Answering the Question You Get Every Week

Look at your last twenty messages and you will find the same three questions, asked in slightly different words, answered slightly differently each time. That repetition is not a nuisance. It is a list of the things your shop has not said clearly, and it is free.

Write the answers down once

Keep a note somewhere you can reach on your phone with the four or five answers you give constantly: postage cost and timing, what discretion actually looks like on the parcel, what you will and will not make, and how payment works. Written once, calmly, they are better than anything you will type at eleven at night.

Move them into the listing

Every question you answer twice belongs in the listing or on your profile. A buyer who has to ask before they can decide often does not ask at all, and you never learn they were there. The questions you receive are the ones from people confident enough to send them.

Keep the reply human

A saved answer is a starting point, not the whole message. Paste it, then change the first line so it answers the person in front of you. The version that reads like a form letter costs you the sale you were about to make.

Watch what changes

When a question stops arriving, something you wrote is working. When a new one starts arriving repeatedly, something in your listing has become unclear, often because you edited it. This is the cheapest feedback you will ever get about how your shop reads to a stranger.

The one question worth answering slowly

Anything about safety, discretion or what happens if something goes wrong deserves a real reply rather than a stock one. Those questions are the buyer deciding whether to trust you, and a pasted paragraph is audible.

Ten minutes with a notes app removes most of your repetitive typing for months, and the questions themselves tell you exactly what to fix.