What I learned by answering every message myself

I decided to answer every buyer message myself for six months rather than use templates. It cost me perhaps forty minutes a day and it was the most useful thing I have done for the store.

Roughly half the questions were about cable length. It was in the specification, but at the bottom, in a table nobody read. I moved it into the title and the questions stopped.

Another quarter asked whether a charger would work with a particular phone. I added a compatibility list to every listing. Returns fell by about a third over the following two months, which I had not expected at all.

Messages are not an overhead. They are a free report on which part of your listing is failing, written by the people about to buy.