are you gonna have this person make love to your wife while theyre at it. Hiring people locally to list, stock, ship , package is great, have done this before, but id rather do it myself and keep the money. Other than that theres not much outsourcing possible non locally unlness youd trust someone with your ebay and paypal login that lives in another country
If you're too busy to run this business, then maybe it's not for you.
Hiring a VA (even under your direct supervision) will lead to problems and cause more headaches than it's willing to solve.
This is your business we are talking about. The fact you are complaining about answering customer questions or other aspects of the job tells me you might not be cut out for this type of work.
Op’s Business is either so established and couldn’t care less about converting the potential sales by replying to messages. Or that he is just starting out and didn’t realise replying to messages is the basis of running any online businesses and is not boring or hard in any way.
Either way, op should probably reevaluate himself / herself if he / she should work on his career via other means or improve on whatever he is doing right now.
I feel for the OP, i just hate people in general most of the time, sometimes stupid people annoy the hell out of me. I no longer am nice to people when i reply to feedback.I call them names and such. i am over their stupidity. LOL I know it's bad business. However, on amazon, i am the nicest person, OR when it's my fault on ebay.
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The OP not wanting to answer questions isn't an alien concept. In fact for some products I used to sell, i'd turn off the ability for customers to ask questions completely. (You can do that on eBay). When they go to ask a question it will show a list of frequently asked questions. This particular niche I was selling in just had too many customers asking the same repetitive questions, so if the OP is in a similar situation, a VA may help.
Now on the other hand, there are other product lines where answering questions, engaging with customers is the way to go. It all depends.
I outsource a lot of my account management and have for years.
It takes trust, but I've actually found that most VA are much more trustworthy than someone you would hire locally.
Just starting, a VA from Philippines is usually the best option. They typically have a pretty good language grasp and require little supervision. Expect to pay somewhere from $400-$600 monthly to start for 8 hour days, M-F.
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh also have a lot of cheaper labor, however I have found they do not have the same english skills and require more supervision.