By business type
An assistant for an online store, and the order it cannot look up
The surprising thing about pre-purchase questions on a shop is how few of them are about the product. They are about delivery: when it arrives, what it costs, whether it reaches that country, and what happens if it is wrong. All of that is written down in your terms already, which makes it the cheapest thing on this list to automate. The expensive thing is order status, and that is the one an assistant cannot answer on its own.
What people actually type
Not the questions on your FAQ page. These are the phrasings that arrive in a chat window, lowercase and unpunctuated, and the material has to answer them in those words rather than in yours.
- when will my order arrive
- what time is the cut off for next day delivery
- how much is delivery
- do you deliver to ireland
- can i return it if it doesn't fit
- who pays for return postage
- how long do refunds take to come back
- will i have to pay customs charges
- when will this be back in stock
- is the price with vat included
- can i change the delivery address after ordering
- do you do click and collect
What to feed it
In rough order of how much work each one takes off the front desk. Every one of these is a document you almost certainly already have.
| Your full delivery matrix | Every service you offer crossed with every destination: the price, the working day estimate, the daily cut-off time, and what happens on a weekend or a public holiday. Shops usually hold this as a table somewhere internally and publish a simplified version, and the simplified version is what generates the follow-up question. |
|---|---|
| The returns policy as you would actually enforce it | The window in days, when the clock starts, whether the customer or the shop pays return postage, the condition the item has to come back in, and which categories are excluded. Every one of those five is a separate question a visitor asks, and vague wording on any of them costs you the sale or costs you the refund argument later. |
| Restock and discontinued lines | Which lines come back and roughly when, which are gone for good, and whether you take a back in stock notification. An assistant that can say a line is discontinued saves a customer waiting for something that will never arrive, and moves them to an alternative while they are still on the site. |
| International terms, duties and taxes | Which countries you ship to, whether prices are shown with or without tax for a visitor outside your home market, and whether duty is collected at checkout or charged on delivery. The unexpected customs bill is one of the highest friction moments in cross border retail, and saying so plainly beforehand converts better than hiding it. |
| Sizing, materials and care content | Whatever you publish per product or per category about measurements, materials, compatibility and washing. This is the material that answers the genuinely product-shaped minority of questions, and it is worth indexing at category level rather than per item so it does not rot every season. |
| An order lifecycle explainer | What each status in your confirmation emails means, how long each stage usually takes, when tracking starts working, and what to do if a tracking number shows nothing for a day. This is the material that lets the assistant be useful about orders in general even though it cannot see any order in particular. |
What has to reach a person
Anything about one specific order
Where is it, has it shipped, why is the tracking not moving, can the address still be changed. The assistant has no view of your order system unless you connect one to it, and an improvised reassurance here is worse than silence because the customer stops chasing and then arrives angry three days later.
The right handling is to say plainly that it cannot see individual orders, give the order number and email route, and offer to take the customer's details so somebody can look it up properly.
A parcel marked delivered that the customer does not have
This is a claim, not a question. It involves the carrier, possibly a neighbour, possibly a photograph on the delivery record, and in many cases a decision about who absorbs the loss. Every step of that is a judgement the shop makes, not an answer the assistant reads off a page.
A refund that has not arrived
The assistant can quote the published processing time and explain that the card issuer adds its own delay. It should not confirm that a specific refund was issued, because it cannot see the payment record, and telling somebody their money is on its way when it is not turns a support ticket into a dispute.
Anything that names a payment dispute or a chargeback
Once a customer mentions their bank, a card dispute or a claim, the conversation has deadlines and evidence requirements attached to it. Hand it to a person immediately, because the shop has a limited window to respond and an assistant reply does not count as one.
The wording when it cannot help
This is the message the assistant returns when nothing in the material covers the question. It is written by you rather than generated, which matters here more than anywhere: it is the sentence a stranger reads at the worst moment.
I cannot look up individual orders, so I have no way to see where yours is. Email us with your order number and we will check it properly. I can help with delivery options and cut-off times, our returns window, international shipping and restock questions.
It names what it cannot do, gives the route that can, and offers to take a message. A refusal that only apologises leaves the person exactly where they started.
Rules and duties that shape the answer
Distance selling gives buyers a cooling off right in many markets
Where you trade, a customer who buys online may have a statutory period in which they can change their mind and return goods without giving a reason, and that right typically runs alongside whatever policy you publish rather than being replaced by it. Some categories, such as personalised goods, perishables and unsealed hygiene items, are commonly carved out.
The practical instruction: index the statutory position as you understand it for your market as well as your own policy, and let the assistant quote them separately. An assistant that states only your shop policy when the law is more generous is creating a complaint on your behalf.
A faulty item and an unwanted item follow different rules
Consumer guarantee rules in most markets treat goods that are not of satisfactory quality quite differently from goods the customer simply did not want. Who pays return postage, how long the right lasts, and whether repair or replacement comes before refund all diverge at that fork.
Write the two paths as two documents. An assistant reading one blended returns page will apply the unwanted rules to a faulty item, and that is the single most expensive wrong answer in online retail.
