Playbook, online store
Answering an order status question with no order system attached
This is the question that makes people install a chat assistant and the question it cannot do. There is no page anywhere on a shop's site containing one customer's parcel, so there is nothing to read and no honest way to invent it. What is available is better than it sounds: most people asking are not requesting data, they are asking whether it is time to start worrying, and that is answerable from a document.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for order status holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- This is the only common retail question where the assistant has literally nothing to read, because a live order is a record rather than a page.
- The visitor usually wants permission to stop worrying, and a plain description of what normally happens at this stage does that better than a tracking number would.
- These arrive in waves behind a dispatch email or a carrier delay, so the same wording gets read by dozens of people in an hour and is worth writing once, properly.
- The failure is not silence, it is reassurance: a customer told their parcel is on its way stops chasing, and comes back three days later much angrier.
How it arrives
- where is my order
- has my order shipped yet
- my tracking hasn't updated in two days
- i ordered on tuesday and heard nothing
- can you check order 10432 for me
- did my order actually go through
What has to be indexed for this to work
| An order lifecycle explainer in your own words | What each status word in your confirmation and dispatch emails actually means, written in the same vocabulary the emails use. Customers quote the word back, so the material has to recognise it. |
|---|---|
| Normal timing for each stage | How long picking usually takes, when dispatch happens relative to the cut-off, how long before the first carrier scan appears, and how long the carrier then takes. The gap between dispatch and first scan is what generates most of these messages. |
| What to do when tracking shows nothing | How long silence is normal for, at what point it is worth chasing, and what the shop needs when somebody does. Publishing the threshold stops people contacting on day one and stops them waiting until day fourteen. |
| Where an order enquiry should land, and with what | The exact address, who reads it, the published response time, and the two things to include: the order number and the email address used at checkout. Guest checkout means the name is a poor identifier and the order number is a good one. |
The reply
I cannot look up orders, so I have no way of seeing yours. What I can tell you is that tracking often shows nothing for the first day after dispatch, because the parcel is scanned when it reaches the carrier's depot rather than when it leaves us, so a quiet tracking page on day one is normal. If it has been longer than that, send your order number and the email address you used at checkout to the address on our contact page and somebody will open the order and tell you exactly where it is.
The refusal comes in the first clause, before anything that could be misread as a lookup. The middle does the work, because most of these arrive within a day of dispatch and the customer is describing a silence rather than a problem. The close names the two identifiers that let a person resolve it in one reply instead of three.
Where it stops
The trigger. Any message containing an order number, or any description of one particular parcel, including one the carrier has marked delivered.
I cannot open orders, so this needs somebody who can. Leave your name, the email address you ordered with and your order number and the team will check it and come back to you.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never say an order has been picked, has shipped, or is out for delivery.
- Never read an order number back in a way that suggests it has been found.
- Never estimate where a parcel has got to from the date it was placed.
- Never tell somebody to wait longer before contacting anyone, when a carrier claim window may be running.
Questions
- Is there any point having an assistant if it cannot answer this?
- The volume behind this question is mostly people who have not read the dispatch email or do not know that the first scan lags. Answering that reliably, at eleven at night, clears a real share of it. The rest was always going to need a person, and it reaches one faster than an unanswered contact form does.
- Can we connect our order system to it?
- It answers from the documents and pages you index, and it has no ability to query a live system or write into one. If order lookup is the thing you need, it has to happen on the human side of the handover, which is why the material should make that route as short as possible.
- What about a parcel marked delivered that never arrived?
- Straight to a person, with no reassurance attached. That is a claim involving the carrier, possibly a photograph on the delivery record and a decision about who absorbs the loss, and it frequently has a deadline. The assistant's contribution is speed, not analysis.
Keep reading
- Everything for a online storeDelivery cut-offs, the returns window and restock questions get asked before purchase. The one thing an assistant cannot do is find an order.
- Handling order status in generalThe most asked question in retail support and the one a document-based assistant cannot answer. What it can do instead, and where handover sits.
- 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.
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.