Your Amazon FBA is growing and growing and your daily tasks are slowly overwhelming you?
Then it’s time to delegate some of your work to professional service providers.
They will take care of many things and make sure that your business runs smoothly.
Amazon Marketing Agencies, Sourcing Agents and other service providers can really bring your business to the next level. But how do you find the perfect match? It’s simple.
If you want to start outsourcing, follow these steps:
1. Define Your Goals and Budget
Before you invest even a second in researching service providers, you should first think about what you actually want.
There are four basic questions you should ask yourself:
Where Is My Business Right Now?
In order to answer this question, you need to conduct a thorough analysis of your current situation.
Important: don’t sugarcoat anything. Hard facts are all that matters.
- What do your sales figures look like?
- Are the customers satisfied with your product?
- How well do your PPC campaigns perform and how good is your positioning in the product search results?
- What are your current logistics costs?
This is only a fraction of the questions you can ask yourself.
For a comprehensive assessment, you can hire an Amazon FBA consultant.
They will know exactly what you have to pay attention to.
How Do I Want My Business to Develop?
Now that you know exactly what your business is doing, what your expenses are and how each of your business areas is performing, it is important to determine in which direction your business should develop.
- Do you want to double your revenue?
- Do you want to increase your profit margin?
- Do you want to sell more products in a specific country or region?
Brainstorm and write down everything that comes to your mind.
Then write down a comprehensive list of your goals and sort them by priority.
Remember: one goal doesn’t have to exclude another. Often, the achievement of one goal also promotes the achievement of another goal.
In Which Areas Do I Need Improvements to Achieve This?
You’ve got your list of goals ahead of you, ranked by importance.
Now you have to think about how you can reach these goals. If your main goal is to increase your profit margin, you have to reduce your costs.
To do so, you take the cost analysis, that you made in the first step, and look at where you can save money. So if you spend a lot of money on a freight forwarder, you should find a new Freight forwarder for Amazon FBA shipments.
If you have high storage and fulfillment costs, it’s time to look for other FBA Prep & Fulfillment centers that can offer you better prices.
What’s My Budget?
Nothing in life is free of charge – including hiring service providers. However, it is always a worthwhile investment.
You should consider in advance how much budget you have available to achieve your goals. That’s why prioritizing your goals is so important. You will rarely have the money to achieve ALL your goals at once.
So think about how much money you want to spend on which goal and focus on one or at least a few.
2. Be Clear About Who & What You Are Looking For
A major part is already done. You know where your business is right now, where it’s going and about, and what needs to be done to get there.
Which areas you outsource plays an important role in whether or not you will be able to grow your Amazon business. So now it’s time to think about who can help you get there.
- If you want to achieve many goals in different areas simultaneously, it’s best to hire an Amazon FBA full service agency.
- If you just want to optimize your PPC campaigns, it might be enough to hire an Amazon PPC agency or freelancer. Another important point is that you decide how long you want to use the service. It depends on which service provider you need.
- With freight forwarders, FBA & fulfillment centers and quality inspections, you will maintain the business relationship over a very long period of time. But if you only need someone to optimize your marketing once and would like to take over on your own afterwards, you won’t need the company or the freelancer for that long.
One last question you need to ask yourself is how important the geographical location of the service provider is to you. Of course, you should both speak the same language. However, Amazon sellers often feel more comfortable if the service provider is in the same country.
But there are really good Amazon FBA experts all over the world and your perfect match may be hundreds of miles away.
So think about whether you’d be okay with a geographical separation and possible time difference.
3. Research & Compare
You can start your research now. With your preliminary work, you have already set a “filter”.
That means that you know exactly what kind of service provider you want to work with, where they should be located, which services you need and how high your budget is. In the first step of your research, you should find out which services are normally performed by the service provider you are looking for.
For example, most product photographers offer photo editing, many tools offer free support and help with the initial setup of the tool.
If you have a general overview of which services are normally offered and are included in the price, you can better compare the offers from different service providers. One way to find a good service provider is to get recommendations from your network.
