Why you need an Ecommerce Assistant to help run your online store.

Running an ecommerce store as a sole trader/proprietor is a great way to start a small business with limited investment. 

Creating and running an online store means not taking on the risk that comes with a brick and mortar space. All that’s needed to start is an ecommerce website, inventory, and marketing skills.

Some store owners even do away with holding inventory – utilizing drop shipper friendly distributors for that task – leaving the store owner to focus on website management and marketing.

Whichever route you decide to follow – be it drop shipping or holding your own inventory – selling online can be a great way to start a side hustle or a fulltime small business.

Making it easy to start can also mean some things can get overlooked.

Make sure you go through all your normal planning routines as if you were starting a brick and mortar store. Do your market research to ensure there is demand for the products and services.

Just because its cheaper and easier to start an online business does not mean that the preliminary steps for starting any business can be ignored.

Assuming you have your online store up and running, where to next? 

Starting an online store and managing the initial day-to-day-tasks can be achieved in a short space of time. There comes a point however where these daily tasks can become overwhelming.

As a business owner your time is limited – and valuable! Perhaps you left a high paying job to start your online store, or you find you are losing valuable hours each day that you could spend with loved ones. In either case your hours are precious.

You find that you want to focus on the tasks that will help you grow the business, however these daily tasks such as updating products, adding new products, managing orders and customer service issues suddenly take up all your time!

Now there is no time for marketing and planning, no time for family or social activities – the store is open for business 24/7, and your attention gets drawn to the demands of maintaining the operation.

I Need Help!

It is at this point you might have decided that you need help – in the form of staff members to take on these daily chores and return back to you the time you need for strategizing, sourcing and marketing.

Employing staff at this point is a great idea – you can offload these routine tasks and get your life back.

All you need to do is find some great staff, and manage them well. Show them the tasks that need doing, teach them their roles, maybe pay for them to be upskilled if required.

Pretty soon your new staff member will be able to perform the tasks you set for them.

In an ideal world this would work perfectly – you find a staff member or a family member that can be trained and return your focus to the important tasks of growing the business and achieving your goals of worldwide ecommerce domination.

But what if you dont know how to train your new staff? I mean you can only teach them what you know, however you are still likely to be in learning mode yourself. Its a quandary. I need staff to help me manage my store but my staff need to be trained and I can only train them on the limited things that I know how to do.

I can’t teach them web design; I can’t teach them about Image editing or software maintenance; I cant teach them so many other things that only come from experience and researching solutions to problems.

OK, I understand the problem….I need people with exisiting experience that can run from day one.

Now I have identifed the problem, the next problem is finding such people. This is a new quandary as the people that have these skills are in very high demand in my local market – aka they are expensive to hire and quick to depart for higher paying offers.

The Outsourcing Solution

There is an obvious answer to this circular problem we have encountered in ou online ecommerce model and that is of course OUTSOURCING! Of course finding outsourcing partners is also a problem, or should I say more of a challenge.

The advantages of ousourcing compared to hiring an employee are several:

1. Outsourcing can get you specialised staff at a minimal cost – no sick pay; no superannuation contributions;  no holiday pay; no long service leave; no PAYE burden. Just a simple invoice each month plus sales tax if applicable. The math here is fairly obvious.

2. Your time vs your Assistants time – your time as a business entrepreneur is worth at least $100 per hour, conservatively. A typical assistant is costing $10-15 per hour. For the sake of pointing this out – it just does not make sense for you to be doing the work of an assitant, especially when the assistant can do it faster and return a better result.

3. Managing the Risk – if an employee does not work out; fails to meet expectations; does not know what they claim to know; what is your course of action? In many cases you need to embark on expensive upskilling, or other remedial action to get the result you hoped for. Alternatively you must go through a termination process for that employee and start over again in the hiring process.

This of course is not so bad if you have 10-20 employees – there is generally another staff member who can cover. But what if this employee is your only employee? Now you are back to square one – with no assistant and relying on your own valuable hours to complete all the daily tasks that keep on coming.

In the case of an outsourced assistant your downside risk is limited and fixed to the amount of the monthly contract you have in place. Of course you are still back to square one in terms of having no staff if things go wrong,  however the upside is you are now skilled at finding and managing outsourced personnel.

About EcomEzy.com Remote Ecommerce Assistants

EcomEzy provides a team of online ecommerce assistants, skilles in day to day management of  ecommerce stores that utilize popular platforms such as Woocommerce(WordPress) and Opencart. All ecommerce platforms have similar functionality and the team at EcomEzy can familairize themselves quickly with most platforms.

The skills our assistants bring are experience with whats requried to run an online store; web skills such as site maintenance, updating themes and plugins/extensions; image editing; content writing; daily tasks of updating products, inventory levels, pricing; adding new products; managing customer service issues and more.

The services we provide are trusted and we work closely with store owners to the extent we are an integrated part of their team. Our costs are fixed and manageable for a small business owner.

Our existing customers generally make use of our services for many years. The longest tenure client we have joined us in 2003!

To start a conversation on how EcomEzy can help your online store contact us here