 We are here today with Igal, who is an experienced dropshipper on eBay. He has a lot of experience with virtual assistants, VAs, and today we will have a very, very, very special and interesting interview with Igal about how he find and manage his virtual assistants. Hey Igal, how are you? Hi Lior, I'm doing great. Thank you for having me. Cool. Please tell us a bit about yourself. How did you get to dropshipping? What do you do now with dropshipping? Sure. Okay, so my story goes back nine years ago. I opened my first eBay account for selling at 2010. I started by selling stuff I had at home, so I sold my father's antique belt that he received from someone he didn't know about at the time, but I told him that I sold it for a lot of money so he was happy for me. And then I started to look for other things that I can sell with more units, so that I had to find suppliers. And I started to look for suppliers in China and I found some. And then we started to sell stuff that has to do with the accessories for phones. We actually, myself and a partner that I partnered with for eBay, we became the biggest seller of iPhone cables on eBay for a few months. And yeah, and that we sold many, many things that are related to technology, phones, tablets, and stuff like that. We then also experienced with Amazon and with Amazon's FBA and warehouses and fulfillment. We would buy stock and move it around the world from China, from other places from India to the United States and sell it there. So that's what we did there. And at some point we decided that there's a crisis because we had a lot of sales obviously and a lot of interest from buyers, but we didn't have any time. At the time I was a university student, so I had to focus my time on studying. And it was a point where I said either we shrink the business and obviously this might lead to closing it or maybe I will try to find someone to do the job for us, which was kind of crazy at the time because you don't want to give any control of your business to someone you don't know, especially all over the world on another continent even, to do stuff for you. But we started slowly. We started with people from India to do some small tasks, some cases of customer support that were very, very simple to solve. And then we grew slowly when we built a team. I think it was we grew up to a team of seven or eight VAs for that account. At some point we split parts, so he continued with this ebay account and I started my own ventures. Yeah, and at some point I created a company of teaching VAs to do stuff and then offering them to other people, to people who do eBay business, Shopify business and stuff like that. Yeah, and basically for now I'm more involved in dropshipping from Amazon to eBay. That's what I do most of the time, of course, teaching and getting VAs to do some stuff for me. Cool. Just for you to know what is it, the ABA is a shortcut of real-time assistant. It's someone who does the work for you, actually, employee who sees it not near real somewhere in the world. What was your first experience with the real-time assistant? Did you had any problems with them or something like this? Yes, yes. So the first experience was a learning experience. You know, you have a learning curve, especially in such stuff that has to deal with people. So we started to find someone from, I think it was ODesk. And in ODesk we found someone by the name, I think Sarmed or something like that. I don't remember exactly his name, but he claimed to be a team of VAs from Pakistan that are working 24-7. So what we did is we started to work with him and he would solve our customer support problems. Quickly, we understood that it's not really efficient because what he did, he did actually kind of a dropshipping of people, which means that let's say we paid him $5, he paid someone else $3 and that someone else maybe even then split it to two other people. So obviously there was a big disconnect because let's say someone had one shift in the morning and had to deal with a problem with a customer and then someone else would be in the later shift and then didn't see, didn't notice what the other guy did with the customer and answered that twice or answered wrong answers. So we had a lot of stuff like that, which led to negative feedback. Also some losses, I allowed them to view as some very personal stuff that has to do with the business. Let's say some PayPal transaction and stuff like that. It wasn't very smart, but I learned a lot. Of course, this is the most important. I want to ask you some questions about how do we find the virtual assistants now? So first of all, what are the most important things which you're searching for when you check the VAs, when you do interviews or when you search for the VAs? So that's a great question and it has something, there are some things that I look at in general, in any customer support or item research or whatever other VA I need. So there are some general things and then there are some specific things that I need for stuff that I don't need for others. For example, I would always want someone to be a person who notices little things, notices little stuff and has a solution oriented person. For that, what I do is I ask some questions inside the, how do you call it, when I put a new offering for a job, then what I do is I explain what the job is, what I'm looking for and then I have a couple of questions. If I see that the person who answers me just answers something like, hello, I read your job description carefully, I am very experienced in what you said and I would be very interested in talking to you regarding that job. Then I know for sure that he's just did a copy, paste, he didn't read, he didn't pay attention. So it's very important for me to have someone who pays attention and replies accordingly. That's one thing. The other thing is that, let's say I have something that an opening for a customer support. So what I do is I put a customer support question inside the job offering and then I want to see first of all, whether they actually answer it at all because many will not answer and again, not paying attention. B, do they have good English skills? Do they answer correctly and C, do they know actually the right answer? Are they smart enough or experienced enough to know what to do in such tasks? So that's something that's very important for me. Also I want to have people who are good with timing. So if you decide that you want to start an interview at a