If you had several extra hours in your week to do whatever you liked, what would you do? Well, what if I told you that you can create these extra hours, with the help of virtual assistants! I personally use virtual assistants to run several of my Etsy shops, and not only do they save me more time, but they also help me make more profits!

I’ll now discuss everything you need to know about how to scale your Etsy shop using virtual assistants!

What Does An Etsy Virtual Assistant Do?

Virtual assistants are remote workers who provide various administrative, creative or technical support services to businesses. As an Etsy seller, you might have a virtual assistant to help with customer service, product creation or even running your entire shop for you.

How To Scale Your Etsy Shop With A Virtual Assistant (VA)

Hiring An Etsy Virtual Assistant To Help With An Existing Shop

If you’ve already established your shop and are now just maintaining it, customer service is usually the only thing you need - assuming you’re not still building the listings in your shop too.

In this situation, hiring someone to do all the customer service related tasks in your shop can be a great way to save you several hours per week. This includes responding to any queries from customers and assisting them with any issues they have, as well as managing the reviews and feedback you receive.

If you did want to continue creating products, you can still hire someone to do customer service then you can focus on the product creation side. Or, you can hire someone to help you with product creation too, which I’ll now discuss…

Hiring An Etsy Virtual Assistant When Opening A New Shop

When you’re opening a new Etsy shop, you don’t have any sales yet which means you won’t need help with customer service just yet! In this case, you can hire a designer to help you create your products and listings.

If your business model involves building lots of different listings in your shop, then this can be a really great way to speed up the process. Or, if you still want to be in control of the product creation phase, you can also hire someone to help with your mockups or more tedious work once the main designs are complete.

💡 TOP TIP: If appropriate, you could even ask your designer if they would like to help you with customer service once the shop is running, as they will already know a lot about the products and how they work.

Benefits Of Hiring A Virtual Assistant (VA) For Your Etsy Shop

1. It saves you hours of time each week

A huge advantage of hiring an Etsy VA is that it takes workload off you - especially those time-consuming tasks such as those we’ve discussed above. It will give you more free time to focus on other things - whether that’s working on other projects, spending more time with loved ones or traveling around the world!

2. It allows you to scale your business

When you hire someone to run your Etsy shop, you’re able to use the extra time to scale your business - whether that’s through more listings, investing more into marketing or opening a new Etsy shop. As you train your virtual assistant, they are also able to take on additional responsibilities to further grow the business and free up even more of your time.

3. It brings unique expertise and ideas

If you hire virtual assistants that are specialized in specific skills such as graphic design, copywriting or SEO optimization, you can enhance the quality of your Etsy listings and attract more potential customers!

Even if they don’t have specific skills, having a different perspective in your team can really enhance idea generation and business growth.

What To Consider When Hiring A Virtual Assistant (VA)

1. Trust and reliability

The most important point when hiring a virtual assistant is to find someone that you trust! Your virtual assistant could be handling a lot of sensitive information such as access to your Etsy shop, customer data, and financial transactions. So you want to ensure you select the right person for it.

2. Communication

When someone is handling a lot of administrative tasks for you especially when they are working remotely, ensuring they have excellent communication is going to make your life a lot easier. Knowing that they are always keeping you in the loop enables you to trust them fully to run your Etsy shop on their own. Any time zone differences or language barriers might also be factors to consider.

3. Training and supervision

There will be a period of time at the beginning when hiring an Etsy VA where you will need to train and supervise them to ensure they understand all the business requirements and tasks that need to be performed.

It’s still important to do the occasional quality checks, especially at the beginning. But once you train the person to know almost everything, then you can definitely automate your Etsy shop and leave them to it!

💡 TOP TIP: You can create documents or guides to help train virtual assistants and enable them to understand the business activities better. For example, a summary of what your business does or a document of common customer queries and their relevant answers.

Learn More

Hopefully, you’ve now learned how to scale your business using virtual assistants - whether that’s for maintaining an existing shop or helping to build a new shop! If you’re looking to open a new shop and are unsure what to sell, you can check out my 100 profitable digital product ideas here to get some inspiration.

You can also check out my pre-launch strategy where I discuss the 10 things you need to do before even opening your Etsy store here! Or, if you’d like to see me chat with another Etsy seller about the benefits of hiring Etsy virtual assistants, you can watch the YouTube video here!