 So your dropshipping stores are up and running, you're already making sales, you're taking care of your product research and you're also taking care of customer service. Now there only seems to be one main problem. It's hard to grow and scale from this point because you are very much limiting yourself with the time that you are putting into your dropshipping business. That is why we are going to be talking about virtual assistants who are employees that will take care of your store and allow you to invest your time in really growing your dropshipping empire. Quick intro and let's begin. What's up everybody? Hope you're all having a wonderful day today. My name is Liran from AutoDS. I'm the content manager and I've also been dropshipping for the last several years and in this video I'm going to talk to you guys about virtual assistants. What are virtual assistants? Why do we need them? Where can we hire them? And which virtual assistants can really get the job done for us at an affordable price? So first of all, let's talk about do we even need virtual assistants and why? So if you're in the beginning of your dropshipping journey and you really just began, you're creating your store, you're starting to learn about the product research, how to fulfill your orders and take care of customer service and all of that. This is not the right time to be hiring virtual assistants. You do need to know how your store runs. You do need to be able to scale it to a certain point where you do need that virtual assistant. You need to learn all the ins and outs of your business before you teach everything that you know to someone else who will start taking care of these tasks for you. So if you haven't been around the block yet, if you don't have enough experience in your dropshipping business, if you haven't managed it from beginning to the point where you're making great sales, great profits, you know how to take care of your customers, you know how to conduct product research and you know how to take care of everything that is happening in your store from A to Z. That is the point where you know you need a virtual assistant to continue growing and scaling. So if you're not at that part yet, if you're still in the beginning of your dropshipping journey, do not hire virtual assistants yet. Remember, you cannot teach someone to manage your business if you haven't managed it yourself. So once you know you're in the right spot and now is the right time to hire a virtual assistant, let's talk about all of the different methods where we can find them, how we can negotiate prices and simply get them on our side. I'll start with the five best techniques for finding and hiring virtual assistants. The first one is a website called Upwork. Upwork is a freelancer website where freelancers create their profiles, they write down what their area of expertise is, and that's how you can find them. Let me show you an example. So here I am at Upwork and on their search field, I'm going to search for eBay virtual assistant. It can also be for Shopify or any other selling platform that you are using. So I searched for eBay virtual assistant and here you can see that I am getting some results. So I got this guy who's doing it for $7 an hour, another Amazon eBay manager, SEO expert, marketing specialist $8 an hour, another one for $20 an hour, another e-commerce VA for $8 an hour. And if you continue scrolling, you'll find all types of different price ranges like this VA over here, she is an eBay Lister and she's taking only $4 an hour. So is this VA virtual assistant VA eBay product Lister drop shipping customer service, and more on and on and on and on. And the more you go, the more you'll find them. Now we're looking at rates of $4 to $5 an hour, which is very reasonable if they do a good job. So Upwork is one place to find them. Let's say I want to take this Zandra person. So I'm going to click on her link. I can see that she's from the Philippines. And here I have a rating of the success of how successful she is taking care and finishing all the jobs that she's getting. So once again, here's a brief intro who she is, what she knows her area of expertise, her work history, jobs that she completed and jobs that are in progress. So she hasn't done that much work yet for Upwork. This is another place where you have to do some research, just like we're doing product research for our dropshipping stores. This is research for finding the right employees for our store. So one great place to find them once again is through Upwork. Don't just go to anyone that you see, click on their profile, see their history, see how long they've been doing it, how much money they want, and then start to negotiate with them through messaging. So Upwork is one place to find them. Now let's talk about another place called guru.com. Guru is another place where you can hire freelancers to take care of your dirty work. Well, it's not exactly dirty work, but you know what I mean. So what skill are you looking for? And by the way, you can do anything beyond virtual assistance, like if you want someone to take care of your cover photo or your profile photo, graphic design, videos for your dropshipping products, and so forth. You can also search up those freelancers in these sites, but now we're talking about virtual assistants. So on guru, I'm going to search for virtual assistant. Okay, that was a little bit too general. We need to give them a selling platform. So once again, eBay virtual assistant. Okay. And here we go again. eBay Lister virtual assistant, $8 an hour. Another eBay virtual assistant, $5 an hour. Let's click on this guy. So once again, we're getting their profile, all of their skills, how much they've earned on the platform. So this guy hasn't earned yet, but he is starting with a low starting price because he wants to get some work in. He wants to build his profile. And then he may raise his price. That's how you people usually start off on these platforms. So once again, you continue scrolling on and on, start talking to these people, you