certain point, you want to make sure that they are there and they're ready. Also, sometimes they don't have a good internet connection, which is by the way something that you can see by doing a screen share in the interview. If the screen is very choppy and very lagging, then you know probably it would be a problem when they start to work. Yeah, also I want them to have a good environment to work in. You don't want someone who is working from an internet café and you hear in the background some buses going over and then the dog barks. It happens to me a lot of times in interviews and ask them, do they have any place to work in? I say yeah, sometimes I go to an internet café if I need to work on the PC. Not good for me. I want someone who has access to the internet, access to computers and obviously understands English and understand basic things about technology. The other stuff we can teach them, obviously. This is a great tip to do a video interview to check the internet connection. You can also, by the way, you can do a speed test. You can ask them in the interview when you do a screen share to go to a site called speedtest.net and then click on Go and it will show you exactly what bandwidth they have actually. Cool. Yeah, this is a very common problem with all these VAs because they're usually from countries where they have problems with the internet. Yes, it's super important. Where do you search for the VAs? On which sites or Facebook groups? How do you do it? Okay, so yeah, I think this is important to know because sometimes you can reach places where it seems like you can find some good personnel but it's just a waste of time. What I found is the best, if you have the option, is if you already have someone who is working for you who is good, is to ask them for a recommendation for someone else they know that can help with that. Because usually people, you know, you are the average of the five closest people too, is that what they say? It's kind of the saying. So if your VA is good and does a good job, you can ask them if they have some friends that are looking for a full-time or half-time job, whatever you need. So that's one. If you don't have a VA, it would be difficult to find recommendation from someone like that. So some people go to agencies and actually I had an agency what I told you about the business which teaches VA's but there are some negative points with that especially you don't know what they learned before, what the agency told them and taught them. Also you pay the agency usually a higher fee than they actually get than the VA gets. So let's say sometimes it's ridiculous. I know one place where they charge $15 or $20 an hour and actually pay the VA like $3 or $4. And I think it's not fair because he does the job. Why are you taking like most of the money? So that's something to think about. Also you pay per hour even for the learning. So you both pay to source the person to the agency and you also pay the money while you're teaching your stuff to this VA from the agency. And sometimes it's just you know more and more things you have to pay for and not always a good choice. Sometimes it is but that's one another way. The place that I find the most qualified people is in the Philippines. It's a site called onlinejobs.ph. Are you familiar with that? Yeah. So this site if you know how to do filtering efficiently like if you create a good system of filtering people a good job offering it's amazing. It's like you can find diamonds there and you can find people do crazy stuff like developers that charge a small amount of like five to seven dollars an hour where in other places they would charge like three times one. So this is a paid site. Yes. So the plan there is like that. It's a site where you can sign up for free and get your job offering for free to be posted. But then if you want to see the contact details of people who are contacting you then you have to pay. I think it's between $50 and $70. It always changes today. I think it's like $60 per month. However you can after you found the people that you need you can cancel it anytime and then continue whenever you need that to hire again. So why do you prefer this site of for example Apple or Facebook groups of assistance? So Facebook groups I kind of had the mixed experience there because you don't have any filtering there anyone almost can join or anyone can pretend and there are no tests that they take. In online jobs you have this kind of how do you call this it's like a level of ID proof where you can filter by what did these people provide for example some people put their driver's license some people put their ID and diploma for example if they did first or a second degree as a proof and also some tests that the site has that they have taken and then the sites show you what were their performance there and stuff like that. So this filtering is saving you a lot of time and money. For Facebook groups I wouldn't say that this is the case because there's a lot of scams over there not only for people who are searching for job but also for people who are offering jobs you know people that want to find a lot of emails and then send some spam and send some stuff that's not relevant for what they're looking for. Now regarding the other sites that you mentioned Upwork and stuff like that they are good sites but they're not really focused on VAs necessarily they're more focused towards freelancers and per project on a per project basis if you know what I mean and the people there maybe are good but that's such a big audience and you know for me it just took a lot of time to filter the right ones also it's not only from the Philippines it's from other countries too and I really love the Philippines to find my VAs so that's why I focus on online jobs at PH. I work a lot with the Upwork I think that the biggest minus in the Upwork is that all the payments should go over Upwork and then Upwork takes money from this and there are a lot of people afraid to go out of Upwork this way sometimes online jobs at PH is really better but I suggest actually people to try both on the sites and check everyone what they like. For sure. Yeah thank you for the tips it's really important why do you prefer Philippines did you try other countries like Ukraine or India or Pakistan? Oh yeah man I tried so many countries it's ridiculous I think I had experience with like 15 countries of people from different places and yeah I don't know if I told this before