Question handling
The business buyer asking a shop for an account
Every site built for consumers gets this message. Somebody buying for a company, a builder, a salon, a school, a reseller, arrives at a page priced for one person buying one thing and asks what the arrangement is for people like them. The material to answer them is almost never on the site, because the site was not written for them, and the enquiry is usually worth several times an ordinary order.
What they are really asking
Whether you sell to businesses at all, and if you do, what they have to be before you will treat them as one.
- how do i open a trade account
- what is your wholesale price list
- do you offer 30 day payment terms
- what is the minimum order to qualify for trade prices
- do you supply resellers
- what do i need to prove we are a business
The material that answers it
An assistant is only as good as the document behind it, and for this question the document usually exists but is written in the wrong shape. What each one has to contain to be answerable:
| Whether a trade arrangement exists at all, in one line | The most valuable sentence in this intent and the one most often missing. Businesses that do not sell wholesale should say so plainly, because a clear no released in thirty seconds is a service to a buyer with a list of suppliers to work through. Businesses that do should say so before anything else. |
|---|---|
| The eligibility test, written as a test | What you require before somebody counts as trade: a registered company, a tax registration, a particular kind of activity, a first order above a value, an existing trading history. Write it as conditions a reader can check themselves against, because this is the one question in the intent that is genuinely about them rather than about you. |
| How the tier actually works | A flat reduction against the published price, bands that move with volume, a separate list, or category by category. Say which, and say which lines sit outside it, because the excluded lines are usually the ones with the thinnest margin and the greatest interest. |
| What has to happen before payment terms exist | Whether early orders are paid up front, what checks run before an account carries a balance, who sets a limit, and how long the process takes end to end. Terms are what a business buyer is really asking about, and the honest answer is a sequence rather than a yes. |
How to handle it
Answer the existence question before anything else
The buyer is working out whether to invest another ten minutes in you. An assistant that opens with a description of your consumer delivery options has answered somebody else's question and lost the enquiry.
Lead with whether trade supply exists, then the eligibility test, then the route. In that order the reply is useful even to a buyer who does not qualify, because they now know and can move on.
Publish the eligibility test, because it is about them
This is the structural oddity of the intent and the reason it needs its own handling. Everywhere else in support, the material describes your business and the visitor reads it. Here the material describes conditions the visitor has to satisfy, and they are checking themselves against it.
That changes what good content looks like. Wording such as accounts are available to qualifying businesses gives a reader nothing to check and produces an enquiry that is really a request for the conditions. Specific conditions produce either a qualified application or a self selected exit, and both beat a message asking what you meant.
State the tier as a fact and keep it out of negotiation
Where the structure is published, the assistant can describe it: how the bands are set, what moves somebody up one, which categories sit outside. That is genuinely useful and it is identical for every buyer.
What it must never do is respond to pressure. A buyer who says they can get it cheaper elsewhere is opening a negotiation, and an assistant that produces anything resembling a counter offer has set the opening position for a deal nobody at your business has seen. Hold the published structure and hand over.
Collect what an account opening actually needs
The handover is worth more here than in almost any other intent, because the person picking it up can do real work with four facts: the company, what they buy and roughly how much of it, whether they are buying to use or to resell, and who is authorised to open the account.
The widget takes a name, an email and a message when somebody asks for a person, so the assistant should prompt for those four to go into the message before handing over. A trade enquiry that arrives complete is quoted the same day. One that arrives as a request for a callback about pricing takes a week and often never restarts.
When it stops being an answer
Every credit decision, limit and payment term
Whether this company gets terms, how much it can owe at once, and what happens if it does not pay are decisions made about one business by somebody who has run checks. An assistant that says terms are available has, from the buyer's side, said that terms are available to them.
Describe the process and the sequence instead. That answers the real question, which is how long this takes, without deciding anything.
Bespoke pricing, exclusivity and anything shaped like a deal
Territory, a matched competitor price, a category nobody else in a region can stock, a bulk rate outside the published bands. These are agreements, and an assistant that discusses them at all has created an expectation somebody senior then has to withdraw in the first real conversation.
How this one goes wrong
The trade price quoted to somebody who was never trade
A buyer describes themselves as a business and asks what they would pay. The assistant, working from a page that lists tier structures, applies one and produces a figure. Nobody has checked whether this buyer qualifies, whether the product sits inside the tier, or whether the volume they described is real.
You now have three bad options: honour a price you never agreed, withdraw it and open the relationship with a correction, or argue about who said what. Meanwhile the number has been forwarded internally at their end and written into their own costings. The prevention is a material set that publishes the structure and the conditions but never a worked example, and an assistant that hands over the moment a question is about one buyer's basket.
Questions
- We are not set up for wholesale at all. Is this worth configuring?
- Yes, for the opposite reason. One indexed line saying you supply retail customers only, with the nearest alternative route if you have one, ends these enquiries in a sentence instead of leaving them in an inbox that is watched for order problems.
- Can it open an account or apply a discount?
- No. It does not write into any system and cannot change what anybody pays. It explains the structure, states the eligibility conditions, and passes a complete enquiry to the address you nominate.
- Should the tier figures be indexed at all?
- That is a commercial call rather than a technical one. If your tiers are already published, indexing them saves everybody time. If they are not, publish the structure and the conditions without the numbers and let the figures come from the person who opens the account.
Keep reading
- Handling refund requestsA refund question is really about eligibility and timing. What to index, what the reply may promise, and where it has to reach a person.
- Handling cancellationsCancellation content is hard to find on purpose. What it costs to answer plainly, how notice periods work, and what happens to data on the way out.
- Handling pricing questionsPublished price versus the price for this buyer. Bands, ranges and from pricing, and why a firm number for unscoped work is the damaging failure.
- Every question typeHandling patterns for the questions every support inbox gets.
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.