can get a quote, you can send them messages, create an account on these platforms. It's absolutely free to do it and reach out to these virtual assistants, read their profile history and start your negotiating skills. Another great place to find them is a website called onlinejobs.ph. Here you can search for jobs if you are a virtual assistant yourself, or you can look for Filipino resumes and search for the VAs right in this text field. So I'm going to write eBay VA. Okay. And here are the results from people in the Philippines. By the way, online jobs, ph, ph is for Philippines. So we're only getting Filipinos over here, which have a lot of workers who will do it for a good price. They are like secret hidden gems. Once again, just like finding a winning product. So we're not going to do any mini money mall. We're not picking them out randomly. We're really working to find the right virtual assistants to take care of our business. So here you can find people who are more experienced, they're more professional, a little bit less amateur than the websites that we've saw up until now. But on the other hand, you will be paying more money for these virtual assistants, but you can be more sure that they will take care of your business. This again requires a lot of research and a good amount of skill when it comes to negotiating because you will need to negotiate for a better price, at least in the beginning until you get the ball rolling. Now remember one thing that you do need to keep in mind. If today you're making a profit of let's say $1,000 per month on your drop shipping store, and it's hard to scale because once again, you're wasting all of your time or not wasting, but you're spending most of your time adding products, searching for the next best winner, taking care of some returns, and you really not growing your drop shipping business, but you are making one K a month. So here you need to know exactly how much of that one K you can give to your virtual assistant so that they will take care of your business and turn that one K into two, turn the two K into three and keep scaling it from there. So let's say for example, you know that out of your $1,000 in earnings, you want to put $200 on the site and give that to your virtual assistant. So divide that by work hours, divide that by how many days you want them to work in a week and in a month and see if it makes sense. See if there's enough work for them and see if they'll be able to do it. The best way to see it is by simply hiring them and testing them and see if it works. But before that, you do want to make some background work. So do check out their profiles, see how much history they have. You can take a risk and take someone who doesn't have a lot of history on his profile. They will go for a cheaper price or you can jump straight to people who will charge more and you know that they will take care of your business. But once again, you can never be 100% sure. So you're testing a lot once again, just like testing products until you find the right one. Another website that I want to talk to you guys about is Fiverr. So Fiverr is very similar to Upwork and Guru. Here you can simply find people who are freelancers who are willing to do the work for a really cheap price. So once again, I'm going to search for eBay VA and here you will find people who are inexperienced who are willing to do it at $5 per hour and learn their way up and those who are experienced and aren't doing it for higher prices. So let me just change my currency really quick so we can see it in US dollars. I will be your expert Amazon FBA virtual assistant. Amazon to eBay starting at $10. Another one starting at 30. Another one starting at 10 bucks. I will do eBay product research and listing eBay dropshipping eBay VA virtual assistant. And of course, the list goes on and on. We got those for 25 bucks. We got those at five bucks. So this is not specifically an hourly rate. It can either be an hourly rate or it can be $5 for a job like to list 100 products. Once again, it depends on what they know and also depends on your negotiating skills. So play around with them both balance it out to find the right formula for you and your VA and start to get to work. Fiverr is one of my favorite places to look for freelance jobs when it comes to VAs and not only VAs. As I've mentioned, anything that you guys need done for your dropshipping stores just search for that service in these search fields and you will find the people who are willing to do it for a really cheap price. So just like the example I gave you, if let's say you're making one K a month and you're putting down 200 on the side for a VA, see how it works out for them. See that they're happy with what they're making and that they are doing a good job of scaling your dropshipping stores. Check out the statistics pretty soon we're going to get to all of that how we can see and control exactly what our VAs are doing. So we just talked about for good websites to find virtual assistants to work and help scale our dropshipping business. Now let's talk about another platform where you can find virtual assistants and now we're going to head over to Facebook. So Facebook groups is another great place to find virtual assistants. And by the way, I'm going to leave links for you guys to everything that I'm talking about all of the articles and the websites and the Facebook posts all of the links are going to be available right below this video. But do keep watching this video because I have a lot more value that is written in whatever links you're going to click on below. So another place is the Autodesk dropshipping community. Here we made a post a while ago, a virtual assistants post where you can post to hire VA's and VA's will also post there looking for people to hire them for their dropshipping stores. So as you can see here, there's a post, there's some text explaining exactly how this works, what this post is for, which is exactly what I just explained. And here, as you can see, people are either looking for VA's or people are