Lesson 8 of 9 · 5 min
What a VA can take, and what stays with you
“Someone who uploads products and answers emails” is a decade out of date. A trained Shopify VA can run most of the operational layer of a store. The point of the list is scoping: mark what leaves your calendar, in what order, and what never should.
The twelve areas, roughly in the order to hand them over
- Customer support: email and chat in your helpdesk, returns and exchanges, chargeback evidence, the FAQ, a macro library refined weekly.
- Orders and fulfilment: daily monitoring, address and fraud checks, partial fulfilments, 3PL exceptions, tracking pushes, refunds and cancellations.
- Catalogue and inventory: listings with proper titles, descriptions, tags and metafields; variants; images; reorder-point alerts; supplier follow-ups and invoice reconciliation.
- Reporting: a daily snapshot, a weekly digest, monthly review prep, dashboards.
- Documentation: a procedure for every recurring task, audited quarterly. The most underrated area and the one that makes the store survive a departure.
- Email and SMS execution: flows and campaigns deployed from your approved copy, segments, tests, list health.
- App stack: a quarterly audit, update and billing monitoring, vendor support tickets.
- Paid media operations: pixels and feeds, naming conventions, pacing alerts, weekly reporting. Not strategy.
- Conversion testing execution: heatmap review, deploying and documenting tests.
- Theme settings and small edits, with anything needing code briefed to a developer.
- Marketplaces, if you sell on them: inventory sync, listings, support, account health.
- Research and admin: competitors, supplier discovery, spreadsheets, meeting prep.
What stays with you or a specialist
Creative direction and brand identity. Brand-voice copywriting (a VA deploys it; a writer writes it). Media strategy at scale. Legal, tax and compliance. The P&L and any major financial decision.
Scope it in an hour
Take the audit from lesson two, tag each task with its time, and mark the ones on the list above. Most founders find fifteen to twenty-five hours a week that can leave their calendar within a month of onboarding. That number is also your answer to “how many hours a week” in the role definition.
Checked From the complete task list guide. Its timelines to results and its sample week-one lists are not here.
The twelve areas and the “what a VA should not do” list are the guide’s. The guide also gives a timeline for when each kind of work shows in the numbers (support in week one, flow revenue by week three, and so on) and three sample first weeks “from clients of ours, with names changed.” Both are plausible and neither can be checked from outside the agency, so they are left out. The fifteen-to-twenty-five-hours figure is the guide’s own observation and is reported as such.