Messages and Offers
Several times a day, buyers message me. And for the most part it's the same handful of questions wearing different clothes:
- Has my item shipped?
- Why hasn't it arrived yet?
- Has it been scanned?
- My item came damaged.
The eBay app is not built for handling that flow gracefully. So I put the API to work here too.
Where it stands today
When a new buyer message comes in, my system pulls the relevant order details and forwards the message to me on Telegram. I reply right there in the chat, and the system posts my reply back to the buyer through the eBay API. That's the win that's live right now: I can clear buyer questions from anywhere, without living inside the eBay app, and every reply is still mine.
I've also built the scaffolding for FAQ auto-replies, a set of rules for those half-dozen predictable questions, but they're switched off for the moment. Right now everything escalates to me and I approve each response by hand. I'd rather answer a few extra messages myself than have an automated reply go sideways with a real customer while I'm not looking. Turning those on, carefully and one at a time, is a near-term step, not today's reality.
Handling offers
Offers get a little special handling. Active offers don't come through the messages endpoint, but eBay sends a system message when one lands, so I catch it that way. From there the system can weigh an offer against criteria, how long the listing's been up, what the live comps say, how far below market it is, to help me decide accept or decline. (There's an auto-accept threshold in the mix, but I'm keeping the exact number to myself; no reason to publish the floor that every bargain-hunter would love to know.)
The theme of this chapter is the theme of the whole series in miniature: automate the mechanical part (routing, context-gathering, posting the reply) and keep the judgment with a human until you genuinely trust the rules.