10 Freelancers You Need to Automate Holiday Ecommerce Operations

The holidays are always a crazy time for any business, but most especially so for online businesses. It doesn’t have to be that way, though – not if you automate your holiday eCommerce operations with the help of experienced freelancers.

The process of automating holiday eCommerce operations is fairly simple. You just need to figure out what kind of help you need, go on an online marketplace to find the right candidates, and get them set up to handle your holiday eCommerce operations. Note that hiring through a marketplace like FreeUp gives you the advantage of being able to get started within 24 hours.

Here we have the 10 most common freelancers that you should consider hiring to help you out with holiday eCommerce operations:

1.  Inventory Manager

You need to know what kind of supply of which products you need to cover the busy season. Guessing will only leave you with too much of one product and too little of another, both of which are going to hurt you instead of allowing you to make the most out of the holidays. Hire an inventory manager to go through your records and crunch the numbers to come up with estimates. Then you will know what you need, how much of it, and when so you can maintain good inventory levels to keep sales flowing smoothly.

2.  Supplier Manager

The next step is to make sure that you have a steady and sufficient supply of all your products. This means contacting your main suppliers and backup suppliers.

Getting everything organized entails a lot of calls and emails, and its best to hire a freelancer to take care of all this. They can check what volumes your suppliers can deliver throughout the holidays, what their schedules and lead times are, and more. Then you will know what to expect and how to prepare so your holiday eCommerce operations can run without a hitch.

3.  Keyword Researcher

You’re going to want to run a few advertising campaigns to maximize your sales over the holidays. You can’t miss this opportunity to reach out to all those holiday shoppers and get ahead of the competition.

The first step is hiring a keyword researcher who has specific experience on the platforms you are using. Give them access to whatever data you have on past keyword performance and parameters for new keyword research. They can then come up with a good list for you to use to spruce up your listings and to run pay per click and social media campaigns.

4.  Advertising Manager

You may have some experience running advertising campaigns, but no one can do it better than someone who is focused on this type of work. The results you get will make the investment worthwhile, especially considering the time that you will free up by passing off this task.

Give your updated keyword list to a freelancer who has experience running campaigns on the sales channels you use. Discuss your specific campaign expectations as well as your overarching expectations for holiday eCommerce operations. Then give them access to any relevant data on past campaigns so they can draw up a plan of action to optimize your holiday campaigns. Have them implement and report back to you on each campaign’s progress as you focus your attention on the bigger picture.

5.  Listing Optimizer

Busy shopping days are the best time to get all your listings updated. You want your products to have maximum visibility all the time, of course. You can take the best advantage of this type of boost during the holidays, however, when there are more shoppers out there with money in hand.

Hire a listing optimizer to take those same updated keywords and re-optimize all the elements of your listings – titles, bullet points, descriptions, backend keywords, and image alt tags. It will help with organic visibility and boost your paid campaigns, too.

6.  Graphic Designer

Social media campaigns are a great way to grab attention on any day, and are especially useful during the holidays. You need to be running special holiday campaigns during this busiest season to catch new customers and bring back existing ones.

Hire a graphic designer who can create stunning visuals that are different from your usual posts. Make sure it’s someone who knows what the requirements are for each social channel you use so that all your visuals are optimized. This will draw more attention to your products and promotions so you can bring more people to your store.

7.  Copywriter

Along with your visuals, you need enticing copy to highlight your products’ features and show off all the deals you are offering.

A freelance copywriter with experience in your niche can produce all the text that you need to get the message across – whether stand alone or to go on the actual graphics. You want to be as concise yet as clear as possible, so you will need the help of a professional. They will also know how to add those keywords in to gain as much traction as possible.

Plus, if you have videos that you want to spruce up as well, a copywriter can create a fresh script that you can dub over to re-purpose them for holiday sales. A bonus freelancer you can hire is a video editor to create really excellent videos.

8.  Social Media Manager

It’s not enough just to randomly upload graphics and text to all your social media accounts. You need someone who first off knows what works on different platforms so they can work with a copywriter to tweak and optimize. Secondly, a social media manager will know when best to get each set posted for maximum reach. They will also know how to best respond to any interaction on these posts, and most importantly, can keep a close watch so that any inquiries are taken care of in a timely manner. This brings us to the next freelancer you need to automate holiday eCommerce operations.

9.  Customer Service Representative

You may need one or many extra sets of these hands over the holidays, depending on your anticipated sales volume versus the slow months. Hiring freelance customer service representatives is the best way to go since you can scale quickly and easily without making too huge of an investment.

What you need to think about here is the areas where you need extra help, and how many additional hours you need covered. Typically, you should have customer service representatives who specialize in voice, email, and chat. These areas have different approaches, so you want to make sure that the people you are hiring have the experience needed to communicate effectively on these channels.

In addition, note that you will want to cover social media as well. You want a social media manager to be able to pass certain customer queries over when they extend beyond their area of expertise.

10. Project Manager

To keep everyone organized – both existing and new hires – you need a project manager. You don’t want to get bogged down throughout the holiday season trying to manage everything that’s going on.

Hiring a project manager takes a lot of the nitty gritty work off your shoulders and gives you a single point of contact so that you can also stay organized. Make sure that this person understands your business well and communicates well with you. The smoother your relationship with this manager is, the better everything will go.

Final Thoughts

If you want to get your holiday eCommerce operations automated so you don’t lose all your customers and all your hair by the time spring rolls around, then you need to hire extra help when things get busy. These 10 freelancers are the most practical hires that you can make for this frantic shopping season.

Moreover, because they are freelancers, you only need to take them on for however long you need them. Some of them may prove so useful that you won’t want to let them go even when things slow down, but the point is that you can do whatever makes the most sense for your business. Keeping things streamlined moving forward is also a great move, and having a bunch of freelancers who have just gone through fire for you gives you the pick of the litter when it comes time to scale back down.

Take a few minutes today to think about the pain points in your holiday eCommerce operations. Then go through this list and check who you need to hire to get things back on track. If you’re not already on FreeeUp, take another few minutes to sign up so you can request the freelancers you need and get things streamlined within a couple of days.