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Outsource your ecommerce business by matching the hiring level to the task: basic workers who follow your systems, mid-level specialists who execute a craft, and experts who bring their own strategy. Hiring a $5 an hour worker to run your Facebook ads, or forcing an expert to follow your process instead of theirs, is where most outsourcing goes wrong.
Nathan Hirsch is the founder and CEO of FreeeUp, a platform connecting businesses to freelancers and virtual assistants who specialize in ecommerce and digital marketing. Before that he bootstrapped an Amazon dropshipping business managing over 500,000 products from more than 1,000 suppliers at $5 to $6 million a year.
Below are the hiring tiers and what each costs, the order he outsourced tasks in, how he manages a 40-plus person remote team without voice calls, and the cultural adjustment that cut his turnover.
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Table of Contents
Key takeaways
- Three hiring levels: basic workers who follow systems, mid-level specialists who execute, and experts who bring their own expertise.
- Overseas rates run roughly $5 to $10 an hour for basic work, $7 to $15 for mid-level specialists, and $15 and up for experts.
- US equivalents run about $20 to $30 for mid-level and $25 and up for experts, roughly a 2:1 differential.
- Customer service was the first thing Nathan outsourced, followed by bookkeeping and price and inventory updates.
- He runs a 40 to 50 person remote team entirely in writing, with no voice calls, using Skype, email, Trello, and Jira.
- Calling out a Filipino team member’s mistakes in a group chat backfired badly. Private, positively framed feedback cut his turnover.
- The concern about VAs getting your Amazon account banned via shared IPs is, in Nathan’s experience across thousands of sellers, overblown.
- The three biggest mistakes: wrong hiring level, unset expectations, and loading one person with everything.
How Nathan Hirsch built a $6 million dropshipping business in college
Nathan started selling on Amazon in 2008 as a college student with no warehouse and no capital, inventing dropshipping before he knew the term for it. His parents were both teachers, and after a string of summer jobs he decided he hated working for other people.
He treated college as a four-year countdown to build something. He started by buying and reselling textbooks, then experimented with sporting equipment, DVDs, and computers, all of which failed.
Baby products were what worked, which meant a single 20-year-old selling millions of dollars of baby gear. At its peak the business ran 500,000 products across 1,000 suppliers at $5 to $6 million a year for seven or eight years.
His supplier pitch started with smaller retail sites that sat between wholesale and retail, then moved up to manufacturers directly. The value proposition was simple: you do not understand Amazon, we have a store with strong reviews and good customer service, and all you have to do is give us inventory access.
Is Amazon dropshipping still viable?
Nathan exited dropshipping in January but still has clients running it successfully. The difference between the two outcomes is quality assurance.
Amazon continuously tightens merchant-fulfilled metrics: cancellation rate, return rate, defect rate. Sellers who succeed are ruthless with suppliers who miss those targets and quick to drop them.
When Nathan started, there were three sellers on a typical listing. The competition today is a different order of magnitude, and Amazon’s quality bar has climbed accordingly.
The three levels of freelancers and what each costs
The single most important outsourcing decision is matching the hiring level to the task. Nathan breaks freelancers into three tiers.
| Level | What they do | Non-US rate | US rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | Followers who execute your systems and processes | $5 to $10/hour | Higher |
| Mid-level specialist | Bookkeepers, writers, graphic designers. Doers, not consultants | $7 to $15/hour | $20 to $30/hour |
| Expert | Brings their own expertise, consults, executes high-level strategy | $15+/hour | $25+/hour |
A mid-level specialist already knows how to be a graphic designer, so you are not teaching the craft. They are also not advising you on strategy.
The two failure modes are opposite errors. Hiring at $5 an hour and asking for Facebook ads or Amazon PPC management produces a bad experience, and hiring an expert then forcing them onto your process wastes what you paid for.
What to outsource first in an ecommerce business
Nathan outsourced customer service first, because dropshipping emails arrive 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He describes the first morning he woke up without any customer service emails to answer as a milestone.
Bookkeeping came second. He was paying manufacturers by credit card and spending hours every month with his business partner reading numbers aloud into QuickBooks.
Price and inventory updates came third. With that many manufacturers, changes were constant, so he built an inbox where suppliers emailed stock and price changes and a team in the Philippines processed them into Amazon.
That manual system eventually became software. Around years four and five he hired developers to build a tool where manufacturers uploaded files, the system monitored prices and inventory, and it pushed updates through Amazon’s API.
