Shippit Virtual Assistant: a VA who runs the orders queue, the manifests and the courier chasing

Nobody searches “shippit virtual assistant” while things are going well. You search it at 8pm, after the picking got done and the boxes got taped, because the other half of shipping never got done: the New Orders queue still holding this afternoon’s sales, three parcels sitting on “in transit” for a week that you haven’t chased, a manifest you nearly missed the cutoff on, and an inbox where every second email starts with “where is my order”. Shippit was built in Sydney to make the carrier side of this easy, and it does. What it can’t do is be the person who runs it every day. That’s the gap this page is about.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Shippit

The day starts in New Orders. Everything that sold overnight through your Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Maropost store is already synced and waiting, and the first job is turning that queue into confirmed bookings. For most orders your smart carrier allocation rules do the choosing, standard parcels to your standard service, express where the customer paid for it, and the VA’s job is to confirm in bulk and catch the exceptions the rules can’t judge: the order that’s actually three cartons, the aerosol that can’t fly, the bulky item that needs a manual quote rather than whatever the rule spits out. Labels generate as bookings confirm, so by the time your packer starts, every parcel on the bench has a label waiting to print.

Then the cutoffs. Every carrier wants its manifest before the driver arrives, and a missed manifest is a day’s parcels sitting in your warehouse overnight while the tracking emails tell customers they’ve shipped. Your VA owns the cutoff times, runs the end-of-day manifest for each carrier, Australia Post, CouriersPlease, Aramex, whoever your mix includes, and confirms the paperwork matches what’s physically on the trolley.

Mid-morning is the Track pass. Shippit’s tracking view, filtered to the shipments that need attention, is where delivery problems surface: stuck in transit with no scan for three days, delivery failed, sitting uncollected at a depot or parcel locker. Left alone, each of those becomes an angry email in about a week. Worked daily, most of them resolve quietly: a redelivery booked, a customer told their parcel is at the post office before they’d noticed it hadn’t arrived, a carrier nudged while the trail is still warm. Your VA keeps a simple ageing list so nothing sits in “someone should look at that” territory past 48 hours.

The customer email rides on top of all of it. Where-is-my-order messages get answered from the real tracking events rather than a generic reassurance, with the branded tracking link resent and carrier jargon translated into something a human can act on. Because the VA is inside Shippit all day, these answers are accurate and fast, which is most of what customers actually want. The wider support inbox usually ends up in the same pair of hands.

Weekly, there’s the job almost nobody does: reconciling carrier weight and dimension adjustments. When a carrier re-measures a parcel and bills the difference, that charge lands on your invoice quietly, and if a SKU has wrong dims in your store, you pay that adjustment on every single unit it ships. Your VA traces the adjustments back to the products causing them and fixes the source data with your sign-off. It’s unglamorous work that routinely pays for a chunk of the VA’s hours by itself.

Lost parcels, and the register that gets them resolved

A missing parcel is really two jobs. The first is the enquiry itself: for shipments booked on Shippit’s carrier rates, the enquiry goes through Shippit, whose support team holds the relationship with the carrier; for carriers you’ve connected on your own account, it goes through that carrier’s portal, with the tracking history and label details attached properly so the investigation doesn’t stall on day one.

The second job is the one that actually gets money back: persistence. Carrier investigations run to carrier timelines, days at best and sometimes weeks, and an enquiry nobody follows up is an enquiry that quietly closes. Your VA keeps an investigation register, every open case, its reference number, the date lodged, the last response and the next chase date, and works it on a schedule. Found parcels get delivered, compensable ones get claimed, and genuine write-offs get flagged to you with the full history so the customer decision can be made once, cleanly, instead of dragging across three email threads.

The honest bit

Three things a Shippit VA won’t fix, because Shippit itself can’t. First, the obvious one: nobody remote can tape a box. Shippit is cloud software and the entire booking, labelling, manifesting and chasing workload moves off site cleanly, but you still need hands in the warehouse to pick, pack and stick labels. If your bottleneck is physical packing rather than screen work, a VA is the wrong hire and we’ll say so.

Second, carrier allocation is only as smart as your data. Shippit’s allocation rules quote off the weights and dimensions your store sends, so if those are wrong, the rules will confidently pick the wrong service at the wrong price, and the carrier will re-measure and re-bill you for the difference later. A VA can find and fix the bad data, but the fortnight of adjustments already in flight is money spent.

Third, Shippit surfaces delivery problems; it does not resolve them. The delivery-issues view will tell you a parcel has been stuck at a Chullora facility for five days, but no dashboard makes a courier move faster, and investigations for parcels booked on Shippit’s rates route through Shippit support rather than you ringing the depot direct. The honest description of the VA’s role here is professional, persistent chasing with good records, which resolves most cases, not a magic lever that resolves all of them.

What stays with you

The screen work moves; the commercial judgement doesn’t. Your shipping rates at checkout, free-shipping thresholds and who wears the cost of express upgrades stay your call, because they’re margin decisions dressed up as settings. The carrier mix stays yours too: whether to run on Shippit’s rates or negotiate your own accounts, and when a carrier’s performance justifies switching an allocation rule, your VA brings the delivery-issue and adjustment data that informs the decision, and you make it.

Compensation is the big one. Under Australian Consumer Law, the retailer is responsible for goods arriving, regardless of whose van lost them, so when a parcel is genuinely gone, refund versus replacement versus store credit is your decision. The working rule is written down during onboarding: the VA resolves anything that’s information, escalates anything that’s money, and never promises a customer an outcome you haven’t approved.

What it costs and where to start

Shipping admin sits on DotVA’s admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, and most Shippit placements run 10-15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month, often folded into a broader ecommerce admin role covering the store inbox and order queue. Placement takes 7-10 business days, and the first 5-7 days are supervised inside your Shippit and your store: the New Orders queue and manifests first, then the Track exceptions and enquiries once the daily rhythm is proven. A $500 refundable deposit credits against your first month, there’s a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. For the wider picture of what a VA takes off an online retailer’s plate, the ecommerce industry page covers the rest of the back office, the inbox management page covers the email side, and the VA cost guide breaks down pricing properly. Or skip ahead and book a discovery call with Jenn, who takes every call herself and will tell you straight if your parcel volume doesn’t justify the hours yet.