Should You Trust a VA to Manage Your Marketplace Listings? – EcommerceBytes

Outsourcing tasks can be a great way to help scale a business, and Virtual Assistants have been around for a long time. But reports have been surfacing of sellers being permanently suspended after giving access to their eBay and Amazon accounts to Virtual Assistants (VAs) to manage on their behalf.

Many marketplaces and inventory-management services offer features that allow accountholders to give permissions to employees to do certain discrete tasks without having to give workers their user name and passwords. For example, eBay offers “Multi-user account access” (MUAA) to let sellers delegate aspects of managing their accounts. According to its help page:

“Multi-user account access (MUAA) is a great way to delegate your workload. For example, you can assign specific tasks to an employee, such as creating your eBay listings or printing shipping labels. You’ll also access detailed activity logs for each account you add.” 

But even granting partial access to accounts should be handled carefully.

In a recent thread, an eBay seller said their VA didn’t ship the items to customers and “ran away”; eBay suspended the seller’s account after customers requested refunds. It wasn’t clear from the post if the seller was using eBay’s MUAA feature or what protection that might have offered if they had.

Likewise, in a thread on Amazon, a seller warned that there were a lot of Facebook groups offering VA services that only want access to sellers’ Amazon accounts for nefarious reasons. (The main thrust of the conversation was about the advisability of engaging in a Retail Arbitrage strategy on Amazon and the reliability of advice given by experts on Youtube and other such channels.)

It’s not just Virtual Assistants – sellers advise colleagues to use due diligence when hiring agencies to manage their online advertising. In one Amazon discussion board thread, a seller asked if that was allowed on Amazon and wrote, “I met a guy on Facebook he is from Pakistan. He’s been helping me with understanding how PPC works. He also offer me service for $300 a month for him to take care of all my campaign ads and PPC.”

One seller outlined one of the risks of hiring an expert – if they log into multiple clients’ accounts, and one of those accounts gets suspended, there could be a “related accounts” issue that prompts Amazon to suspend all of the accounts for being related to the suspended account. But another seller quickly pointed out that they use an agency with great success:

“It’s completely fine to hire a third party to handle PPC. While I wouldn’t trust some random guy from Pakistan on Facebook, I do know of plenty of legitimate individuals and businesses. In fact, I pay an agency to handle my PPC, reimbursement requests, A+ content, deals etc. It’s brought my costs down significantly.”

It’s worth pointing out that some of the sellers who said they’d been suspended for using VAs were based in other countries, including Pakistan – this isn’t just a problem that impacts US-based sellers.

A colleague of ours used a Virtual Assistant for years – her emails were always answered promptly and her social media accounts were managed professionally and timely. But I have no doubt she took time to search and thoroughly vet the person before granting any access to her accounts.

We raised a similar question a few years ago with regard to freelancers (“Would You Hire a Freelancer to Boost Online Sales?“). In the comments, one seller said their use of gig-workers actually made things worse, but they had found a reliable person to help – though they didn’t say how they had found the person.

There’s an adage made famous by a New Yorker cartoon that applies when hiring someone sight unseen: “on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog” – and that applies when looking for a virtual assistant. 

What kind of vetting do you do when searching for VAs, agencies, or vendors, for that matter? Do Zoom interviews help in the vetting process?

Let us know what you think – is it ever okay to hand over control of your eBay or Amazon account to a Virtual Assistant, even on a limited basis?

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