Simplifying e-commerce: 5 tasks you should outsource

While some online business-owners may prefer to do everything on their own, it’s not a realistic option. If you are serious about growing your e-commerce business, you will have to outsource or employ a member of staff to help with a number of the tasks.

Ultimately, you want your business to work for you — not the other way around.

Besides, outsourcing to a specialist isn’t that bad. It may cost you money, but the results are almost always good if you do it right. You can hire professionals and field experts to handle certain tasks, which may help you with cost optimisation, increase output, and better results.

If you have an e-commerce business that you want to scale, here’s a list of 5 tasks that you should consider outsourcing.

1. Administrative tasks

As an online business owner, you will soon find yourself swarmed by a plethora of administrative tasks. Although some of these administrative tasks may seem simple on paper, they consume a lot of your valuable time. Moreover, if you do not manage to stay on top of them, things will get out of hand very quickly. Instead of lagging behind, you should consider outsourcing these administrative tasks.

Hire a good VA (Virtual Assistant) and assign some of the following tasks to him/her:

• Preparing presentations
• Collecting important data
• Creating reports for key performance indicators and KPIs
• Managing schedules
• Handling travel arrangements
• Making important reservations
• Sorting out important emails
• Running some personal errands that can be done virtually
• File management

Remember that good communication is the key to achieving success in outsourcing administrative tasks. Hire a virtual assistant that syncs with you and has similar a thought process as you do. When things work in synergy, you yield much better results.

2. Customer success

Customer success is something that you should start on your own — at least in the beginning. There are two reasons for it:

1. First, when you outsource a lot of different tasks (as mentioned in the rest of this article), it may take a hit on your monthly budget. Handling customer service on your own for a little bit will give you an opportunity to cut some corners.
2. Second, communicating directly with your existing and potential customers will lead to a deeper understanding of your customers, their needs, and how your business is (and should be) serving them.

As your business grows, you should definitely outsource customer service. Because of your prior customer service experience, however, you will have a solid foundation to build your business on.

3. Website design, development, and maintenance

Unless you are very good at website development — and you enjoy it a lot — you should stay away from it.

Designing, developing, and then maintaining a website can be hectic and very time-consuming. Besides, you should be focusing on growing your business all the time, instead of finding out bugs in your website and then fixing them.

In today’s digital age, there are plenty of ways to find a good website developer or a web-dev team. If you hire an agency, make sure that they assign you a single point of contact. All communication will pass through that source, and that will make things significantly easier for you as an online business owner.

4. Content creation and SEO

We chose to combine these two aspects because they are closely related to each other.

You will require a lot of content. In the online marketing world, content is king. Publishing fresh, useful, and high-quality content on a regular basis is extremely important. Creating all that content requires a lot of time and effort.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is something that requires a lot of monitoring and constant effort. From finding profitable keywords to monitoring backlinks; from optimising (on-page and off-page) your web pages and keeping penalties away from your site, it is a full-time job.

You may take it upon yourself, but we won’t recommend it. After all, a good SEO strategy may lead to a ton of free website traffic. In other words, you can start cutting down on your ads and operating costs — which can eventually be the difference between a loss-making and profitable online business.

5. Graphic design

Along with content, you will also need a lot of graphics for your website. This may include featured images for your blog post, images to be shared across social channels, infographics, charts, presentation assets, etc.

As you may already know that making high-quality graphics is a full-time job. If you start doing it on your own, you will have no time left to focus on growing your online business.

Conclusion

Many people will recommend you against outsourcing to an agency or freelancer, but it does have its benefits. Without outsourcing these tasks, you will find it difficult to grow your online business.