A delivery estimate becomes a promise once it is in writing
There is a real difference between saying a service usually arrives in two working days and telling a customer their order will arrive on Thursday. The first is a description of a service and the second is a commitment the shop has to honour or refund against.
Index the estimate in the wording you would defend, and let the assistant repeat it verbatim rather than converting working days into a calendar date on the fly.
Never, whatever the documents say
Out of bounds
- Where a named customer's order is, or whether it has shipped.
- A specific calendar date an order will arrive.
- Whether a refund has actually been processed on a card.
- Whether an item is physically in stock right now.
- Whether a customs or duty charge will be applied to a particular parcel.
Playbooks for this trade
One page per recurring question, written for a online store rather than in general. Each carries the phrasings, the material that answers them, a reply worth copying, and the line where it has to stop.
- Cut-offs, zones and duties: three questions wearing one set of wordsCut-off times, zone pricing and who pays the customs bill. What a shop can state as a fact, and where a fact turns into a promise.
- Answering an order status question with no order system attachedThe one question a hosted assistant cannot answer. How to say so and still move the customer forward instead of stalling them.
- The five things a returns answer has to containWindow, start date, postage, condition and exclusions. Five facts hide in one question, and a reply missing any of them gets asked again.
- Restock answers when the count is behind glassA live count is the number an assistant cannot see. What it says about restocks, discontinued lines and the notify button instead.
- The handover that exists because there is no record to readMost handovers on a shop are one thing: an order nobody can look up. Collect the two identifiers and the reply comes back complete.
- Money going backwards, and the days nobody in the shop controlsA return, a refund and a chargeback are three different things. What the shop controls, and the issuer delay nobody there can shorten.
- It is already on a pick list, which is the whole answerStopping an order ends when the pick starts. The window to change your mind ends much later. Two rights wearing one word.
- The claim belongs to the shop, not to the person with the empty porchThe carrier contract is with the seller, so the buyer cannot claim at all. The window is short and it started at dispatch.
- Never quote a figure the catalogue can change while you typeA catalogue price changes without notice, so an indexed copy of it goes stale within hours. Quote the rules around it instead.
- The receipt they were sent is not the document their accountant needsA confirmation email is not a tax invoice. The company details an accountant needs had to be captured at checkout and usually were not.
- Three lines on the statement and one order that never existedA failed attempt can still leave a pending line on a statement. It clears on the issuer's schedule and nobody at the shop can release it.
- The marketing list and the sales ledger are not the same dataClosing an account does not remove the sales records a seller has to keep. Separating the two is what makes this answerable at all.
- The size chart is a photograph and the photograph has no wordsSize charts, spec tables and delivery grids are usually pictures. A screen reader gets nothing from them, and neither does an assistant.
- They have read the policy already. Quoting it back is the wrong moveBy the time it is a complaint it is the third contact, the policy has been read, and what is wanted is a name and a decision.
- There is no such thing as a size on a general storeOne store, a dozen suppliers, a dozen charts that disagree. What size means changes by aisle, and the chart is usually a picture.
- Sending them to the manufacturer is the reflex that causes the complaintA maker's guarantee and a seller's own obligation are different things, and pointing the customer at the manufacturer is often wrong.
- There was never an account, only an email address on an orderGuest checkout leaves an email with orders behind it and nothing to sign into. Most access problems on a shop start right there.
- The reset was sent. That is the whole of what anybody here knowsThe mail is usually delivered and filtered. Where it lands, how long the link lasts, and why the shop is told nothing either way.
Questions
- Can it tell a customer where their order is?
- Not on its own. It answers from documents and pages you index, and no page contains a live order. It can explain what each status means, how long each stage takes, and hand the customer to the right email with their order number, which resolves most of the traffic without pretending to know.
- Should we index individual product pages?
- Category level content ages far better. Product pages churn every season and a confidently described item you no longer sell costs you the sale twice, once when it is wrong and once when the customer stops trusting the answers. Index sizing guides, care instructions and buying guides, and let the catalogue speak for itself.
- What happens when a visitor asks something the material does not cover?
- It refuses rather than reaching for the nearest page. There is a match threshold you set, and below it the question never reaches the model at all. You write the wording it returns instead, which for a shop should end with the email address you want the enquiry to arrive at.
- Does it help with cart abandonment or just support?
- The delivery and returns questions above are the ones people ask with a full basket, and an unanswered one at that moment is an abandoned cart rather than a support ticket. That is the argument for putting the shipping matrix in first, ahead of anything about the products.
Keep reading
- For a fashion retailerFit is both the most asked pre-purchase question and the biggest cause of returns. Here is what a clothing retailer can safely automate.
- For a furniture retailerLead times, delivery access and assembly dominate furniture enquiries. What an assistant answers well, and where it must take a name.
- For a electronics retailerCompatibility, warranty and returns on opened items answer well from your own terms. Firmware level setup advice does not.
- Every business typeWhat an assistant has to know before it can answer for a trade.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.