I Trained a Remote Hire to Buy $400k Inventory in 30 Days

Today, I'm going to show you how I actually trained a $5 an hour virtual assistant to purchase over $400,000 worth of inventory for my e-commerce business. Since 2022, we've done $4.2 million in revenue in my Amazon business. Here's a photo of some actual inventory going out. So, it's not just numbers on a screen. This is my team based in the Philippines we're going to be talking about today. And this is a screenshot from our inventory spreadsheet.

In 2025, we purchased $491,000 worth of inventory. I'm going to be going through the process that I took to get to that outcome. So, first some context on the business model so you understand where we are. There's two parts of the equation. There's the sourcing side and there's the purchasing/admin side. The sourcing is finding the deals. The admin purchasing is actually making the checkouts and getting it the the logistics behind it.

We're going to be focusing on this part today. So Danielle has been with me since 2023. I found her on online jobs.ph and I posted a role directly calling out someone that does not have experience in e-commerce, especially not Amazon. I wanted a clean slate. I could teach someone on the process that I already knew very well without having to re unlearn the things that they already knew and retrain them. I my my end goal here was to get purchasing off my plate, but you can't just throw someone the credit cards and say, "All right, you know, go for it." I had to build up to that.

So, this is the process that I followed to get to that outcome. I used a pretty simple training pyramid, starting off with building the foundational context first, moving into the core concepts required to do the role effectively, the actual execution, and then the forever ongoing feedback loops. So first I started her off with data entry. I wanted to give an idea on the entire supply chain how everything works. This was a lot of our inventory sheets for our internal records and then for our third party logistics provider as well as order tracking in the supply chain process from our suppliers to the to the warehouse to Amazon and so forth.

And this gave her the the foundation in order to move on to the next stage which was actually performing the checkouts. Now, I was doing the reviewing down here on our master Google sheet. How many I would purchase, zero or however many quantity, and she would be doing the actual checkouts of the inventory, putting in the card information just based on what I had recommended. Now, she wasn't doing any of the judgment, but she saw which leads I was purchasing and which ones I was passing from the sourcing team.

So, just that added in that next layer of understanding. From there, I give her access to the data, layering that in. So, access to the actual performance of the items that we sourced on Amazon seller central so she could get a pulse for what inventory actually sells, for how much, what models, what brands, that sort of stuff. Next step was parallel feedback. So, I still not given her access to the to the actual uh purchasing yet, the actual quantity.

So, what we would do was I added a second column here to our sourcing sheet, DND, where she would put her recommendations and I would put Brian recommendations. I would have her put in hers first without looking at hers. I would put in mine. And then I would double check and give her feedback on like, hey, here's why I think, you know, you might have said this. Here's why I think it's this way.

Here's where I think you're actually right on this. And eventually we just got to the point where unknowingly we would be providing the exact same recommendations on quantity to purchase. And that's when I knew she was ready. So now Danielle reviews all the leads from the sourcing team, calculates how many we're going to buy and ends up making better calls than I do a lot of times just from being so in the weeds on the data.

And then she checks out using their company cards totaling $492,000 worth of inventory. So the loop to really make this effective in order for me to get to this point was her and continuous from now on is getting that feedback of seeing how our recommendations actually did. Looking at the true sales performance on a day-to-day basis like per item and then on a monthly aggregate level looking at our KPIs. So, the average profit per sale and the net profit to see in general if she's trending month over month, year-over-year in a positive direction or a negative direction.

Now, in order to make her actually care about this data, there are significant incentives on bonuses for high performance. So, the $5 an hour is base pay. I mean, she's not at that anymore. That's what it was when she started. But the effective hourly rate ends up being a lot higher because of the performance bonuses she's able to achieve from sourcing or purchasing good inventory. So, I hope this is helpful to your operation, whatever it is, e-commerce or not.

That's how I've done it. Thanks for watching.