but I started with the VAs about one year after I started the eBay business so like we did a lot of trial and error and grew with this we tried the people from Pakistan I think these were the first ones then India China even Bulgaria Romania Russia I think from Chile someone from Argentina from Spain well yeah a lot of countries and well first of all you can find in any country you can find great talents that's for sure but the question is where is it the most efficient for you to look for and what we found out and when I found out is that the Philippines have this great composition of both the salary there is very low for people so it's very good for businesses that are starting out and that are doing something online so that's one thing the other thing is that they have their very good potential for learning English some of them are very proficient in English and even more than that they have some companies big companies like Microsoft and others that are taking them through classes that will remove their accents so it looks like you're talking to someone from the United States it's crazy I had some people some some managers I hired from the Philippines that that speak first of all much better than me in terms of accent but they're also writing skills are far superior than what I saw in other countries now sure you can find people in India that know English really well this is official language there but you know have you ever talked to someone from India in English yeah it's how you immediately understand that they're from India and kind of you know they have a different mentality in the Philippines they have this mentality of being very oriented at helping people at understanding problems and resolving them so yeah I found that really interesting for me to look for and then I found that there I can find really the good people that fit my business cool nice how do you avoid the VA's cause any damage to your business or do something which can hurt you this is a really good question and what I'm going to tell you I'm not just I will not just say things that I imagine out of my head things that really happened and then I will learn from that you you know people especially from poorer countries like the Philippines when they see a big amount of money or an opportunity to you know to have you know an easy money and or an easy money it's important to make sure that you don't put yourself in a vulnerable vulnerable position which means you don't share with them your PayPal access or other things that have money for example you have to be very careful with giving them access to let's say any supplier site or Amazon where you have gift cards loaded because what they can do they can even if they're living in the Philippines they can find someone who is in the United States and then send them the product and then you know it would look like it's a purchase that you made that someone made from you know from eBay to the United States where actually it's the VA is trying to do some not very legitimate business also you know obviously PayPal you don't give them full access because they can take money and run away with it I wouldn't even recommend giving them limited access to eBay a bit to to PayPal you don't have you don't know where are the blind spots you don't know where they can make these at tricks at the back door and so you know only if it's someone that you trust that work for you like three four five months I would grant them some limited access also AutoDS obviously has this limited access that you can grant to your to your VAs which is good so that's one thing to notice also you can use a screen capturing software that you require the VA to work with when they're working for you and what it does is that it takes screenshots randomly at let's say every 50 to 70 seconds they take a random screenshot of the of the screen and then you see if while they're working for you are they doing what they're supposed to do or are they doing some other stuff in addition to that I would highly suggest have a spreadsheet that you share with them like Google Sheets or whatever other place or Dropbox you can also share and there they will have to record what they did each time that they're working so let's say I have someone who has to list items for me I want them to also not only list the items I want them to also put there the amount of items that in the in the spreadsheet the amount of listings that they put maybe even what titles they optimize so then I can cross reference and see that they're actually doing their job so that's a thing that I recommend also strategically never give your every VA the full picture of your business so I don't give a VA to do both customer support and optimize in items and finding items and all the other stuff simply simply because I first of all I don't want them to be confused because it's a lot of information you know how difficult it is to run a business that has so many facets so many things that you can do but also when they see the picture it's like they might start to think hey I can do this business myself I will steal ideas and stuff like that so although it happens rarely and I don't want to expose myself to you know to stuff like that and finally what I would say is that when you're working with the other people be the VAs or you know just workers who are physically with you in the office you have to assume risk things happen people sometimes will you know will copy your clients list or will copy your business idea and start something of their own however I mean it happens rarely but it does happen but you have to think about the cost and the benefit for example for me I can't run a successful business I believe without two three or four people that are helping me grow and expand like for me to get to that level I'll have to work with other people so either I just stay at the lower level by myself or I expand my business spend more and then accept the possibility that you know sometime someone might start and be a competitor that's part of doing business yeah I totally agree with you it's funny I also hear the more than one case where the VA really did the trick which you said about the amazon that they bought products to themselves or their parents some who live in the United States I also hear the cases where the VA created another eBay store and just took all what he learned from the owner of the store and copied it and this is why this tip is really really important to split