263: How To Outsource Your Amazon Business For Less With Omer Riaz

Podcast: Download (Duration: 41:46 — 48.1MB)

An Amazon virtual assistant runs $6 to $15 an hour depending on skill level, and the first two tasks worth outsourcing are listing optimization and PPC management. Both eat enormous amounts of time, both compound in value when done consistently, and both are trainable.

Omer Riaz sold on Amazon and eBay before building UrTasker, an Amazon VA service that now employs about 200 trained ecommerce specialists across offices in Long Island and Pakistan. He joined me on the podcast after we spent three straight days together at my Sellers Summit event.

Below is his cost breakdown by skill tier, the onboarding process that actually works, the account access rules that keep you from getting suspended, and the two mistakes that sink most first-time delegators.

Key takeaways

• Amazon VA rates at UrTasker run $6 to $15 an hour across three tiers, with the mid-tier specialist being the most popular.
• Listing optimization and PPC management are the highest-value tasks to outsource for a private label seller.
• Never give a VA admin access to your Amazon account. Use Amazon’s user permissions and audit them monthly.
• Budget roughly two weeks of onboarding with 30 to 40 minutes a day of your own time before expecting independent work.
• The two most common failures are expecting a VA to match your output in month one and micromanaging instead of delegating.
• Build response templates for customer service so your VA is not composing replies from scratch.
• An account audit on my own listings found a field-entry mistake my team had made, and correcting it lifted sales close to 30%.

How UrTasker started as an Amazon VA service

UrTasker started because Omer’s own suppliers asked to borrow his team. He and his brother began selling on Amazon in 2015, starting with retail arbitrage and moving into private label, while Omer worked full time as an IT consultant at Accenture and Deloitte implementing ERP software.

Staffing for ecommerce was the gap he ran into immediately. Finding people was hard, and the people he found were not economical.

So he brought in a third co-founder and set up a three-person team in Pakistan handling listing creation and PPC management. Omer trained himself first, then trained them.

A year later the business was doing six figures, and his New Jersey suppliers could not work out how two IT guys were running a functioning ecommerce operation. When he explained he had a team in Pakistan, they asked whether that team could manage their accounts too.

Why Omer stopped selling on Amazon

Omer shut down his own Amazon selling in early 2016 for two reasons. Demand for training and staffing was consuming the time he would have spent on his own account.

The larger reason is conflict of interest. Managing seller accounts while selling competing products in the same categories does not work.

UrTasker is a family business with three co-founder brothers, two in the US and one in Pakistan running operations. Four years in, they have about 200 trained specialists and three offices.

Which Amazon tasks should you outsource first?

For a private label seller, listing optimization and PPC management are the two highest-value tasks to delegate. Both are time-intensive and both create a feedback loop that most sellers are too busy to close.

Listing optimization means checking your title, bullets, backend keywords, description, and images against Amazon’s current standards. Omer’s framing is to ask whether you are actually using the full space available in each field.

PPC generates the data that should feed back into the listing. You download search term reports, find the terms that convert, and put them into the listing, and Omer sees most sellers skip this entirely because day-to-day work crowds it out.

His other requirement is that a VA should research platform changes, not just execute assigned tasks. Amazon sharply reduced the backend keyword character allowance from what sellers had in the early days, and plenty of them never noticed.

Outsourcing inventory management and case filing

Inventory management is the next tier, covering FBA shipment creation and chasing down inventory Amazon loses. One of Omer’s managers recovered about $5,000 for a client by filing missing-inventory cases.

That work is mechanical and slow: pull inventory reports, filter the data in Excel, identify discrepancies, submit cases. Software exists for parts of it, and manual work remains at the end of every workflow.

Sellers doing FBM or selling across multiple channels have more inventory work, not less. The right scope depends on your fulfillment model.

Outsourcing Amazon customer service

Customer service works when you build templates for your common scenarios. Omer’s team in Pakistan learns English from grade one, and he is candid that a US resource is a different skill level.

Templates solve most of that gap. Every business has recurring situations, and a documented reply for each one lets a VA respond consistently to customers and to Amazon.

Communication outside the templates still gets handled. The templates just stop you from rewriting the same answer repeatedly.

Voice support is rarely outsourced to UrTasker. VAs will call Amazon, and most clients who want phone support with customers keep a US-based rep.

What does an Amazon virtual assistant cost?

UrTasker’s rates range from $6 to $15 an hour across three tiers, on month-to-month contracts with no long-term commitment.

The rate covers training, benefits, and vacation backup coverage, since these are full-time employees rather than freelancers. UrTasker also collects client feedback monthly and pays bonuses out of its own margin based on that feedback.

Most clients hire dedicated full-time VAs and can reach them by call, Skype, or message throughout the day. Part-time arrangements mean sharing that person’s hours with another client.

Replacement is complimentary. Departing employees give two months notice so a replacement can be trained in parallel, and if someone leaves abruptly, UrTasker absorbs the retraining cost.

How to onboard an Amazon VA

Plan on about two weeks of onboarding with 30 to 40 minutes of your own time each day. That starts after an account audit that defines the actual scope of work.