Structuring a customer service team across two countries
Nathan’s original structure put a US rep on escalations and management, with a Philippines team handling repetitive work like tracking questions and product inquiries. That split was historical accident rather than design.
He hired US college students first because he knew nothing about outsourcing, then added Philippines staff underneath rather than firing anyone. At FreeeUp today his entire 12-person support team is in the Philippines.
The mechanism that makes it work is a documented blueprint of every situation type. Returns that are your fault, returns that are the manufacturer’s fault (which is really your fault), tracking inquiries, product questions.
Each situation gets canned responses and an assigned handling level. Anything past a threshold escalates to the US rep, and genuinely angry customers escalate to Nathan.
How to vet for customer service attitude
Nathan vets for attitude and communication, not just skill, because impressive resumes regularly blow up on contact with real work. The trait he wants is someone who gets nicer as the customer gets angrier.
The test is a one-on-one interview where they deliberately challenge the candidate. They are not yelling, and they are probing to see whether the person becomes aggressive or defensive.
FreeeUp receives about 4,000 applicants a week and accepts roughly one in a hundred. Skill tests are role-specific, and a seven out of 10 is fine as long as the person is priced accordingly and honest about their limits.
Pros and cons of hiring customer service in the Philippines
The advantages are price and time zone coverage, since someone can work while you sleep and hiring a US worker for overnight shifts is difficult. The disadvantage is cultural, not linguistic.
Nathan would put his top Philippines reps against any US rep on English, communication, and problem solving. What does come up is occasional misinterpretation of a client’s tone, which he treats as a teachable moment rather than a defect.
Phone support works too. Filipino accents tend to be less pronounced than those from India or Pakistan, and Nathan has clients running four-person phone teams whose customers never notice.
The cultural adjustment that cut Nathan’s turnover
Nathan’s directness was driving Filipino hires to quit, and softening how he delivered feedback fixed it. He had hired a great assistant named Cheeks early on, then watched a string of subsequent hires leave after he invested time and money training them.
He asked Cheeks directly why people were leaving. Her answer was that his communication style is very direct, and the people he was working with tended to take criticism more personally than his US hires.
The concrete fix was one specific behavior. He had been tagging an assistant in a group chat every time he spotted a small mistake, which embarrassed the person, made him nervous, and made the errors worse.
Pulling him aside privately changed everything. The reframed version leads with what went well, notes the specific corrections, invites questions, and closes positively.
Nathan eventually applied that approach to everyone as preventative maintenance. He also filters for fit rather than adapting to each person, because managing 40 to 50 people each in their own style would be impossible.
Freelancers vs dedicated virtual assistants
Nathan splits his business by task type: repetitive daily operations go to part-time or full-time VAs working mainly for him, and project-based or high-level work goes to freelancers and agencies who serve other clients too. Customer service and billing are outsourced full time; blog writing and Facebook ads go to US freelancers and agencies.
For the high-level work, he does not need exclusivity. It is fine that a freelancer has other clients as long as his work gets done at a high level.
That structure replaced the office he opened around year five of the Amazon business and shut down 18 months later. He disliked commuting, found that bringing people together generated more drama, and realized he was competing for local talent against every other business in the area.
Handing sensitive information to remote workers
Nathan gives bookkeepers view-only permissions on PayPal, credit card, and Amazon accounts rather than the ability to move money or change settings. User permissions do most of the security work.
His accountant asked him at 20 when he planned to hire his first person, and Nathan listed every excuse: they will steal my ideas, they will steal my information, it costs money, I have to train them. The accountant laughed and told him he would learn the lesson himself.
He did, working 20-hour days through his first busy season answering every email and filling every order. In eight-plus years of hiring since, billing 15,000 hours a week, he has never had a serious incident.
His view is that the risk never reaches zero even if you hire your best friend. Freelancers care far more about supporting their families and growing their own businesses than about stealing from you.
NDAs are near-useless in practice, because you are not going to chase someone across the Philippines to enforce one. Relationship building is the substitute Nathan actually recommends.
Do virtual assistants put your Amazon account at risk?
Nathan has never seen a VA’s shared IP get a client’s Amazon account banned, across thousands of sellers using VAs both inside and outside FreeeUp. He considers the concern well overblown in the industry.
Amazon expects sellers to hire people rather than operate solo. The reasonable precautions are giving user permissions rather than main account access, and optionally providing a VPN.