looking for VA job offers. So we got them both. All you need to do is go to this post right down that you're looking to hire a VA and VA's will start to message you, they will go to your inbox automatically. And this is simply a great way to take care of this task. But once again, the link will be available right below this post. And there are other groups where you can find virtual assistants. Again, using these Facebook groups and using those websites is absolutely free. It just requires time. And even if you found someone and you hire them and they didn't end up doing such a good job, it's okay, it's like running a real business, as it is a real business guys, but think about companies who start to grow. In order to grow, they need to hire workers. Once they hire workers, some workers may not be so good and they simply get replaced. Same thing in this business that is absolutely fine. That's why we have statistics and that's why we can check everything that's going on on our dropshipping stores with and without the help of our virtual assistants. We're going to get to that really soon. Here's another group on Facebook where you can find a lot of virtual assistants. It's called the virtual assistant network Philippines. So it's kind of similar to online jobs that pH they showed you guys, it simply gathers a huge community of Filipinos who are willing to do the work for us at a reasonable price. And a lot of them already have a lot of experience doing it. Now let's talk about once we found them, once we hire them, how do we connect them with the system and start growing and scaling while also checking out their performance. So as we know auto DS is a wonderful all-in-one dropshipping platform where you can easily scale your business with price stock monitoring, customer service, and so much more. Now virtual assistants are completely supported by auto DS. So once you hire your virtual assistant, you can simply create an account for them on auto DS and select exactly what privileges you want them to have. In the beginning of your journey, when you hire your first virtual assistant, one of the best pieces of advice that I can give you guys is to start with a low limit, give them some small tasks in the beginning, not a huge responsibility and see that they're doing everything the way you want it to be done. Once you see that they are doing a good job, they are listening to everything that you're saying and they seem to be a good employee, then you can give them more privileges, have them take care of more tasks, of course, pay them more, but they are going to get that back to you with the results that they will give you on your dropshipping business. So let's begin. You found a virtual assistant and you want to add them to the system. What you want to do on auto DS on the left side, click on settings, then here on the top right, you have users. We're going to click on that, add your first VA, click here to add your first VA and start working together. So we're going to click on add user. And here we are creating an account for our virtual assistant, his first name, let's call him Frank. His email is Franky 80 at gmail.com and we're going to give Frank a password. Now we're going to configure what privilege we want to give Frank. So you can give him access to all of your dropshipping stores, you can give him access to selected stores. So only some of your stores. And when you click on that, you'll have all of your store names. So you can choose one of them, some of them or however much you want. So let's say I can go with buy and save USA and nightlight stars. I want Frank to only take care of those two stores. Now I'm going to click out. So we got those two stores. And finally the privileges, what we want to give them access to. So you can allow them to view the dashboard, view and edit your active products, view, edit or delete your drafts, view, edit your orders, view and import on track listings, list new products and active products or on track products and view and edit your settings. So as you see, it's very customizable and you don't have to give them full power right at the beginning. Get to know them, create your trust together, create that bond and slowly start to give them more control on your dropshipping business. So let's allow Frank to do everything because I've worked with Frank for a while and I want to keep working with Frank. He's a very good virtual assistant. I'm going to give him access to all of the features that I can on AutoDS and simply have him take care of everything on my dropshipping business. Now I'm going to click on add user, wait a couple of seconds and his account will be created on AutoDS. User has been added. Here we have Frank. Here's all of the privileges that we assigned to him. And now Frank can simply log on to AutoDS and use the credentials that I created when I created this account for him. So now I would call him and tell him, hey, Frank, listen, go to AutoDS, click on login, use your email that use your name and the password is whatever password you gave him. Go ahead and log in and get to work. That is how easy it is to add a virtual assistant to your account on AutoDS and have them start taking care of your dropshipping business. I hope that this video on virtual assistants was helpful for you guys. Don't forget we have more videos and more articles on the subject where to find them, how to hire them, and so much more. Do not forget to connect with our dropshipping community so that you can find also the virtual assistants post where you can find and hire those virtual assistants. But also to ask us in the community any question that you may be having while dropshipping, we are a very open and active community. We love to help each other out and succeed on our dropshipping businesses. So if you haven't done so yet, subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you can always stay updated on all of the latest and all of the hottest topics that are coming out in the dropshipping world. Thank you for watching. See you in the future videos.