The first requirement is patience, because you are building a working relationship with a person rather than turning on a service. Omer’s phrasing is that you need mutual understanding before you need output.

The second requirement is documented business process. A trained VA can work from day one on generic Amazon tasks and still needs to learn how your business specifically does things.

If your processes are already documented, use them. If they are not, documenting them is the onboarding work.

Omer draws the parallel to enterprise IT consulting, where requirement gathering and scope definition consume real project time before implementation starts. Ecommerce sellers skip that step and then wonder why the delegation failed.

Matching VA skill level to the work

Trained does not mean interchangeable. Omer’s team is trained at different levels, and you have to match the tier to what you actually need done.

An entry-level VA doing data entry is a different hire than an expert running PPC. Defining the requirement is what makes that match possible.

How to give a VA Amazon account access safely

Never give a VA admin access to your Amazon account. Use Amazon’s user permissions, grant only what the defined scope requires, and review those permissions monthly.

The risk is real. A friend of mine let a VA into his account, that VA had been doing suspicious activity across other accounts, and he ended up suspended for a period.

UrTasker manages this by working from its own offices with controlled traffic. They define scope up front, request only the matching user permissions, and tell clients to revoke access that turns out to be unused.

Their offices have posters reading “no admin account,” the same way an office posts no-smoking signs. There is no admin account to log into.

Vetting a freelancer’s other account access

Ask a prospective freelancer whether they have admin access to any Amazon account, including their own or another client’s. That is the layer sellers forget to check.

Omer’s younger brother is a cybercrime lawyer and recorded a video specifically to educate sellers on this. The failure mode is a VA whose own account activity contaminates yours.

An NDA adds a further layer. UrTasker signs one with every client and is US-based, which makes the agreement enforceable.

The two biggest mistakes sellers make with VAs

The first mistake is expecting a VA to perform at your level within a month or two. You are effectively producing a photocopy of yourself, and that takes time and review.

Realistic expectations mean reviewing output early, flagging what needs improvement, and treating it as an iterative process. You still own quality as the business owner.

The second mistake is micromanaging instead of delegating. That leaves you managing a VA and doing your own work, which generates frustration on both sides.

UrTasker structures around this by assigning every VA a quality assurance manager with 10 to 15 years of experience who reviews work before it reaches the client. That review layer only helps if the client stops duplicating it.

Omer’s diagnostic question for anyone about to hire is whether they have listed the tasks they want done and decided how they will monitor them. Most people have not thought about it.

The point of delegating is freeing your time for strategy, product research, or manufacturing. That only works if you actually hand the day-to-day off.

The product research mistake new Amazon sellers make

New sellers rush product research and commit to inventory before validating anything. They skip studying categories, competitors, and market size, then order thousands of units that sit in a warehouse.

That approach is survivable with a lot of capital. It is fatal if you are working full time on a small budget trying to build something.

Omer’s alternative is hiring a VA for a short engagement purely to do product research, without a long-term commitment. You get five or six candidate products, order fewer than 100 units of each, and launch four or five.

One or two will work, and that is your product. The small test order is what keeps a bad pick from becoming dead inventory.

What an Amazon account audit finds

I let Omer audit my own Amazon listings because I treat my ecommerce business as a laboratory and did not expect him to find anything. He found that someone on my team had put information into the wrong field on a listing.

Correcting that mistake lifted sales close to 30%. With a large catalog, details get lost, and a second set of eyes on your listings is genuinely useful.

UrTasker’s audit process runs two to three days and produces a written PDF report. I have used them for listing optimization since, mostly as a check on my own team’s work.

You can find Omer and his team at UrTasker.com.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an Amazon virtual assistant cost?

UrTasker charges $6 to $15 per hour depending on skill tier, on month-to-month contracts. The mid-tier specialist, who can handle listing optimization and PPC management, is the most commonly hired.

What tasks can an Amazon VA do?

Listing creation, listing optimization, PPC management, customer service, inventory management, FBA shipment creation, and filing cases with Amazon for missing inventory. Omer’s summary is that everything except physically shipping your product can be delegated.

Should you give a VA admin access to your Amazon account?

No. Use Amazon’s user permissions to grant only the access the defined scope requires, and review those permissions monthly, because a VA with problematic activity on other accounts can get yours suspended.

How long does it take to onboard an Amazon VA?

Roughly two weeks, with 30 to 40 minutes of your own time per day. That assumes your business processes are documented or that you document them during onboarding.

Do you get a dedicated VA or a shared one?

At UrTasker, a full-time hire is fully dedicated to one client. Part-time arrangements such as four hours a day mean the remaining hours go to another client.

What happens if your VA quits?

UrTasker requires two months notice from departing employees so a replacement can be trained in parallel, and the client has to approve the replacement. Retraining is provided at no additional cost.

What is the biggest mistake sellers make when hiring a VA?

Expecting the VA to match their own output within a month or two, and micromanaging rather than genuinely delegating. Both leave the owner doing their original work plus managing someone else.

How should you handle customer service with an overseas VA?

Build response templates covering your recurring customer and Amazon scenarios. Templates give the VA consistent, correct language to work from, and anything outside them can still be escalated.