25 Tasks to Easily Pass Off to Shopify Virtual Assistants

Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms today that is used by both start-up businesses and established brands. Just like in a physical store, you need an assistant to help you run and grow your Shopify website.

With the advancement of technology, almost everything can be found and done on the internet. For companies who operate online, outsourcing to Shopify virtual assistants is one of the ways to scale up your business. Learning to delegate tasks that are mundane yet evenly important to keep your business running will help you focus on bigger things.

In this article, we will give you some of the important tasks that you can readily pass off for the growth of your business.

Top 25 Tasks That You Can Outsource to Shopify Virtual Assistants

There is a lot going on in any online store. Your operations consist of different areas that contribute to the success of your business. To make it easier for you to understand this comprehensive list, we have categorized the tasks you can assign to Shopify virtual assistants, depending on their expertise.

SHOPIFY STORE SET-UP

Starting with creating an account with Shopify and setting up the basic tools to make your store work, it will probably take a lot more time than you think. But you can’t spend a great deal of effort to learn all that technical stuff, only to end up with an average looking website. Hiring a Shopify virtual assistant to set up your online store is probably the best investment to make for your business at this stage.

1 – Shopify Account Set-Up

The first thing you want to do to kickstart your new e-commerce venture is to create a Shopify account. It’s one of the most popular platforms for a reason — easy to use and customizable. If you decided to hire a Shopify virtual assistant from the get-go, setting up your account can be the first task you can assign to him/her.

2 – Web Design

Building your brand’s identity is important for consumers to be able to relate to you. With a virtual assistant to help you with Shopify design, you are assured that your website reflects your brand’s personality to attract the right customers. An experienced designer who understands the core of your business, your goals, and how you want everything to work is the best person to collaborate with.

3 – UI Custom Development

There are many ways you can use Shopify as your online store platform. For beginners, the Shopify Theme Store is a great place to start building the look you want for your website. For merchants who’ve had prior e-stores, they may want to migrate from an existing platform to Shopify because of its many useful features. A Shopify virtual assistant with experience in custom development can do bespoke integration to add extended functionality to your e-commerce store.

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

As you scale up your business, you will find product-involved tasks to be very time-consuming. The influx of sales, especially during peak season, gives you a lot of tasks to handle including finding new products to sell, processing orders, shipping them out, paying invoices, managing returns and exchange, and refunds for customers. These may be boring, everyday administrative tasks, but they are equally important as core areas of your business. 

4 – Product Sourcing

Even while selling original products, retailers also source products from manufacturers and wholesalers to give consumers variety. There is a lot involved in product sourcing — from understanding your target customers (i.e. knowing what they want to buy) and looking for products to the acquisition process (i.e. making connections with other companies and distributors). Only with the help of a Shopify virtual assistant who has experience in product sourcing will this part of your business process be efficient and productive.

5 – Product Listing

Online shoppers are quite impatient. If they are not able to find what they’re looking for in a few clicks, they move to someplace else. A product listing specialist for your Shopify store will know how to display your products based on (1) what your customers need to see first and (2)  what features they need to know to positively influence their buying decision.

6 – Order Management

Managing an online store is no easy feat, especially during the Christmas season when everyone shops everyday.  You don’t want to mess up orders because that will lead to angry customers and bad reviews. The smart thing to do is to hire an assistant who will handle those orders for you.

7 – Product Fulfillment

Next to getting orders is to ship the items to your customers. Some owners opt to hire a fulfillment service, depending on the scale of their businesses. However, if you’re taking care of the product fulfillment yourself, you would want to hire a freelance expert who will ensure that customers receive their orders on time, as promised.

8 – Shipment Tracking

As much as we want to avoid issues, hiccups can and will always occur along the way. E-commerce store owners anticipate problems in shipping, which can be out of their control, so they have people tracking each and every order from day one. You need someone like this for your Shopify store, as well.

9 – Inventory Manager

You know your business is doing great if you are moving your inventory. A Shopify virtual assistant can make sure that you don’t have too much or too little of your items on stock. Most importantly, they know which products are making the sales and which aren’t, so they know what to order and when.

PROFESSIONAL DESIGN

When you’re aiming for the top, you have to eventually grow your business from being personal to professional. You will want to focus on setting your brand apart from your customers. The look of everything in your Shopify store (e.g. logo, website, graphics, and photos) is what defines your brand name. Professional designers have the right understanding of design elements and other details that can help your store stand out and be remembered.

10 – Logo Design

Having a logo for your brand helps customers distinguish you from all the other stores out there. It conveys trust and professionalism to provide quality goods and services. Designing a logo begins with a concept of the core of your brand. A master designer can then turn this concept into a symbol by using colors, lines, and other elements that are aligned with your company’s purpose.

11 – Graphic Design

Images and graphics help catch the attention of buyers. They are used in different areas of your business, especially marketing. It is advisable to hire a freelancer who has great image-editing skills and is good at creating appealing and engaging visuals for your website and social media pages.