the knowledge between different people this way they don't have the full picture they can't really open the store without you yeah it's also more efficient if you think about it yeah this way you also can grow easily you've said about screen capturing programs do you have any recommendation for a tool like this well there are plenty you have a time proof which is from online jobs you have a time doctor I think it's called you have hub stuff which also have this possibility there are plenty just search for it you can find it for free in many places as long as it's something that it's easy to work for you and for the VA to install and you know choose whatever is best for you cool right now we are in the hub stuff also and not a yes great tool what what is the best way to teach virtual assistant a task do you have any recommendation how to do it right yes I do there is I think the most effective way is to create a video in which you do the task and you do it from start to finish however you also construct it in such a way where there are problems or challenges I'll give you an example for example you hire someone to order stuff for you from amazon if you choose to take up on yourself the risk to give them access through amazon then you give them the task to purchase an item and you know to make sure that they put all the details correctly which auto ds by the way has the bot that does it automatically obviously but that's an example and what you would do in the video you would also put an error for example the item is out of stock or there are no prime items or the address that the buyer gave you is incorrect or something there is missing for example sometimes you have cities that are near each other and then the buyer puts the name of one city but actually if you take it google if you look at google it's the other name it's the name of the neighboring city and then when you put it it's the right address and so the order goes through but if you wouldn't do that the order would fail and so you show them these exceptions and show how to deal with them in the video itself and you have to think for yourself what are the most common problems that you can troubleshoot right right there so that they won't have to ask you hey listen i had this problem how what what do i do so we create this video and one advantage of that is that v especially from the philippines are a lot of times a bit shy they will try to do something and if they encounter an error they wouldn't ask you so this way what the video does is that they can watch it however many times they want they can watch it one time or ten times and see what is the solution to what they're asking so they won't have to bother you and then for you it's less problems more profit and all are happy so this is one thing and for each task there are different strategies of how to engineer this kind of video to make sure that you cover all the bases or most of the bases what also is important is to make sure that the va understood what you taught them so you want them to both show it to you and explain in the words what they understand from what how to do the task and this way it's kind of this back and forth is very important to see that you don't have any blind spots that you didn't think of or the va didn't think of that you don't know it could cause a problem and you can solve it right there before the problem actually happens yeah also usually va has this thing that they always say yes yes yes i know i know i know and they'll stand and this way you can really check that they really understand everything yes yes mr. lyor yes sir yeah like that and then yeah yeah also you have to think of the tasks as as a recipe you have to kind of write action plan one to ten of very simple actions to complete the task so you can show it to them and then they'll have both the video which they can watch and learn and also this this list which they can reference to and understand precisely what and where to do and this way you kind of cover 99 of the problems so that the process is much more efficient cool another way which i use is asana we put the task in asana and then an employee before he put it as completed they just need to put a tag of done and only after we check it we can put it as completed this way we have like two steps verification that i will think really done yeah this way how much do we usually pay to the va's from the philippines it depends on what they do usually if it's something in general then i would say between two and three dollars is a good amount if it's something more specific that requires more expertise for example well developers are much more expensive as like still it's a low price but i would say between five and twenty dollars which is also stupidly stupidly cheap if you if you think about it that you know in developed countries it's like a hundred dollars per hour but um these are the prices for graphic designers excuse me for graphic designers it's between four and ten dollars it depends on what a portfolio they have how experienced do they have the programs and the advanced programs that are needed to work um data mining is something very data entrant sorry is something very very basic you can teach like anyone to do that so even two dollars is enough for that that i wouldn't recommend trying to find someone very cheap and you know find the unicorns what someone some people call because of a couple of things first of all they're probably not very good or not very confident in themselves that they offer to work at such a price second of all it's like i mean we're not doing slavery we're working with people who want to have enough money to support their family usually it's like either single moms or newly new or moms that had their babies recently and they want you know to provide them to have enough money for that and then no one is stopping them from receiving an offer that's like 20 cents per hour more than you're offering and then they'll run away to that person so for example i found someone that will be doing my job for $1.5 and no one is stopping someone else to easily offer like $1.8 and then they'll run away and you'll never hear from them so you kind of want to be fair you want to be in the competitive market range of prices and also you know two to three dollars it's it's crazy it's very cheap uh you you know how prices go with people who are doing customer support in developed countries in in israel or in the united states or even in in