Running an e-commerce business requires you to wear many hats. Similar to running a physical store, an online business has its own front-office (management and administrative tasks) and back-office ( accounting, inventory, website maintenance, etc.) sections.
If you’re just starting up, you have to play the role of a CEO, innovator, financier on top of being a salesperson, customer service representative, plus a lot of repetitive, micro-tasks on a daily basis. It’s IMPOSSIBLE that a single person can do all of these for an e-commerce business. And I have to tell you that you don’t have to do every single task ALL alone. Thus, the importance of delegation. Delegation of work will free up some of your precious time and allows you to work on things you feel more important to succeed in business.
Delegation doesn’t mean you aren’t a hard-working entrepreneur. But, delegation simply means you know how to work smarter as a business owner.
In this blog post, I’m going to share the 10 most-common e-commerce tasks that you can delegate. You can hire a contractor, a freelancer, or a virtual assistant to do some of these.
10 E-Commerce Tasks You Can Delegate
Social Media Management & Marketing
In your e-commerce business, social media is big, powerful, and critical. Diverse e-commerce brands are riding the wave of social media marketing. According to Oberlo, 73% of marketers believe that their efforts through social media have been very effective for their business.
If you’ll spend your time posting and interacting with your target customers on social media, you surely have no time left to do the other tasks. Even with the help of automation, social media management and marketing requires attention and creativity. What the smart thing to do? Hire a social media manager and marketer who can help you run your social media accounts.
Customer Service
A missed call from a customer who follows up for an order or an overlooked email asking for a change in order is bad for any e-commerce brand. Customers are expecting you can receive their calls or answer your emails. If you can’t do this, then you should delegate this task to someone who can.
Data Entry
Every e-commerce business updates its records from time to time. Though this task is fairly easy, it will still consume a considerable amount of time on your end. 1-2 hours of data entry task can be delegated to someone else instead of you doing it.
Product Research
An e-commerce brand is constantly on the lookout for a great product. Online competition is tough and the first to innovate always succeed. Instead of spending long hours of research for your next winning product, hire someone else to do this. What you can do instead is to review the products and approved them before it will be added to your shop.
Graphic Design
How you present your product to your target customers is as much important as finding the right product. No matter how great a product is if you fail to present it well, it won’t attract sales. That’s why great product design is very important. That’s the role of a graphic designer comes to help!
Primarily, an email marketer can help you create emails that suit your brand. An e-commerce email marketer can set up newsletters, nurturing campaigns, and abandon cart flow.
Content Writing
A content writer comes helpful when you need assistance with copywriting especially when writing your emails, blogs, product description, landing pages, and the like.
Bookkeeping & Accounting
The next person who can tell if your business is running in good shape is your accountant. We can all agree that cash is king when you’re running an e-commerce business. But there are other figures that can determine the condition of your e-commerce store and an accountant can help you with that, especially when taxes are involved.
Website Development & IT support
How comfortable you are with CSS and HTML? If you’re someone like me who isn’t confident to tread on that area, you’ll need to add a website developer on your team.
Lead Generation
What a lead generation specialist can do for your e-commerce business is to follow up with your leads. He or she will be your dedicated person in your sales and marketing team who’ll help you with prospecting and qualifying leads.
Conclusion
We can add more to this list but my point in this blog post is to help figure out the kind of tasks you can delegate to other people. People who can do these tasks effectively and probably faster than you do.
Been delegating tasks for your e-commerce? Great! Share with me how it helps you run your e-commerce business.