What Is a Virtual Dropshipping Assistant?

A Virtual Dropshipping Assistant is a professional able to provide an array of virtual services to a dropshipping business, such as website management, product descriptions, customer service, database entry, handling payments and returns, or even marketing services. 

There are dozens of repetitive, tedious tasks related to running a dropshipping business. Handling them all by yourself will prove increasingly difficult as you scale your business, add more products to your catalog, and grow your customer base. Attempting to handle everything yourself—from creating product listings and writing descriptions for every single item to responding to customer inquiries and complaints—can take up your entire workday. 

The alternative would be hiring a full-time employee, but you’d have to be making a sizable profit to be able to afford the associated costs, such as PTO, sick days, taxes, and other benefits you’d have to pay. 

A Virtual Dropshipping Assistant is a much better alternative. The main benefit of hiring a VA over a full-time employee is the cost-effectiveness. When you contract a Virtual Assistant, you only pay for the hours worked. There is zero overhead, no additional costs, and you don’t have to provide any benefits that FTEs are entitled to by law. 

Furthermore, you can find a Virtual Dropshipping Assistant with the particular set of skills that your business needs with ease, given the fact that you have access to a global talent pool. 

Virtual Dropshipping Assistants increase the productivity of small-scale teams, where it’s a common occurrence for a single person to oversee all company’s operations, handle customer communication, manage an e-commerce website, deal with financial tasks, and similar. Outsourcing some (or all) of these tasks to a Virtual Dropshipping Assistant will save you a ton of valuable time you can dedicate to scaling your dropshipping business.

What Does a Virtual Dropshipping Assistant Do?

The tasks a Virtual Dropshipping Assistant will perform depend on the specific needs of your business, but there commonly boil down to:

• E-commerce website content management—Dropshipping websites need regular updates—you want to ensure new product supplies reflect on your website timely. You also need adequate SEO strategies applied for appropriate exposure, i.e., high ranking among search engine results. Engaging a Virtual Dropshipping Assistant on such tasks will ensure everything related to your web presence is on schedule since timely performance is what increases the chances of companies engaging them again
• Customer service—Professional customer support is vital for a dropshipping business as the lack of one can make a client give up on placing an order and google whether dropshipping is even legal. To make your business flourish, you have to put customers’ needs first, and the first step towards firm client relationships is making yourself available for their inquiries
• Coordinating returns and exchanges—Despite the accompanying documents of the dropshipping orders usually containing the suppliers’ information only, customers also tend to reach out to the dropshipper for any issues with payments or returns. You might be expected to mediate between the supplier and the customers on financial matters, and doing it properly enhances your relationships with both. For instance, you might be expected to issue a net 30 invoice. Why neglect business-critical duties when you can have a Virtual Dropshipping Assistant do it instead?

How Much Does It Cost To Hire a Virtual Dropshipping Assistant?

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact salary of Virtual Assistants, because they charge by the hour or on a project basis, are typically contracted by multiple businesses at a time, and their rates differ greatly depending on their skillset, experience, and industry-specific knowledge.

The amount of money you’d have to set aside for a Virtual Dropshipping Assistant will depend on the type of tasks that you’d like to outsource to them, the scope of work, and the price point you manage to negotiate with the VA of your choosing. 

According to Ziprecruiter, the average annual salary of Virtual Assistants is around $40,000 dollars. That said, the range spans from $13,000 at the lowest end of the spectrum to almost $73,000 for the top 1% of Virtual Assistants. 

Regardless of the high fluctuation in the cost of hiring a Virtual Assistant, one thing is certain—they’re a much more affordable alternative to full-time employees. We’ve already mentioned that there are no overhead costs associated with hiring a VA, but here are some other reasons for hiring a Virtual Assistant:

• You get to choose from a global talent pool—The beauty of hiring a Virtual Dropshipping Assistant lies in the fact that you have access to a global talent pool, meaning you could find a skilled VA at virtually any price point, provided you invest the time to evaluate dozens, if not hundreds of candidates
• Virtual Assistants are skilled at what they do—There are thousands of VAs online offering a wide variety of services. Given the fact that they are competing against hundreds of other people for the same job at any given time, and that they rely on getting continuously contracted by businesses, VAs have to do an excellent job in order to secure a reliable, consistent income stream. This means you can be pretty much certain that experienced VAs with a ton of good reviews on their profiles are reliable, efficient, meticulous, and will get the job done right and on time

Expert Tips on Hiring a Virtual Dropshipping Assistant

While hiring remotely enables you to contract a VA from virtually anywhere in the world and at any price point, it also comes with a few challenges. 

