keyword Scout help you efficiently and conveniently manage product hunt, inventory, listings, and sales.
Helium 10
H-10 works just like Jungle Scout and offers almost the same features. Besides suggesting potential and profitable product ideas, finding appropriate keywords, and optimizing listings this web application helps you manage everything through one dashboard.
Viral-Launch
With its innovative features and data-driven approach, viral launch is the game changer in the field of FBA. You can fully optimize and automate an online business with it using Amazon Keyword, Amazon Advertising & PPC Research, and Amazon Keyword Tracking.
Note: Other than these main tools, there are so many tools which can be used by Amazon Sellers and Amazon VA’s depending upon the task.
For those living in Pakistan, there are countless online resources and institutes that train individuals for this job. For example,
Extreme Commerce: They conduct online training, bootcamps, seminars, 1-1 training, and corporate training. Moreover, they also run an incubator in 8 cities of Pakistan to provide young entrepreneurs a dedicated environment to grow their business. Just enroll yourself in one of their programs to equip yourself with essential skills and conquer the world of e-commerce.
Enablers: Enablers offer a complete course on Virtual Assistance along with a series of video lectures for newbies who want to jump to the field of e-commerce. They have their centers spread across the country to enable everyone to learn, earn, achieve, and accomplish in life.
E-com Outset: Their online learning portal offers 4 types of courses; Amazon Beginners Pack, Amazon Advanced Basics, Amazon certified Virtual Assistant, and Amazon Sellers training.
All of these programs and courses come with unique perks that can prove very beneficial for newcomers with no previous experience and education. Sign up for their certified courses to begin your Amazon Virtual Assistant career. We hope this guide will help you and help clear things for you.
Let us know in the comments if you have any questions!
1. What is the average monthly income of Amazon Virtual Assistant?
The salary range for the said job varies greatly with the experience and the skills offered by the VA. However on average a newbie Amazon VA earns upto $1000, mid-level ears $1000-$3000, and the experts who set up their own agency have a potential of earning more than $5000 per month.
Bonus: Don’t forget the conversion rate of American Dollars to PKR.
2. How long does it take to become a Virtual Assistant?
Depending on your abilities and intellect the time period for becoming a VA ranges from 1-6 months on average.
3. How to get started?
If you are convinced and want to kickstart your career in this field, then follow this game plan:
Biography of Wajeeha Yasmin
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