Kogan Marketplace Virtual Assistant: a VA for the seller portal everyone just moved to

Two closures made this page necessary. Catch shut its marketplace to third-party sellers in April 2025, and MyDeal followed in September 2025, which means the Australian-owned general marketplaces went from three to one inside six months. If you sold on either of them, you have already worked out where everyone went: Kogan Marketplace is now the main surviving Australian-owned shelf for third-party sellers, and the migration queue is long. Which is how a channel that used to be “the one we list on when we get around to it” became a channel with a daily orders queue, a customer enquiry inbox, a remittance statement that needs checking and a catalogue that still looks like it was uploaded in a hurry. Because it was.

The Kogan admin is not hard. It is relentless, and it rewards the seller who shows up every day: the one whose tracking uploads on time, whose enquiries get answered before Kogan’s customer team has to step in, and whose catalogue does not still carry the scars of a rushed migration. That seller does not have to be you.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Kogan seller portal

Morning, first thing: orders. New Kogan orders picked up from the portal and pushed to your warehouse or 3PL, consignments booked, and tracking uploaded against every order inside your stated handling time. This is the pass that matters most, because Kogan fronts the customer relationship on this marketplace. The buyer bought from Kogan.com, not from you, and the platform’s patience with sellers who dispatch late is thin in exactly the way you would want it to be if you were the one whose brand was on the storefront. A DotVA VA works Australian business hours from Manila, so the orders that landed overnight are moving before your first coffee, not after your last meeting.

Then enquiries. Delivery questions checked against live tracking before anyone replies with a guess. Change-of-mind requests answered to your stated policy. Faulty-item claims worked properly under Australian Consumer Law, because “the marketplace sold it” does not move your obligations anywhere, and a claim handled quickly and fairly stays an enquiry instead of becoming a dispute. Anything that smells like it could escalate goes to you the same day with the order, the messages and a recommendation attached, in the same shape as any well-run support queue.

Then the catalogue, which on Kogan is where most sellers are quietly underperforming. New SKUs get built to spec: titles and descriptions written to Kogan’s style rather than pasted from your Shopify, images that meet the standard, barcodes and brand fields completed, and the category mapping done thoughtfully, because a pizza oven filed under the wrong home-and-garden node is invisible to the deal-hunter who would have bought it. Bulk work runs through Kogan’s upload templates, and if you arrived here from Catch or MyDeal with a catalogue export and a sigh, the remapping of those columns and categories is a genuine project: repetitive, detail-heavy, exactly the structured data work VA hours were made for, and exactly the project that stalls forever while it belongs to the owner.

Stock and pricing sync runs underneath all of it. Kogan does not know what your main store sold overnight unless something tells it, so the VA keeps quantities and prices true between channels, through your channel manager and Kogan’s seller API where you have them, and through a disciplined manual sweep where you do not. The oversell, where a Kogan customer buys a unit your Shopify store sold yesterday, is the single fastest way to burn your standing on a marketplace that measures you on fulfilment, and preventing it is a daily habit, not a setting.

Weekly, two passes. First, range hygiene: listings getting traffic without sales flagged for a price or image review, discontinued lines removed properly, duplicates and half-built products caught. Kogan’s own retail range sits on the same shelf as yours, photographed and written to a retail standard, and your listings are compared to that standard by every shopper whether you like it or not. Second, the money: each remittance statement reconciled line by line, dispatched orders matched, the negotiated commission and per-order payment processing fee checked against what was agreed rather than assumed, refunds netted off, and the clean result handed to your bookkeeper or posted against the Kogan clearing account in Xero. Marketplace remittances are where small discrepancies go to live undisturbed, and the only cure is someone who reads the statement every cycle.

Around the edges: Kogan First eligibility maintained on the SKUs whose margin can carry free shipping, so your range surfaces for Kogan’s subscription customers, and promotional events prepared before their deadlines, deal prices loaded and reverted on schedule, with every discount depth signed off by you before it goes anywhere near the portal.

And one queue that only exists on marketplaces: the platform itself. When a courier loses a consignment, when an upload is rejected for a spec you cannot see, when a remittance line refuses to add up, someone has to raise it with Kogan’s seller support and keep the thread alive until it resolves. That is patience work with deadlines attached, far cheaper done in VA hours than in yours. Each case gets logged, chased on a schedule, and summarised for you in a short weekly list of anything genuinely stuck, so the platform’s queue never becomes your evening job.

The honest bit

Four things about this marketplace that a VA will not change, and that you should weigh before hiring anyone, us included.

Kogan is both your landlord and your competitor. Kogan.com is a retailer first: it sells its own sourced range and its own exclusive brands on the same pages where your products appear. That is not a scandal, it is the model, but it means your listing can sit beside a Kogan-branded equivalent at a price you cannot match. A VA keeps your catalogue sharp and your fulfilment clean; nobody’s admin makes that structural tension disappear.

The audience is deal-driven. Kogan built its brand on price, and the customer it brings you shops accordingly. Premium positioning, brand storytelling and full-margin sales are not what this shelf does. It moves volume at sharp prices, and the sellers who do well here treat it as exactly that. If that is not your product’s game, better to know before the migration than after.

The traffic is real but it is not Amazon’s. Consolidation after Catch and MyDeal closed has pushed more sellers and more buyers onto Kogan, and being the main surviving Australian-owned general marketplace counts for something. It still is not a global platform’s firehose, so the sensible posture is Kogan as one channel in a set, with your stock synced across all of them, rather than a single bet.

And the commercial terms are negotiated, not published. Your commission rate is set by category in your agreement with Kogan, which means the deal another seller got is not automatically yours. The VA can reconcile what you are charged against what you agreed with complete precision. Negotiating what you agree in the first place is a conversation between you and Kogan, and it should stay that way.

What stays with you

No regulator sits over marketplace selling, but the line matters here anyway. Pricing is yours: the VA loads and reverts the numbers you set, and never invents a discount. The commission negotiation and every commercial conversation with Kogan stay in your name. Refunds above the agreed limit, any enquiry hardening into a formal dispute, and any decision that touches your standing on the platform come to you first, same day, with context. Sourcing and supplier relationships never route through your assistant. And the banking side of the portal, the account your remittances land in and the settings behind it, is off limits by written agreement, because the person reconciling the money should not be the person able to redirect it.

What it costs and where to start

Kogan Marketplace admin sits on DotVA’s admin tier at $12-17 AUD an hour excluding GST. A Kogan-only brief rarely fills a week on its own, which is why most placements here run the marketplace alongside the rest of the seller’s channels: 10-15 hours a week, landing around $500-1,100 a month, covering the daily orders-enquiries-sync block plus the weekly catalogue and remittance passes across everything you sell on. A Catch or MyDeal catalogue migration front-loads the first month with extra hours, then the schedule settles.

The onboarding shape: placement inside 7-10 business days, then 5-7 supervised days working in your seller portal before anything runs solo, beginning with orders and enquiries because those carry the SLAs. The $500 deposit is refundable and comes off your first month, the first 30 days carry a recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and 14 days notice ends it, which suits a channel you may still be deciding about.

The multichannel picture is on the ecommerce industry page, and the VA cost guide breaks down every tier. Or book a discovery call with Jenn, who takes each call personally and has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024. Bring your last remittance statement and, if you have one, the catalogue export you have been meaning to migrate since the old marketplace closed. That backlog is the first fortnight’s work, and it is very satisfying to watch it disappear.