As we mentioned, Virtual Assistants practically “battle” each other for each job opportunity. Since the competition is fierce, most of them apply for dozens of different job ads, in hopes of getting contracted by at least one business. 

A good number of VAs will apply to just about any job that has anything to do with a skill they possess. That’s why you can’t post a vague job description—you’ll receive hundreds of applications from people who lack the skills and experience necessary to perform the job well. 

On top of that, you have to make sure that you hire someone who is reliable, since you’ll provide them with access to your website, autoresponders, and other tools you’re using. You might even have to share sensitive information with the VA in order for them to complete their tasks.

That’s why you can’t simply hire a VA with the lowest hourly rate, and why you shouldn’t evaluate candidates based on their portfolios/profiles alone. The last thing you want is to have to micromanage the VA, QA their work, and fix their mistakes—this defeats the purpose of hiring a VA since it takes just as much time as it’d take you to do the tasks yourself in the first place.

We scaled a team from 1 to 45 remote workers in just 18 months, working with a dozen different VAs in the process. Here are the best tips we’ve learned that will help you streamline your hiring process and hire the right Virtual Dropshipping Assistant:

1. Be specific with your expectations—Don’t leave any room for misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Be as specific as possible in your job ad, explain the responsibilities they’ll have in detail, and list the exact qualifications a VA should meet in order to be considered for the role. This will save you a ton of valuable time since you won’t have to go through hundreds of sub-par applications. Most of the VAs that do apply to such a job ad will be experienced and confident in their skills
2. Test every relevant skill. Portfolios aren’t always an accurate reflection of the candidates’ actual skills—tests are far more reliable predictors of their performance. Testing candidates increases the likelihood that you’ll contract the right Virtual Assistant that will perform all their task exceptionally well
3. Set up an automated recruitment funnel—The search for the perfect Virtual Assistant is far more tedious than most people imagine. You have to evaluate at least a dozen candidates, respond to hundreds of emails, negotiate work schedules, scope of work, hourly rate, review tests from promising candidates, etc. If you’re doing everything manually, it can become overwhelming fast, plus hiring will take you away from business-critical tasks. With Workello, you can automate every step of your hiring process, find the perfect VA faster, and cut hiring costs IN HALF!

Hire a Reliable Virtual Dropshipping Assistant, Faster

You can think of Workello as the perfect virtual hiring assistant. Our fully automated hiring funnel is the product of countless hours, over $100,000, and dozens of iterations. With Workello, you can automate testing, scheduling, and email correspondence with candidates so you can focus on scaling your business and maximizing revenue.

Here’s how Workello makes hiring Virtual Dropshipping Assistants a breeze:

1. Signup for a free Workello account and launch your automated, pre-configured hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes
2. Post your job ads across LinkedIn, Monster, Facebook, Indeed, and all your other hiring channels and link to your Workello job ad
3. See all your candidates in a single, unified Workello dashboard, regardless of which hiring channel they applied from
4. Reject, test, interview, and send offers to Virtual Dropshipping Assistants with a single click
5. Filter out unqualified candidates with Workello’s built-in testing feature
6. Trigger automated emails and move candidates through your hiring funnel simply by changing their status from a drop-down menu
7. Minimize transactional questions by enabling candidates to see a live status page that tells them exactly which stage of your hiring funnel they are in

Don’t waste hundreds of hours looking for a perfect Dropshipping VA that’s supposed to save you valuable time. Set up a fully automated hiring funnel with Workello, cut your hiring costs by 50%, and start accepting ideal candidates today!

Sign up now and review 5 Virtual Dropshipping Assistant tests for free.