Hiring in-house vs ScaleWise VA
An employee in the room is the default answer to "the store is running me". It is sometimes the right one. This page is the arithmetic and the trade-offs, so you can decide with the numbers in front of you rather than after the job ad has gone out.
Hire in-house when you need someone physically present, when the role is mostly judgement rather than process, or when you already have a manager with time to train and supervise. Use us when the work is the daily running of the store, when you want it covered on the days one person is away, and when you would rather buy hours than a headcount.
Hire in-house when
- The job needs hands on stock: packing, photography, returns inspection, a warehouse.
- You want one person to grow into a manager and you have someone to manage them meanwhile.
- Your operations are still being invented. A process that changes weekly is easier to run across a desk than across a portal.
- Volume is high enough that a full-time person is busy all day, every day. An employee who is idle a third of the time is the most expensive option on this page.
Use ScaleWise VA when
- The work is repeatable: listings, catalogue cleanup, inventory updates, order and returns handling, the support inbox, store fixes.
- You want the work to survive one person's holiday, sick day or resignation. Every store we run has a second person who knows it.
- You want hours scoped to the month's volume rather than a fixed salary, and to change them when the season does.
- You want the time and the screenshots behind every invoice, without building that monitoring yourself.
Side by side
| In-house hire | ScaleWise VA | |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | A salary, plus everything on top of it (see the example below), whether the month is busy or quiet. | Hours. Hourly VA tiers start at $4 to $8 an hour depending on the work; most clients are on a monthly retainer scoped to their volume. |
| Cover | None by default. Holiday, sickness and notice periods are yours to absorb or to hire around. | A second person on the team knows each store. Cover is part of the arrangement, not an extra. |
| Time to start | Advertise, shortlist, interview, notice period, onboarding. Weeks at best. | A discovery call, a scope, and a start. Most engagements begin within a week of the call. |
| Shopify knowledge on day one | Whatever the candidate brings. Training is your time. | Shopify is the whole job. Flow, metafields, catalogue structure, apps, the admin at scale. |
| Procedures | Live in the person's head unless you write them down and keep them current. | Every recurring job has a written procedure in our portal, with a record of who has read it. |
| Oversight | You, or a manager you also pay for. | Time logs and screenshots on every invoice, and one person (the founder) you talk to about all of it. |
| Presence | In your building, in your timezone, at your desk when you need them. | Remote, from Islamabad. UK mornings and US mornings are both inside our working day; late US afternoons are not. |
| Ending it | Notice periods, and in the UK and EU a process. Fair to the employee, slow for you. | A month's notice on a retainer. No severance, no process. |
The number people forget: what sits on top of the salary
Put your own salary figure in; the point is the layer on top, which the job ad never mentions. In the UK, from April 2025 the employer pays National Insurance at 15% on everything above £5,000 a year, a minimum 3% pension contribution under auto-enrolment, and 5.6 weeks of paid holiday (28 days for a five-day week) during which the work still needs doing. In the US, the employer share of Social Security and Medicare is 7.65% of wages, before federal and state unemployment insurance and whatever health cover you offer.
Then the items that are not on any payslip: a laptop, software seats, a desk if you have an office, the hours you spend recruiting, the weeks you spend training, and the cost of the store being run badly for the six weeks between one person leaving and the next one being useful.
A retainer has none of that layer. It also has none of the things a salary buys: loyalty to you alone, physical presence, and a person who can be promoted. Which of those you need is the decision.
What you give up with us
- Someone in the room. If the work involves touching the product, we are not the answer.
- A single dedicated person for the whole day. You get a team and one point of contact, which is better for continuity and worse if you want one face at every meeting.
- Late US afternoons and evenings. Our day is Pakistan time; US East Coast overlap ends around lunchtime there.
- The option to promote them. Our people grow inside our company, not yours.
Questions people ask
- Is a virtual assistant cheaper than an employee?
- Usually, once employer contributions, holiday, equipment and cover are counted, and always when the workload is not a full week. It is not cheaper if you genuinely need forty hours of one person's attention, in your building, every week, because then you are paying for the flexibility you never use.
- Who owns the procedures and the accounts?
- You do. Procedures are written for your store and handed over if we part; logins are yours and we work inside your Shopify admin as staff accounts you can revoke.
- Can we start with a few hours and grow?
- Yes. The hourly model exists for that. Most clients move to a retainer once the month's volume is predictable.
- What if we later want to hire in-house?
- Then you hire into a store with written procedures, a clean catalogue and a support inbox at zero. That is a much easier job to fill than the one you have today.
Where the figures come from
- UK employer National Insurance rate and threshold: HMRC, rates from 6 April 2025. Auto-enrolment minimum: The Pensions Regulator. Statutory holiday: GOV.UK.
- US employer FICA share: IRS Publication 15.
- Our hourly tiers: the Hire a VA pages on this site. Engagement models: the Pricing page.
Prices and terms on other companies' pages change. If one of these has, tell us at hello@scalewiseva.com and we will correct it.
Not sure which one you are?
Tell us what the store is and what is eating your week. If we are the wrong fit we will say so and point you at the right one; that is cheaper for both of us than a month that does not work.