Sellhelm vs Hiring a VA to Watch Your Suppliers

What a VA genuinely costs for this specific job

Checked 26 September 2026: UK virtual assistant pricing guides put e-commerce VA rates at roughly £15 to £20 an hour for entry-level support, rising to £25 to £35 an hour for VAs experienced with specific platforms. Part-time cover, around 20 hours a week, is commonly quoted at well over £1,000 a month for genuine e-commerce experience - a real, ongoing cost that compounds every single month a VA is retained, in the same way a software subscription does, covered in our piece on one-time price vs monthly subscription. A VA hired specifically to check supplier prices and stock, and keep eBay listings in step, is doing precisely the same job Sellhelm automates - simply doing it as paid, human labour rather than as software running continuously in the background.

What a VA genuinely does that software doesn't

A capable VA brings real judgement software cannot replicate - deciding how to respond to an ambiguous buyer message, spotting a supplier's listing that has quietly changed in a way that needs a human decision rather than a simple price comparison, or taking on tasks entirely outside a stock tool's own job, like drafting new listings from scratch or handling a genuinely tricky return. None of this is a weakness of software to apologise for - it's simply outside the specific, narrow job a stock-management tool like Sellhelm is built to do, which is watching supplier data and keeping listings in step with it, not exercising judgement or handling buyer communication directly.

Why a VA carries the same repetitive-task risk a spreadsheet does

Our piece on Sellhelm vs a spreadsheet covers a specific risk worth restating here in a slightly different form: a person checking the same handful of numbers across hundreds of listings, week after week, is genuinely more prone to missing a real change simply from the fatigue of repetition - and a VA doing this task is still a person, subject to the identical limitation, however capable and conscientious they are. This is not a criticism of VAs as a category - it's an honest acknowledgement that the specific, narrow task of checking a supplier's price and stock repeatedly is exactly the kind of task software performs with a consistency a tired human attention span, however well-intentioned, genuinely struggles to match at real volume.

The real comparison, stated plainly

A VA retained specifically for supplier checking, at a conservative estimate of five hours a week at £20 an hour, costs £100 a week - roughly £5,200 across a year, and £15,600 across three years, for a task performed at real volume. Sellhelm's Solo licence, covering the identical specific task with no recurring cost, is £99 paid once. This is not a claim that a VA is poor value in general - a VA's broader range of tasks, including everything outside the narrow checking job this comparison is about, genuinely justifies a wage that reflects all of that combined work. It is a claim that if the specific reason for hiring is purely the checking task Sellhelm automates, the cost difference between the two approaches to that one task is considerable.

Why many shops genuinely use both, not one instead of the other

The honest, common pattern among established shops is not choosing between a VA and software - it's using software for the specific, repetitive checking task it does well, freeing a VA's time for the judgement-based and buyer-facing work only a person can actually do. A VA whose day is no longer spent manually checking hundreds of supplier prices has considerably more time for genuinely valuable work - drafting better listings, handling buyer messages promptly, chasing down a specific supplier issue - the exact kind of task covered in our piece on knowing when you've outgrown doing everything yourself. Software and a VA are, in this sense, complementary rather than competing purchases for a shop that has grown enough to genuinely need both.

When hiring a VA alone, without software, genuinely still makes sense

A very small shop, with a handful of listings and an owner who wants to step back from the day-to-day entirely rather than simply remove the checking task specifically, may reasonably prefer a VA doing everything by hand, software included or not, simply because the total volume never reaches the point where manual checking becomes its own real burden. This is a genuine, reasonable choice for a small enough shop - the case for software strengthens specifically as volume grows, in the same way the case against pure manual spreadsheet checking does.

A note on lower-cost overseas VAs, and the trade-offs that come with them

UK-based VA rates are not the only option many sellers weigh - overseas VAs, commonly based in the Philippines and other markets with a lower cost of living, are often available at meaningfully lower hourly rates than the UK figures above, and a genuine, common choice for shops managing costs carefully. This comes with its own real trade-offs worth naming honestly: a time-zone gap that can slow same-day back-and-forth, and handing a supplier's login details and a shop's own pricing data to someone working outside the seller's own direct oversight, which some sellers are entirely comfortable with and others are not. Neither option is simply "correct" - the honest point is that even at a lower overseas rate, a VA is still being paid on an ongoing, recurring basis for a specific checking task that a one-time software licence performs at no further cost after the first purchase.

The reliability question a wage doesn't solve either

A further, honest point worth including: hiring a person, rather than software, introduces its own reliability risk that a monthly wage does not remove. A VA can be ill, take genuine, deserved leave, or leave the role entirely, each time requiring either a gap in coverage or a new hire brought up to speed on the specific supplier list and checking process from scratch. Software has no equivalent version of this risk - once configured, it checks on the same schedule every single week without needing a holiday, without needing retraining, and without the specific risk of a sudden departure leaving a genuine gap in a shop's supplier monitoring at exactly the wrong moment.

A practical division of labour worth actually planning for

For a shop genuinely large enough to justify both, the practical split worth planning deliberately is: software handling the specific, repetitive checking task covered throughout this piece, and a VA's time reserved entirely for genuine judgement work - buyer messages, listing improvements, handling a supplier issue that needs an actual conversation rather than a data comparison. Planned this way from the start, a VA's hours are never spent on a task software already does more consistently, and the wage being paid buys work that genuinely requires a person, rather than work that happens to be done by a person purely because nothing else was doing it yet.

The onboarding cost a wage figure alone doesn't show

A further, easily-missed cost of the human approach is the time spent training a new VA on the specific checking process before they can actually do it reliably - which supplier shops to check, how to read each one's own layout, what counts as a genuine change worth updating versus routine noise, and how to actually make the eBay update once a change is confirmed. This onboarding time is itself a real cost, paid again in full every time a VA leaves and a replacement needs training from scratch, on top of the ongoing hourly wage already covered above. Software, once configured once, carries no equivalent retraining cost the next time it runs - the exact same process, applied identically, indefinitely.

A worked example

A shop with 400 listings hires a VA at £18 an hour, specifically to check supplier prices and stock weekly - a task taking roughly six hours a week at that catalogue size, costing £108 a week, or £5,616 across a year. Introducing Sellhelm to handle that specific checking task automatically, the same VA's hours shift entirely toward buyer messages, new listings and general shop management - work genuinely worth the wage being paid, rather than time spent on a repetitive task software now does more consistently. The VA's total wage doesn't necessarily fall - the value produced by every hour of it goes up, since none of it is being spent on the one task a one-time £99 licence now handles instead.

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