As one of the largest eCommerce platforms in the world, Amazon is a must for anyone from individual sellers to large-scale sellers.
The platform provides an easy opportunity for growth by leveraging consumer trust in Amazon’s platform as a whole, so that retailers selling anything from private label to generic products can compete and succeed on it. However, as you grow, especially as you expand to other platforms, managing an eCommerce store will become more and more work.
In addition to basic business management, you have to handle inventory management, supply, marketing, order fulfillment, warehousing, and listing creation and management. It will eventually become necessary to hire others both remotely and co-located to take on responsibilities that you cannot handle. Outsourcing is one easy solution that allows you to affordably scale your needs based on demand.
Amazon listing creation and management is an easy choice to outsource, because it requires relatively low skill, but can be time-consuming. If you’re creating a quality product listing, it will take you at least 30 minutes (without accounting for copy), and if you’re listing hundreds or even thousands of products, you need help.
Especially with the introduction of Amazon’s new Inventory Performance Index, ensuring your your listings accurately reflect products and make conversions is even more crucial to avoiding unnecessary fees.
Hiring a freelancer or outsourcing to another company is a relatively simple process, but you should prepare so that you’re ready to make a hire, track value, and ensure quality of work completed.
Define processes for listing optimization
Whether you have existing work processes for creating, uploading, and managing listings, or you’re still in the early stages of designing how your business works, it’s crucial to develop a process defining how work should be done.
This means creating basic quality standards, creating an example of what listings should look like, and defining both a process of steps and quality assurance. For example, your process should consider the following:
- What steps are taken for creating and uploading a listing?
- What is included in the listing?
- Where is content coming from? Who is doing quality assurance?
- Where are images coming from? Are they the right size? Is cropping necessary? If so, who should do it and what are the image standards?
- When should listings be uploaded? How often?
- How are listings classified? Are they already classified, or will the freelancer have to do it themselves?
- What keywords are being used? How many? Where are they coming from? Who is providing them?
- How is work documented?
- Who is reviewing listings for quality? How often?
- What is the process of management?
- What tools are you using?
Defining your processes gives you a clear way to communicate what you are hiring for, which skills are needed, and what good work looks like once you make the hire.
Choose what you want to outsource
Depending on your eCommerce store, you may want to outsource almost every aspect of listing creation and management, or or just a few aspects. For example, if you already have a quality copywriter on your team, you wouldn’t need to hire someone who can write engaging copy. If you already have someone to research keywords and link SEO with PPC campaigns, you don’t have to hire for it.
Defining what you already do (and want to keep doing), and what you already have before looking for a hire will help you to choose someone who perfectly meets your needs and profile.
You might also want to consider whether you want your freelancer to create listings on other platforms, if they need to use an ERP or inventory management tool, and so on. Once you’ve handled this, you’ll have a good idea of whom you’re looking for and why.
Finally, what is this work worth to you? What is your budget per hour/per week/per month? One good way to determine value is to look at hours saved, total profit and budget you can work with, and total value earned from adding new listings and managing existing ones.
Hiring for Amazon listing creation
Hiring a freelancer is often the most difficult part of the process of outsourcing, but today, it’s relatively easy over the Internet. In most cases, you’ll have several options to outsource including going through an agency or service specializing in connecting freelancers with organizations and going to a work platform doing the same.
Hiring from a freelancer platform
Platforms such as Upwork, Credo, Freelancer, PeoplePerHour, and many others allow you to create a simple job listing, hire candidates who apply, and then choose based on the application. Each of these platforms includes work tracking and management tools as well as integrated payment solutions. You’ll typically pay between 10 and 20% in fees to the platform.
Here, you will have to find, vet, and manage your freelancer yourself, but you can save a considerable sum over using an agency. It’s important to pay attention the freelancer’s portfolio or previous work, reputation on the platform, and experience because no one is guaranteeing their ability to perform their job well.
Hiring from an agency
Most areas have their own freelance agencies who work to find, vet, and place freelancers with businesses. Here, you will likely pay a significantly higher fee, but won’t have to find or manage the freelancer on your own.
Once you’ve found a candidate and made the hire, you’ll still have to follow through with introducing him or her to your work process.
Onboarding a remote listing creation specialist
Most freelancers or outsourced workers will work remotely, likely from their office or home and perhaps even from another country. It’s important to get started on the right foot, establish working hours, and to ensure that onboarding is handled in a way that your freelancer knows what they are doing, what is expected of them, and how they can do it well.
Here, you should introduce your processes and software, provide training where necessary, set up communication schedules, and establish communication between anyone involved with their role. It’s also a good idea to set up standards for how much work should be completed in a time-span and to integrate performance management and review on a weekly basis when you start.
The most important questions you should answer from the start are:
- Who is the freelancer’s direct superior? Who do they answer to?
- What are the freelancer’s most important tasks?
- How much is expected of the freelancer?
- When and how should they communicate?
Outsourcing Amazon listing creation and management can save you a great deal of time, which will free up time and resources to focus on more important and value-added tasks. It’s relatively easy to make a hire on any work platform, which means that so long as you can define processes and how/where content is coming from, you can easily outsource your listing management.
Outsourcing Amazon Listing Creation
About the author: This is a guest post from Michael Krakaris of Deliverr. Deliverr provides fast and affordable fulfillment for your eBay, Walmart and Shopify business. With Deliverr you can accelerate your online sales by activating Walmart 2 Day tag, eBay Guaranteed Delivery and 2 Day Shipping on Shopify.
Deliverr’s FBA like multi-channel fulfillment comes with clear pricing, easy on-boarding and a hassle free experience so you can focus on growing your ecommerce business.