Answering customers without losing the week

Customer service in a one-person shop is not a department, it is an interruption, and the way it is usually handled is by being interrupted all day. Most of that is avoidable without becoming any less helpful.

The messages you actually get

Worth listing, because the distribution is consistent across small shops and it tells you where to spend the effort.

• Where is my order. By a distance the most common, and almost entirely preventable with a dispatch message carrying a tracking link.
• Will this fit, suit, work with, arrive before. A product question that the product page should have answered.
• I want to return this. Routine, and it goes badly only when the policy is hard to find or the process requires a conversation.
• Something is wrong with it. The one that deserves a person and the one most worth getting right.
• A question that is really a sales question, from somebody deciding whether to buy.

The first three are a documentation problem, not a service problem. The last two are where your attention is worth something.

Answer once, properly, in public

The single highest-return habit here. Any question asked more than twice gets answered on the site, in the place somebody would look for it, in the words they used to ask.

Not a general frequently-asked-questions page, which nobody reads. On the product page for a sizing question, on the delivery page for a shipping question, in the dispatch email for the where-is-my-order question. The measure of success is the message you stop receiving.

Keep it in one place

1. 01Pick one address customers write to, and route the others into it rather than checking five inboxes.
2. 02Set the hours you answer, publish them, and answer inside them rather than at eleven at night, which trains people to expect eleven at night.
3. 03Handle it in two sittings a day instead of continuously. The messages do not get worse and your day stops being shredded.
4. 04Keep the saved replies where you write from, so the routine answer costs seconds and the attention goes to the unusual one.

Refunds without the argument

For small sums, the argument costs more than the refund. The time spent establishing who is right, the message thread, the reputation of being difficult, and the review at the end of it are all more expensive than the item.

Which argues for a threshold decided in advance: under this amount, refund it and ask nothing. Above it, ask one question. That is not generosity, it is arithmetic, and it is also the thing people tell other people about.

The dispute route, and a dead link to remove

Many European storefronts still carry a link to the European Commission's Online Dispute Resolution platform, usually in the terms or the footer, put there years ago because it was required.

That platform was discontinued on 20 July 2025, following Regulation (EU) 2024/3228, and the Commission's own page now redirects visitors elsewhere. A link to it is a link to a closed service, which at best looks neglected. Remove it and check your terms, your legal notice and any marketplace profile for the same reference.

What has not gone away is alternative dispute resolution itself. National bodies under the Alternative Dispute Resolution Directive remain in place, and the Commission maintains a list of them, so if your terms or your sector require you to name a route, name the relevant national one rather than the platform that no longer exists.

Read what you are being asked

The last piece, and the one that pays. A month of messages is the cheapest product research available: the same question three times is a page that needs rewriting, the same complaint three times is a supplier or a packaging problem, and the questions from people deciding whether to buy are the objections your product page is not handling.

Half an hour once a month, reading back rather than replying, converts an interruption into the most direct information you have about why people do and do not buy.

The message that is really a sales question

Easy to treat as an interruption and it is the most valuable thing in the inbox. Somebody asking whether this will work for their situation is a customer deciding, and the reply is the whole sales process for a small shop.

So answer those first, properly, and tell them what will not work as well as what will. A message that says this is not right for you, try this instead produces more sales over a year than any amount of enthusiasm, because the person remembers it and because the refund you did not have to process was the alternative.

Going away for a week

The thing that stops one-person shops taking a holiday. The honest version works: say the dispatch dates, say when messages will be answered, and put it where somebody sees it before they order rather than after.

A banner on the shop, a line in the checkout, and an automatic reply with the same dates. Customers are considerably more tolerant of a stated delay than of a normal delivery promise quietly missed, and the shops that get into trouble here are the ones that kept selling as usual and hoped nobody would notice the week of silence.