europe in even like well romania is a good place actually they have also good prices but it's very cheap and you don't have to cheap out you don't have to try to find the cheapest find someone who is good and they pay them in that range cool amazing and do you have anything more that maybe i missed about the a's before i go to some other questions well we can talk about a lot of things for example how do you criticize them for example how if they did something wrong how do you make sure that you're telling them like you're giving them the right critique and make sure that they fix stuff okay so do you know the sandwich method okay it's funny it's like you start with the compliment which is the upper like bun and then you have the actual critique or the thing that you want to fix and then you finish also with a compliment so together it's like a sandwich and what it means is that you know we start with something like a listen max first of all i'm happy to hear that you know you're trying your best i think that you put a lot of thought in this thing however and the way you answered this client here could be improved let's say you didn't include the other options of the refund or they could also have a replacement and this is something that's important to include and you missed it that way you know we lose money so i i'd like you to uh to make a point of that the next time to include like the other solutions that we have as a store and then the third part which should be also a compliment and so again thank you for your time i think you're doing a great job overall and i think it will be easy for you to fix because i know that other problems that we had you really fixed really well and have great results so this is the way you kind of criticize them but you give it to them in a good way that you know they don't take it personally and they actually want to improve and then as i said to you before with how you teach people stuff you also ask them to now explain what you explained them to do the fix in their own words so that way you know they understood it and will actually implement so that that's another tip for you cool amazing so actually i contacted you from a facebook group of three videos can you talk us about this group a bit how did you start this group and why what is this group actually yeah sure so i started this group with maor maor amar which is also a very very successful ebay seller and he's in the community of ebay israel he's very known and very respected and what we're doing this group is currently just putting some really awesome videos that are about how to create great items how to sell better for example there is a tip there of how to drive like three four five times more traffic to your listings using some tips and tricks that i think 99.9 percent of ebay sellers don't even know exist so you can take advantage of that yeah and i'm just putting a lot of good free content there that is based on my experience and on experience of other people that i've been working with inside of the ebay community and it's free it's like you can join the group you even don't have to join the group it's open for access for all but if you joined then you have you know the updates and you're more involved in can ask many questions stuff like that so that's the group and people can request videos which you can create for them and how does it work or you just post videos absolutely if you have ideas you know let me know i'll i'll do my best i find that i you know i find a great joy of creating videos because i try to do it with good energies and people can really take advantage of experience of people who are eight or nine years in this industry because we know how things changed over time like i don't know from 2015 and 2019 are very different in terms of how ebay treats people and for that you have different solutions ways of how you put items way of how you you know you're doing dropshipping now is is a bit more difficult than it was before so you have to be smarter and i think with all the knowledge that we have we can really give people good good tips of how to avoid things how to avoid you know getting your account suspended how to have more you know ebay sometimes will remove visibility of your listings if they find that you're doing dropshipping from other retail sites well stuff like that i think it would be very helpful i don't remember the question that you asked i'm sorry but hopefully that gave some insight yeah cool so i will put a link to this group under this video and i think actually that's all if you don't have anything to add well you know the group is called dropshipping free videos that's how it's called and yeah we'll have the link below that Leo will put and i just want to say how well it is that talking to you because i don't know if you remember probably you do but i'll just want to say that back like three years ago something like that we did an event in the Tel Aviv and i remember that you were in the first line do you remember you were sitting in the first line on the right side and you were with this notebook and you were taking notes and asking questions and look what happened and how well you've uh we've taken that and you're developed it and you have this amazing system now that helps many many sellers do dropshipping and i think it's inspiring i think it's great that you did that and yeah so it's like interesting to see this development of how it was then and how it's now it's crazy in a very good way thank you very much yeah i think this event is where we started i were all there with my partner previous partner the first one and we came there with the tool which was only for ourselves and then when we said about the tool if you remember we had like a meeting like everyone should say what he does maybe so we said about the tool and everyone said that wow why you don't publish this this tool so we saw that we need to go with it to the market that's awesome man that's really really awesome thank you they are also teached about the VA's and that's why i also remember this and told you that we must do this video yeah oh and i forgot if you guys want to you know to find the VA's if you want someone like to have some really professional consulting with that you can contact me and we can find something you know and to avoid some painful mistakes that i did and others do and you know find it very efficiently and very quickly so that's good good thank you very much sure thank you bye bye