Scale your business whilst doing less by leveraging the power of outsourcing key tasks.
In this article we cover the top tasks you should outsource for your Amazon business. This will free up your time to focus on growing your business!
Task 1 Customer Service
Amazon requires that you answer all buyer messages within 24 hours, every day of the week including holidays.
It’s best you answer customer service inquiries personally for the first few weeks to double check that your product has no major issues.
You can use the questions customers send you to create templates on how to answer each one of those types of questions. Then find a virtual assistant who can login and check customer messages twice a day at fixed times using the templates you gave them to copy and paste the answer each time.
This way you don’t have to login twice a day to check messages. If your agent comes across a new issue you can simply create a new template to use in the future.
Task 2 Sourcing Agent
One of the most time-consuming tasks is sourcing factories for your product.
If you’re buying from China you really need to find someone on the ground that can source products for you and monitor factories during production.
Task 3 Inspection
You need to check the quality of every shipment leaving your factory.
Instead of wasting time trying to do this yourself, hire a professional who uses statistical quality control such as AQL to check every shipment on your behalf. All you need to do is to provide them with an accurate sample and they can check every batch against that.
If your product contains any food, liquid or cream that may be applied to someone’s skin you also need to perform regular lab checks of the items.
Task 4 Warehouse
Receiving shipments from China or your US factory to your home for repacking, labeling and posting is very time-consuming and inconvenient.
There are several Amazon warehouse solutions available. Search Google for one near you or ask for recommendations in a Facebook group.
The warehouse can receive your shipments from China, split them into several smaller shipments and then arrange for UPS to deliver them into Amazon. This will actually save you a lot of money because the cost of a warehouse doing this is much less than sending multiple shipments from China.
Task 5 Design
Unless you are a pro with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, it’s better to let someone else handle all of your design needs.
From packaging to editing your photos, there are a lot of reasonably priced designers available on Upwork and fiverr.
Task 6 Photography
Having great product images can boost your conversion from 10% to 20% or more.
People want to see what they’re buying, and high-quality photos build trust in your product. Proper lighting and camera settings can make a huge difference.
It costs around $100-$200 to get professional shots done for your product, but this pays for itself within the first month.
Task 7 Accounting
Amazon’s backend systems for calculating your costs and profits are really complicated.
You can’t actually see your profit anywhere in Seller Central. However, cash cow pro lets you monitor your sales and profits easily in one dashboard.
I would strongly recommend you get a professional accountant to do your annual return, and get a bookkeeper to calculate all your costs and final net profit every month. You can’t run your Amazon business without accurate data.