He ran his own Amazon store with VAs for eight years, and those VAs were working for many other sellers at the same time.
How to manage a remote team entirely in writing
Nathan runs a 40 to 50 person distributed team without voice calls, keeping every instruction in writing so nothing gets lost, no call drops, and there is always a reference. His stack is deliberately minimal: email, Skype, Trello for projects, Jira for developers.
Monday at 10am the whole VA team meets, reviewing the previous week and the week ahead, with each team reporting. Those meetings are Skype group chats rather than calls.
Individual teams meet separately through the week. Nathan and his business partner Connor split responsibilities by skill set, with Connor on developers, social media, and content, and Nathan on customer service, billing, and business structure.
Routing is by urgency. Anything needed within the hour goes by email, and genuinely urgent items go by Skype.
Outsourcing development work
Working with developers requires assuming nothing, because what is obvious on the business side is invisible on the code side. A project you assume is small may be large, and vice versa.
Nathan runs two developers in India and one in the US, and every requirement is documented before work begins with explicit due dates. Jira maps every bug, revision, and update.
The extra time spent specifying up front is what prevents the confusion later.
How to set expectations with a new freelancer
The single biggest failure in hiring freelancers is not setting expectations before work starts. Freelancers serve many clients, and what one client loves is another’s pet peeve.
Nathan sees people hire someone, start them on work, check back three weeks later, and be unhappy. Almost all of that traces to the front end.
He specifies how communication will happen, what the goal of the project is, and what constitutes success or failure. He also describes what working with him is like: he talks fast, moves fast, avoids voice calls, and keeps everything in writing on Skype.
Time invested up front is time saved on he-said-she-said later.
The three biggest outsourcing mistakes
Nathan’s three failure modes are hiring at the wrong level, skipping expectation-setting, and failing to diversify. The third is the one that damages businesses most.
Because hiring is hard, entrepreneurs make a series of bad hires, finally find someone excellent, and load that person with everything. That makes the business fragile.
If that person quits, gets sick, or has a falling out with you, it can set the business back months or years. Distributing responsibility as you grow is the protection.
How FreeeUp differs from Upwork
FreeeUp pre-vets rather than letting clients recruit from an open pool, accepting roughly the top 1% of about 4,000 weekly applicants. Because those people are already on the platform and looking for work, clients get matched within hours or minutes of submitting a request.
The other differentiators are 24/7 support and a no-turnover guarantee. If a freelancer quits for any reason, FreeeUp covers replacement costs and provides a new person immediately.
You can find Nathan at FreeeUp.com, spelled with three E’s.
Frequently asked questions
What should you outsource first in an ecommerce business?
Customer service, because it generates constant inbound work at all hours and is the easiest to systematize with documented scenarios and canned responses. Nathan Hirsch followed it with bookkeeping and then price and inventory updates.
How much does a virtual assistant cost?
Roughly $5 to $10 an hour for basic task work outside the US, $7 to $15 for mid-level specialists like bookkeepers and designers, and $15 and up for experts. US rates run about $20 to $30 for mid-level and $25 and up for experts.
What are the three levels of freelancers?
Basic workers who follow your existing systems, mid-level specialists who execute a skill without needing training in it, and experts who bring their own expertise and can consult on strategy. Matching the level to the task is the core of hiring well.
Can a VA get your Amazon account banned?
Nathan Hirsch has never seen it happen across thousands of Amazon sellers using shared VAs, and considers the concern overblown. Use Amazon’s user permissions rather than granting main account access, and optionally provide a VPN.
How do you manage a remote team across time zones?
Keep everything in writing so nothing is lost and there is always a reference. Nathan runs 40 to 50 people using email, Skype group chats, Trello, and Jira, with no voice calls at all.
How should you give feedback to overseas team members?
Privately and framed positively. Calling out mistakes in group chats embarrassed one of Nathan’s assistants badly enough to hurt his performance, and switching to private, encouraging feedback reduced turnover significantly.
Should you hire a dedicated VA or a freelancer with other clients?
Use dedicated VAs for repetitive daily operations and freelancers or agencies for project-based, higher-level work where exclusivity does not matter. That split is how Nathan structures his own business.
What is the biggest outsourcing mistake?
Loading one trusted person with every responsibility. If that person leaves or becomes unavailable, the business can lose months or years of progress, so distribute responsibility as you grow.
