10 Amazon Storefronts Tasks You Should Start Outsourcing Immediately

If you sell on Amazon Storefronts, then you aren’t in the business of selling mass-produced items from nameless, faceless companies. You are most likely a small business that specializes in unique items. Whether you make them yourself, collect them from handmade shops, or source them here and there, you sell specialty items, and this takes a special approach.

Particularly when you’re looking for some help to run your business, you need a very particular type of person for each area.

Here are some of the tasks you should be outsourcing to make your Amazon store run as smoothly as possible.

Item Curation

One thing that takes up a lot of time when selling unique items is the brainstorming process. The steps that you take here can be very much like what sellers of mass-produced items do. The problem is that there’s not a lot of data to back you up when you’re in the curiosities business. There just aren’t enough people buying these items in one place to really get an accurate feel for what they might want to purchase next.

You are probably an expert at trinkets, and you need someone who has the same or at least almost the same level of experience as you do. This person needs to know the art not of spotting a great piece, but knowing what would be a great addition to your inventory even before you know where to find it.

Supplier Contact

The sourcing process takes up even more time than the process of thinking up new items to sell. It’s not at all like spending heavy hours for a few weeks to find a factory that matches your order needs, pricing, and shipping times.  When you sell unique products that you don’t make yourself, you are most likely sourcing from hundreds of different individuals and shops. This is more true in cases where you sell handmade items.

If you want to step back from this part of the process, you need to hire someone who has the time to go around looking for special items and talking to people who can supply them. This person needs to have an eye for unique products and a knack for relationship building. This is not a mass negotiation process. People who make handmade products or collect unique items don’t respond to a corporate demeanor. Choose someone who not only loves all those knick-knacks but also loves building rapport with people and genuinely cares about taking care of relationships.

Inventory Management

Even for a small business, managing inventory can be a real challenge. When you’re stocking different kinds of inventory all the time, it can become even more challenging. There’s a learning curve for sellers who deal with mass-produced goods. For you, the curve just keeps going.

You would be wise to get some help in this area from someone who is extremely organized and who obsesses about tracking accuracy. You are the business owner, and you probably have other talents that can serve your business better. Pass inventory management for your Amazon Storefronts shop off so you can rest assured that everything is accounted for while you focus on the parts of your business that you love.

Listing Management

Every item that you sell on Amazon Storefronts needs to have a great listing to let people know what’s available. But what looks like a great listing to you may not be what a great listing really is in Amazon’s terms. There’s a balance here between knowing what customers want and what ranks on the marketplace. You might be able to create listings that sell, but no one can buy from you if they can’t find your listings.

As with the other areas in this type of business, you need someone here who has knowledge of the types of items you sell. They don’t have to be experts, but they at least should have a level of familiarity with the items and the types of people who want them. This is what will allow them to create compelling copy for your listings.

A lister also needs to have knowledge of the rules of listing on Amazon Storefronts and the ins and outs of Amazon SEO. Not everyone who can write marketing copy can write great or even good Amazon listings. Plus, you are very niched down, so your best bet is someone who does listings for unique products and understands this special market.

Website Building

If you’re not happy with just selling on Amazon, you should open up your own online store. You really should, anyway, because this is where you can freely interact with your ideal customer and market to them in ways that Amazon won’t let you. It’s so much easier even to just give people free information on your own website than it is on a tightly guarded marketplace. Besides, the customers you get on your own website are yours, not Amazon’s.

Find a website designer and programmer who can build you a site that suits your specific needs. Of course, they should be able to create a design that suits the homemade feel and unique angle that your business targets. They should also be technically savvy, however, so don’t leave that out in your search for a good design. Your website needs to function properly if you want to keep visitors on long enough to like you, make a purchase, then tell their friends about you.

Off-Amazon Marketing

If you really want to grow your business, then you should look into conducting marketing efforts outside of the Amazon platform. There are a lot of places where your ideal customers hang out, and this is where you need to be to increase your customer base.

For this task, you need to hire a niche specialist. If your customers are at all like most everyone else on the planet, they are on social media somewhere, or at the very least, know a dozen people who are.