12 – Photography

The same as other e-commerce platforms, Shopify has requirements on everything that you put up on your store, including product images. Hiring a photographer ensures that everything you upload to your website meets Shopify specifications, in addition to being stunning and professional at the same time.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT

13 – Content Writing

Content can bring your Shopify store to greater heights. Engaging, relevant, and high-quality content translates to website traffic and sales. The more articles you produce, the higher the chances you can reach your target market. You probably can write top-grade articles on your own but you will definitely need the help of a freelance writer to produce more.

14 – SEO

You need good SEO to rank high in online search results. An SEO specialist is proficient in the process and knows the best practices in the field to optimize your Shopify store. For example, the SEO trend today no longer relies heavily on using keywords throughout your content (i.e. random articles). Instead, search engines like Google give more importance to the relevance of your content. Knowledge of current trends are what a virtual assistant with SEO experience will use to increase traffic and sales.

15 – Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization helps turn a random visitor of your website from just a passerby to an active customer who engages with your content and buys your products. More than just worrying about conversion rates, it is more meaningful to get the right kind of customers to visit your website in the first place. CRO is complex for someone who is not knowledgeable and experienced in this line of work. You can’t afford to fumble here, so hire for the touchdown.

16 – Social Media

Everyone is on social media nowadays. It has empowered individuals and businesses to present themselves to the world. You need to be on social media and you will want to hire a Shopify virtual assistant who can set up and update your account across different channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

17 – Link Building

A person knowledgeable in SEO understands the importance of building high-quality links. The goal is to direct a user searching on Google, for example, to your website. It is a technical part of SEO that many experts find quite challenging to do. Hiring a freelancer to take care of your link building will definitely put you ahead of the pack.

DIGITAL ADVERTISING

For new e-commerce entrepreneurs, finding your first customers is perhaps the most challenging and frustrating stage of running an online store. Influencers from your niche can give you a plethora of tips and tricks to market your brand, but if you don’t have time to try different advertising methods, you will never find the right strategy to push your business to success.

18 – Social Media Ads

For advertising experts, social media is the most powerful digital marketing tool for e-commerce businesses. One reason is that social media ads can be filtered to target a more specific audience. Another is because these ads can engage social media users and get them to share information about you. People can ask questions through commenting and you can easily answer them, too.

19 – Sponsored Ads

Together with promoting on social media, a Shopify virtual assistant who has a good understanding of sponsored advertisements can help generate more sales on connected channels. The goal of an ads expert is to make sure that your ads reach your target market — the right customers — and bring them to your store to purchase. 

20 – PPC

This paid online advertising method works well for ranking on search engines. PPC allows you to be seen on the first page of searches. Through Pay-Per-Click, your website also gets additional traffic, and it does so consistently. A PPC expert will do audience and keyword research, set up campaigns and test them for you.

21 – Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best means that business owners have to reach out to their customers. Shopify has a variety of apps that can optimize email marketing, such as Klaviyo. Hire an experienced virtual assistant who can set up email sequences for you that have provocative subject lines and content that will urge your customers to take action.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Customer support is very important to online shoppers today. Whatever they read about your product online, they will take at face value, and will count on that from the moment they pay. But a customer’s shopping experience does not end with receiving the product. It goes beyond the satisfaction they get from using it for the first time until their next order. Strong customer service to get those repeat sales is essential.

22 – Customer Review Manager

As your Shopify store grows, more and more customers will be trying your product/service and will surely leave a comment on your store about their experience. It’s great if you get good reviews; you’d be happy to personally respond to their comments. The part where it becomes overwhelming is how to respond to the negative ones. Hiring a customer service specialist to do this for you is helpful in maintaining your brand’s image.

23 – Refunds

When you run a Shopify store, expect to get refund requests every now and then. This task can be tedious, especially if you have a lot on your plate. Delegating this to a Shopify virtual assistant is a wise decision. You can appease upset customers and keep track of your profitability without lifting a finger.

24 – Email Correspondence

One of your everyday tasks as a business owner is browsing through your inbox and responding to personal and business-related emails. What happens when you become busy for 2 days or take a vacation? You are bombarded with pages of unread emails. What if most of those emails are from your customers? Assigning inbox management to an assistant is much better for your business and your sanity.

25 – General Customer Service

When you decide to scale up your business, you should think about scaling up your service levels as well. Thus, hiring one or more Shopify virtual assistants to take care of your customers should be on your to-do list. They can do a myriad of tasks such as taking inbound calls, doing outbound marketing calls, responding to comments on your social media accounts, and staying active on forums and other online communities where your customers spend time.

Take Action!

Stop arguing with yourself about whether you need to begin outsourcing or not and start taking action. Shopify virtual assistants for each of these areas will be your superheroes who will save you every day from time-consuming and mundane, stressful tasks.

We can give you a whole slew of reasons to hire Shopify virtual assistants, but you can’t take advantage of anything if you don’t make a move. Now. There’s no time to waste, so start looking for places where you can find exceptional talent to connect with your company. Start by joining global freelance platforms like FreeUp that specializes in driving e-commerce businesses towards success with the help of experienced remote freelancers from all over the world.

Once you find the right Shopify virtual assistants to collaborate with, delegate the tasks which are not in your area of expertise. Take inspiration from the list above. From here on out, keep working together towards more sales and profits for your online business.