The decision to Hire eCommerce Virtual Assistant for Assisting in your store’s operations needs to be carefully analyzed as the growth and success of your eCommerce business depends on it. Hiring the wrong candidate is not only going to waste your time and money, but also make it difficult for you to achieve your business goals.

To help you select the right virtual assistant (VA) in the first go who provides valuable support to your eCommerce business and grants you benefits like improved efficiency and productivity and leaving more time for you to focus on your business critical tasks and achieving a perfect work-life balance, we are sharing with you some important things to consider while hiring a VA for your eCommerce store.

1. Be sure about your needs

First of all, you ought to have clarity over whether you really need a virtual assistant. For this, you have to contemplate over these questions. Are there too many routine tasks that you are unable to perform on your own and need someone’s help to do them for you? Do you have got some other more important tasks that you are unable to devote enough time for? Is it right to pay someone else for doing tedious and repetitive tasks when you don’t have other important tasks to take care of in the time available with you? Answering these questions will make it easy to decide whether you actually need a virtual assistant or not.

2. Write a clear job description

Whether you are looking for a Virtual Assistant for eCommerce on Upwork, job boards or any other online platform, you need to describe clearly in the job description the various work related responsibilities and roles the virtual assistant will perform. This will help the candidates who are keen to apply for your job to better understand your expectations and requirements and judge whether they are right fit for it or not. So only those candidates will apply who seriously feel themselves to be suitable for the job, thus saving you time in filtering a huge number of responses from the interested candidates.

3. Go for candidates with experience

Hiring an eCommerce virtual assistant is a crucial decision on which the success of your business depends. Rather than hiring a new candidate who does not have much experience in the eCommerce world, you should go for one who has adequate experience and expertise in the eCommerce realm.

Hiring a not so experienced candidate would eventually cost you more as you need to spend more time and money on training, monitoring and supervising him.

But in the case of an experienced candidate, you need to spend minimal time and effort in onboarding him as he is already familiar with how to work in an eCommerce setting. He can work independently and perform even complex tasks with efficiency and precision. So you need not worry about how he is working and need not spend much time in monitoring, supervising and guiding him. With him taking care of your routine and time-consuming tasks, you become free to focus on your most important tasks of revenue generation and thinking strategically for growing your business.

4.Skills

The VA for eCommerce that you hire should possess various eCommerce related skills like product data entry, uploading products, data mining, categorization of products, inventory management, market research, writing product titles and descriptions, image optimization, etc. So make sure the candidate you choose for hiring is equipped with these eCommerce skills for running your store in a smooth and streamlined manner.

Also, the candidate should be proficient in using various eCommerce automation tools, softwares and platforms like ecommerce management systems like Magento, WooCommerce, etc., multi-channel order and inventory management softwares, tools for abandoned cart recovery and sending push notifications, drop-ship automation software, etc.

5. Right fit

Apart from having the right experience and skills, the candidate you select should also be perfect fit for your eCommerce company. He should be motivated and dedicated enough towards working for your business. He should respect your brand values and work according to your company’s culture and vision. If he does not possess these qualities, he may leave or his productivity may start to go down.

To avoid this you should hire only that candidate who has got these skills. Moreover, you should communicate to the candidate your company’s culture, vision and brand values at the beginning. Also, you need to make him feel welcome to your company, treat him like your in-house team member and communicate with him from time to time. This will help to keep him inspired and motivated to give his best shot at work.

6.Check their past projects

By asking prospective candidates to share their past work with you is a good way to judge if they have the necessary eCommerce related knowledge and skills and if they are competent enough to work for your eCommerce store.

7. Conduct interview of selected candidates

Based on the responses you get from your job ads or references, you need to shortlist the candidates and then interview them. You can hold their interviews through Skype or Google Hangouts. You should at least conduct a 30-minute call in which you should ask candidates these questions. What are their skills, expertise and job responsibilities? Which strengths do they have? Why do they want to apply for the job? What are their interests apart from their work? Their answers to these questions will help you gain insights into the personality of the candidates and decide which one of them is the best. Accordingly, you can hire him.

8. Payments and onboarding

Once you have decided to hire a particular candidate, you need to discuss payments with him in terms of hourly or weekly payment and the mode of transferring payments. Then you have to begin with the process of onboarding him, giving him minimal training if required and explain to him the tasks to be done. Also, you need to discuss with him various security protocols and the work process to be followed.

For the initial few weeks, you need to give some guidance to the VA and supervise his work to some degree. After spending some time, he will become familiar with the work. Then he can perform various tasks related to your ecommerce store independently and without your supervision. By performing time-consuming and mundane tasks efficiently and accurately, the VA would allow your store to function in a smooth and streamlined way and help you get back enough time for utmost important tasks like revenue generation and strategic thinking for growing your business and for maintaining work-life balance.

You can save the hassles involved in hiring the ideal eCommerce virtual assistant by opting for the skilled and expert VAs of a leading outsourcing eCommerce Virtual Assistant Service like Matrid Technologies. Strong and reliable support given by its VAs would play a key role in taking the growth and success of your eCommerce business to new heights.