Business owners already have a lot on their plates. From building a site, developing marketing and sales, and maintaining customer service to keeping track of product inventory – it’s a lot to attempt to do it all alone.
Instead of juggling everything, isn’t it time you started to focused on completing the important tasks at hand
Instead of juggling everything start focusing on completing important tasks at hand – it may be time to start thinking about outsourcing your eCommerce store.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term “outsourcing,” this is basically hiring an outside individual or service to perform specific tasks for your business. With today’s internet world, it is totally possible to outsource everything from content marketing and web development to your payroll and bookkeeping.
Outsourcing your eCommerce store is a great way to grow your business; however, there are several factors you need to consider when thinking about whether or not it’s the time right to outsource. Below are some situations when you should look to oursource:
1) If you absolutely have no time or interest.
If there’s a specific skill you feel that may take a long time for you to learn and you absolutely have no desire to do it, then it may be time to outsource.
2) Your business is growing fast.
This is clearly a good problem to have, but not when it becomes difficult to keep up. In order to achieve long-term success, you need to figure out a plan to implement systems that will bring your business to scale. Outsourcing can allow you grow from a small shop to a serious online goods provider.
3) You’re ready to expand.
Are you to the point where you are just ready to build things out a bit more? Instead of having to hire full time, you can outsource individual tasks to freelancers at a fraction of the cost. There are also software and automated services to use for sales and marketing help.
Business owners that experience any or all of the above should consider outsourcing. If you are new to outsourcing or are looking for new outsourcing ideas to help grow your business, you’ve come to the right place.
Today, I will be going over 7 tasks to outsource your eCommerce store:
1) Order Fulfillment
Fulfillment services should be outsourced. Why? There are many benefits to outsourcing this task:
Cutting shipping time and lowering shipping rates
Reduced operating costs
Broader reach to help you grow into new markets
2) Website Design and Development
Now most people are not skilled with web design and development – yes, you can learn the basics, but you should leave it to the experts to handle this portion of your business.
In order to run your online business you need a good interface and proper backend/frontend coding – so it is an excellent idea to outsource this. You should also consider outsourcing to various freelancers for these tasks because you do not want to be reliant on one freelancer alone, and you want experts in each part or stage.
3) Social Media Management and Content Creation
Social media and content is a huge part of today’s marketing world. Though it’s been around for quite some time now, it is fairly new to those who aren’t familiar with using it for their businesses. For one thing, social media never sleeps, making it very time consuming for most businesses.
In order to stay up to date and manage a social media presence across all platforms, while also establishing a consistent blog, outsourcing might be your best bet.
Freelancer sites like FreeeUp are a great way to start. You can request for the best from hundreds of available freelancers who have experience and knowledge in these tasks.
4) Inventory Management
When you first start off, you only have a small inventory which can be easily tracked on a spreadsheet. But as your business takes off, your orders will start multiplying, and it will be quite hectic to manage it on your own.
Outsourcing this part of your business can really help grow your online business.
5) Writing Product Descriptions
If you aren’t aware already, writing optimized product descriptions and titles can become incredibly time consuming. As your inventory starts growing, you can easily be spending your entire day on this task – yikes!
And don’t even think about simply breezing through this because this task needs to be done right if you want to have effective SEO.
Hire a freelancer who has experience with writing product descriptions and is familiar with how to sell the product through proper optimization.
6) Customer Service
Every business owner knows customers are the root of their business. Without them, your business will fail miserably. Especially in today’s society, high customer ratings are crucial.
Ideally, customer service should be provided during work and after work hours, including weekends. As a business owner it’s smart to outsource this task in order to focus your full attention on other important aspects of your business while ensuring that queries are handled 24/7.
7) Administrative Work
Think about all the tedious tasks you do daily – scheduling, creating reports, organizing and managing your files, etc. Do you really have time to focus on this? It you answered no, it may be a good time to start outsourcing these tasks to a virtual assistant. You can find one who is an all-around rockstar who can handle all these tasks and more. Use remote hiring sites like FreeeUp to find the right VA for you.
If you’re a business who sells through multiple channels like web stores and online marketplaces, you should consider trying out multi-channel management software in order to look after the data and processes that you use for your sales channel(s). Some popular management softwares you could use are SellerCloud, Sellbrite, and ListingMirror.
Running an online business can be stressful and hectic, but with outsourcing, you can make your everyday business life easier. You can start off by considering the above tasks and using sites like FreeeUp to find the right freelancer for you today.
New to Freeeup? Use coupon code “Expandly25” in the Referral section of the sign up page for a for $25 credit on your first hire!