How an online seller should handle customer questions before purchase

Every evening the same three questions come in: "Will this jar fit my 750-watt mixie?" "Is it original?" "Can it reach Kottayam by Friday?" They arrive on WhatsApp, in the marketplace's question box and in Instagram messages, and too often they wait until someone is free. Each one is a buyer with money ready and two other sellers open in the next tab. Treat pre-purchase questions as enquiries: log them, answer them from a bank of checked answers while the buyer is still shopping, and change the product page so the next buyer does not have to ask.

The four questions that decide an online order

Most pre-sale questions fall into one of four kinds, and each has its own trap.

Size and fit. "Will a 32 fit me if I wear a 30 in most jeans?" You cannot answer for other brands. You can give your own garment's waist and length, measured flat, and say how it compares to your other sizes.

Compatibility. Mixer jars, chargers, car accessories, printer cartridges, spare parts. Every "will it fit my..." has a right answer and a wrong one, and a hopeful yes comes back as a return. Phone covers are the extreme case, and our note on mobile accessories online covers them.

Delivery and payment. The date to their pin code, whether cash on delivery is offered there, whether the parcel can be checked before paying. Answer with the date, not "3 to 5 days", because the buyer is planning around a birthday or a trip.

Authenticity and warranty. "Is this original?" and "Will the brand honour the warranty if I buy from you?" The buyer asking has usually been burnt before. Give checkable facts: who supplies you, whether a GST invoice comes with the order, and what the brand's warranty asks for.

Log them the way you would log a lead

A pre-sale question is an enquiry with a product attached. Record it in a simple register, a shared sheet is enough, so you can see which questions cost you orders and which pages keep causing them.

Build an answer bank, and decide who may use it

For each product, write the approved answer to each question type once, checked against the product itself. Compatible models come from the maker's list and a real machine in hand. Measurements come from the garment, not the supplier's sheet. Delivery dates by zone come from your courier's actual record, warranty terms from the brand's card.

Then a rule: anyone answering, person or bot, answers from the bank. Nobody improvises compatibility. "I am not sure, let me check and come back to you in ten minutes" is an allowed answer. "Yes, fits all models" is not.

A website chat or chatbot can answer delivery dates, stock and order status from your own data. Hand compatibility and authenticity to a person, or let the bot repeat the bank word for word and nothing more.

Marketplace question boxes need extra care, because the answer stays on the listing and every later buyer reads it. Write it for them: the fact, the condition it depends on, and where to check. On some marketplaces other buyers can answer too, and a wrong answer from a stranger sits there until you correct it.

For example: spare mixer jars from Bidar

Imagine an invented Bidar seller of replacement mixer-grinder jars, blades and couplers, listing on two marketplaces and taking WhatsApp orders from Instagram. The figures are made up. Questions arrive every evening, nearly all some version of "will this fit my mixie?". Three staff answer them from memory. Most buyers give the wattage, because it is printed on the front of the machine.

One staff member, keen to close, tells a buyer "yes, fits all 750-watt models". The jar arrives, the coupler under it does not seat on the buyer's base, and it comes back, a ₹140 return, with a one-star review saying the seller lied. On the marketplace, the same question had been answered "yes" weeks earlier by another buyer who owned a different machine.

The mistake was answering by wattage, when the fit depends on the coupler and the way the base locks. The team spent one long evening writing an answer bank for each jar, listing the brands and models it fits from the supplier's list. They checked each one against the bases they had in the shop. Staff now ask for the model from the sticker under the machine, or a photo of the old jar's base, and "let me check" is fine. The compatible models went into each title and onto the first image, beside a close photograph of the coupler. The seller also posted a correct answer under the wrong public one. Better, not solved: fit returns fell from about one in six jars to one in twenty, and the answer bank still had gaps for older models.

When the answer belongs on the page, not in a chat

If the register shows the same question five times for one product, the page is broken. Answer the fifth buyer, then put the answer where the sixth will see it: the title, the first image, or the first lines of the description.

Some questions only a person can answer. A custom size, gift wrapping for a wedding, forty units for an office: these are worth a fast human reply. A bulk enquiry is a trade lead, and it should go straight to whoever handles trade orders.

Skip the register if you get a handful of questions and answer them all yourself; a WhatsApp Business label marked "pre-sale" and a notes file will do. The register earns its keep once several people answer, or questions arrive on three or more channels.

What to do next

Scroll back through the last fortnight of WhatsApp chats and marketplace questions, and sort them into the four kinds. The biggest pile names the page to fix first and the answer bank to write first. Where else an online sale is won or lost is laid out in that section, and lead response and follow-up is the service for routing questions to the right person. If questions arrive faster than your team can answer them well, tell us what you need.