Shopify tasks you can
hand to a VA
Almost everything you do in Shopify admin every day is delegable, and most store owners delegate none of it. Here is the split, the order, and the access settings that keep it safe.
Shopify is unusual among business systems in that nearly all of the daily work is execution rather than judgement. Building a product. Sorting a collection. Setting up a discount. Checking an order exception. Answering a where-is-my-order.
The decisions — what to stock, what to charge, what the brand sounds like — are yours and take a small fraction of the time. Yet most store owners spend their week in the admin doing the execution, because it never quite reaches the top of the list to hand over.
This is the highest-leverage handover in ecommerce and also the most visible: the work shows up on the site the same day, so you find out quickly whether it is working.
Who this is for
✓Worth your time if
- You are in Shopify admin most days doing work you could describe to someone else
- Your catalogue has half-finished products or empty attribute fields
- Promotions go out late or not at all
- Support tickets are answered in the evening
✕Probably not if
- Your store has almost no products and almost no orders yet
- You need a developer — theme code and app integration is a different skill set
- You want someone to own strategy and range decisions
- You are not willing to write down your voice and your policies
What a Shopify VA actually does
Grouped by how quickly store owners hand each one over. The first three usually go in week one.
Products built end to end — copy from your brief, images sized and named, variants, tags, metafields and SEO fields all populated rather than left as defaults.
Collections curated and re-sorted, bestsellers surfaced, out-of-stock demoted, cross-sells and upsells configured.
Discount codes, automatic discounts, bundles and campaign landing pages built, scheduled, checked live and taken down on time.
Held orders, address problems, payment flags and pre-order mismatches caught and resolved before dispatch.
Tickets, chat and social messages answered to your macro library, returns processed to policy, chargeback evidence lodged.
Stock reconciled between Shopify and your marketplaces or 3PL, oversells prevented, low stock flagged.
Broken links, missing images, failing filters and checkout friction found by routine checking rather than by a customer.
Sales by product and collection, conversion, dead stock and return reasons — weekly.
What stays with you
The dividing line in Shopify is commercial decisions and money. Everything else is delegable with the right access level.
- Payment and payout settingsNever delegated. No changes to gateways, bank details or payout configuration, and no access to that section.
- Pricing and marginThey enter your prices and build your discounts. What you charge is yours.
- Ad spend authorisationBuilding a campaign is not authorising a budget.
- Range and brand decisionsWhat to stock and how the brand sounds are yours; they execute to your brief.
- App installationAnything that changes your stack or adds a subscription comes to you first.
The order to hand it over
Visible, checkable work first. Anything touching customers or money later.
Product listings, first
Start here. The output is completely visible, mistakes cost nothing, and building twenty products teaches them your catalogue, your voice and your conventions faster than any briefing document.
Merchandising and collections
Once they know the catalogue, sorting and curating it is the natural next step — and the conversion effect is measurable.
Promotions
Now they know products and collections, building a campaign is mechanical. Keep the offer decision with you; hand over the build and the QA.
Order exceptions
Requires enough context to know what is normal. Give them a written escalation rule for anything unusual.
Customer support
Last, because it is the only one where a mistake reaches a customer directly. Build the macro library first, review the first week of responses, then loosen.
Giving the owner login instead of a staff account
It is the fastest thing to do and it is the one that actually causes damage. A staff account with scoped permissions means every action is attributed, payment settings are unreachable, and access dies the moment you revoke it. The owner login means none of that, and it survives the person leaving. Create a staff account, grant products, collections, discounts and orders, withhold payment and payout settings entirely, and review the admin activity log in the first fortnight.