However, this can take a long time and there is no guarantee that anyone will be able to recommend someone who fits your needs. In addition, it is often the case that service providers are recommended who are not specialized in Amazon FBA and therefore do not understand your business properly.
On Sermondo you will find service providers from twenty categories, all of them specialized in working with Amazon sellers. They know exactly what you need to be successful with your business.
4. Set Milestones & KPIs
Once you have found a potential service provider, you should clearly state your idea of their contribution and set goals. If the service provider can name concrete courses of action, this speaks strongly for him and his expertise.
Together, you should precisely define their areas of duties and set measurable (!) milestones. That way, the service provider knows exactly what he has to do and for you, control is easier.
A common technique to further define your goals from step 1 is the S.M.A.R.T. goals technique:
S – Specific
Your goals should be specific.
Ask yourself what exactly you want to achieve, why this goal is important, who needs to be involved, how you want to achieve it, where you want to achieve it and so on.
So instead of saying “I want to increase my sales”, you should choose a specific goal like “I want to increase my sales in the German market by 50% by improving my ad campaigns so I can use the profit to invest in a new product for the US market”. The more specific you formulate your goal, the better.
M – Measurable
When you set your goal, make sure it’s measurable. Try to quantify it as much as possible. Don’t set yourself the goal that your customers will be more satisfied with your product.
Set yourself the goal of satisfying your customers with your product so much that you get three 5-star ratings from them. Boom! A measurable goal.
A – Attainable
The A in S.M.A.R.T. stands for attainable or achievable, meaning that your goal should be realistic.
It’s unlikely that you will increase your sales by 1000% within a month while simultaneously lowering your ad spent. You will quickly become frustrated and demotivated if you set yourself goals that are unrealistic and unattainable.
Ask yourself what restrictions your goal is subject to and how you can achieve it despite these constraints. Do you have enough money, do you have enough time and if so, how do you best use your resources? Once you have answered these questions, tailor your goal to your ability to achieve it.
R – Relevant
In this step in formulating your goal, you need to ask yourself if your goal is relevant and why it is relevant to you. Because only if you see a long-term purpose in fulfilling your goal, you will be motivated to stick to it.
Ask yourself whether this goal also supports and promotes other goals, whether it makes sense to pursue the goal in your current situation, and whether achieving this goal will have a long-term impact on the success of your Amazon FBA business.
T – Time-Bound
When pursuing a goal, it is very important to set fixed deadlines. You need to set a date for the achievement of the overall goal as well as a number of individual dates for the achievement of milestones.
This helps you not to lose focus and keep your goal in sight. So if you plan to tap into a new market, set a product launch date as your day zero and several dates for tasks leading to the product launch, like hiring a local Amazon PPC agency, translating Amazon product listings or contracting an Amazon FBA prep & fulfillment center.
In addition, you should have feedback meetings every now and then. This gives both parties the opportunity to express their wishes, criticisms or suggestions for changes to the strategy.
5. Be Honest
The last step is not really a step, but an important advice that always applies: be honest.
If you don’t like the way the service provider works, tell him. If you want to make changes to the joint workflow or plan, tell him. And above all, tell him in good time if you no longer need his services or want to change the service provider.
Behind every company and every professional Amazon FBA freelancer are people who also have to feed their families and pay their rent.
So as soon as you want to stop the cooperation or reduce the order volume, you should address this openly and honestly so that the service provider can adjust to it. On the other hand, you should also give the service provider the feeling that he can express his opinion and wishes honestly and openly at any time. That way you can work together to resolve any discrepancies.
After all, you don’t want the service provider to suddenly stop working in the middle of a project.
Conclusion: Start Outsourcing and Find the Best Amazon Service Providers on Sermondo!
The competition on Amazon is growing significantly day by day. By outsourcing some of your tasks, you can improve the efficiency of your work and bring your Amazon business to the next level.
So get help from an experienced Amazon expert now! On Sermondo you will find the help you are looking for!
Use our Matching Form & find your Amazon Expert now – Free of charge →
