RELAYSHIP vs HIRING A VA
Your VA costs $300/mo for 20 minutes of real work a day — and still leaves you with a 12-hour tracking lag.
Almost everyone I talk to starts here. “I have a VA in the Philippines who handles tracking uploads.” I’ve done this math with dozens of merchants now. The numbers rarely break even, and nobody counts the 12-hour customer lag at all.
| Line item | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| VA salary ($8/hr × 1h/day × 30 days) | $240/mo |
| Gmail labels + inbox management overhead (your time) | $50/mo |
| Extra WISMO support tickets from 12h tracking lag | $30/mo |
| Tracking errors (wrong order, wrong carrier) refund costs | $20-50/mo |
| Onboarding a new VA every 3-6 months | ~$100 one-time, amortized $20/mo |
| True cost | ~$360-400/mo |
Relayship Starter is $19/mo. Growth is $39/mo. That’s a 10-20x cost reduction, before counting the operational benefits below.
“Because he’s in a different time zone, there’s often a 12+ hour delay between the tracking number arriving in our inbox and the customer receiving it.”
— r/dropshipping, April 2026
Your supplier ships at 9am Beijing time. Your VA wakes up at 8am Manila time (3 hours later). They work through the queue for 2 hours. By the time tracking hits Shopify, it’s already been 5+ hours since the supplier shipped.
Meanwhile your customer (who ordered 4 days ago) is checking their email for a shipping notification that hasn’t arrived yet. They email support. Your support queue grows. If the VA is sick or on holiday, tracking gets uploaded the next day at the earliest.
Relayship processes the same email in under 60 seconds. The shipping notification hits your customer’s inbox before they’ve had time to check.
VAs doing high-volume manual data entry have a predictable error rate. The common failure modes:
Each error costs you a support ticket and sometimes a refund. Relayship’s confidence-gated queue never auto-fulfills below your threshold — ambiguity lands in a queue you review with one click, not in a wrong customer’s email.
Many merchants do. But VAs are great at judgment work: answering customer emails, handling unusual requests, liaising with suppliers. Retarget your VA to that higher-leverage work and let Relayship handle the mechanical tracking upload.
Your VA is happier. Customers get faster tracking. You save $300/mo.
If your volume is under 20 orders/week AND your VA is already paid for other tasks AND you only have 1 supplier — the marginal VA time is close to zero. Don’t change anything.
Everyone else: do the math above with your actual numbers.