You need someone who knows the channels that are best for you to establish a presence on, like Facebook and Instagram or Pinterest. They will know how to talk to the people who populate these channels and know when to engage, when to introduce new information, and when to take people aside to start a conversation. Customer acquisition is both a science and an art, and you should really leave this task to an expert.

Amazon PPC Management

The competition on Amazon Storefront isn’t nearly as harsh as it is on the rest of the marketplace. You may never have even seen the need to run a single ad. But you may want to run promotions now and again to better manage old stock or to boost your visibility.

Playing with ads is never a good idea, so you need to find someone who knows how to run campaigns, particularly on the Amazon marketplace, and for Amazon Storefronts.

This person will have a different perspective on ads first off because they are not primarily for beating out the competition in most cases. Promotions will be more useful to you as you showcase your unique items and invite people to visit your shop.

Repricing

Amazon’s pricing model has put a lot of small shops out of business. This has led to the need for a repricing strategy to keep up with super low prices. You can use a tool to help you automatically reprice items as Amazon pricing shifts. But since you’re selling unique items, you don’t likely take on large inventories, and they are not likely the same items all the time. This can make it more tedious to use a tool because you’d have to keep loading up new items and setting the rules for them.

Ideally, you would want to have an actual person to help you with your pricing strategy. This is someone who, primarily, is familiar with the types of items that you sell. They should have a lot of experience with the value of these unique items from source materials to craftsmanship to consumer demand.

There is no tool that can tell you how to price specialty items better than a person who has been handling them for a long time. Tools just don’t have the data that they need to compute values for such unique items.

Customer Service

Every business needs stellar customer service. Especially on Amazon, you need to give customers the best possible experience if you want to get and stay on top. For a specialty shop, this gets a bit more complicated.

Amazon created Amazon Storefronts because they wanted to give customers the option of a more intimate, mom-and-pop-shop experience. This means you need to be able to provide customers with that personalized level of service for every single interaction.

Customers who visit Amazon Storefronts are there because they like that personal touch. You need to provide them with someone who can maintain the one-on-one customer relationships that you have developed. Customer service for this type of shop is not mainly focused on answering questions about items, but this is still a very important part of the job.

A representative needs to be knowledgeable about each item, which can be challenging if inventory changes quickly. That means hiring someone with a knack and a passion for unique items and the ability to learn and adjust quickly.

Accounting and Bookkeeping

If you’re like most small business owners, you probably do this yourself. If, however, you’re not really good at it or don’t enjoy doing it, then you shouldn’t. Keeping this task on your plate will only stress you out, take your energy, and rob the joy that you have for running your business. Numbers aren’t for everyone, and crunching them to track profitability, gauge marketing efforts and for tax purposes is a whole different ball game.

You need to hire a bookkeeper to make sure that all your ducks are in a row. There’s nothing worse than trying to backtrack and hunt down numbers that don’t add up. But, hey, you might be really good at this and not want anyone else to touch your books.
You should at least have an accountant that checks everything before you file. This is very important as someone who studied accounting and works with businesses and the government on a regular basis will always know a few things that you don’t. It could mean a lot of additional savings for you, and save you from costly mistakes as well.

Final Thoughts

Running a shop on Amazon Storefronts may seem like a piece of cake, but anyone who actually does it knows better. Even small businesses have a lot of moving parts, and not a lot of hands to keep them from crashing into each other or falling off the edge of the world.

When you start to feel like you’re not enjoying your business anymore, start thinking of what it is that you’re doing that’s making you feel that way. Then get that off your plate! Business owners are supposed to work on their businesses, not in them. Sure, that guarantees the mom-and-pop feel that on Amazon Storefronts customers love. But if it isn’t serving you, then it isn’t the ideal solution.

You can find people to help you out who have the same values as you do. This also means that you can bring on additional skill sets to make things better all around. There’s a win-win situation just waiting in the wings. The only thing left to do is to go out there and find the ideal people to pass off some of these tasks to.