Why your Facebook page gets messages but not orders
Short answer: Most Facebook shops in Bangladesh lose orders to reply delay, not price. A buyer who asks "dam koto?" is usually messaging three or four sellers at once, so the shop that answers first — with a price, a delivery cost and a next step — usually gets the order regardless of who is cheapest.
You post a product. The comments fill up with "dam koto?". You reply to every one, you get twenty people in your inbox — and at the end of the week you have shipped four orders.
The instinct is that the price is wrong. It usually isn't.
The buyer is not messaging only you
A Bangladeshi F-commerce buyer researching a purchase behaves in a very specific way: they open four or five pages selling the same thing, message all of them, and buy from whichever one answers first with enough information to act on.
That single behaviour explains most of what looks like a pricing problem. You are not competing on price against those other pages. You are competing on who replies first, and price only becomes the deciding factor when two shops answer equally well.
If your average reply time is over an hour, you are not losing to a cheaper seller. You are losing to a faster one.
What "fast enough" actually means
The window is roughly the length of one phone session:
| Reply time | What is happening on the buyer's side |
|---|---|
| Under 10 minutes | Still in the app, still comparing. Your reply lands in an active conversation. |
| 10–60 minutes | Phone is down. Your reply is a notification competing with everything else. |
| 1–6 hours | Usually already answered by someone else. You are now the second quote. |
| Next morning | The purchase decision was made last night. |
The drop is not gradual — it falls off a cliff at the end of the session. Which is why a shop that answers every message within ten minutes, including at 11pm, converts dramatically better than one that answers thoughtfully at 10am the next day.
And 11pm matters more than it sounds. Evening is when people shop on their phones. It is also exactly when a human seller has stopped replying.
The reply that closes
Most sellers answer the question that was asked. That is the mistake — it costs three more round trips, and each round trip is another chance to lose the buyer.
A buyer who asks "dam koto?" actually needs four things before they can decide:
- The price. Plainly, with no "inbox for details".
- The delivery charge. Inside Dhaka and outside, because they do not know which one applies to them.
- When it arrives. "2-3 days" beats "soon" every time.
- How they pay. Especially whether cash on delivery is available.
Answer all four unprompted and the buyer has nothing left to check. Answer only the first and you have handed them three reasons to go and ask the next page.
Compare these two replies to the same message:
Buyer: Vai eta dam koto?
Reply A: 1450 tk
Reply B: 1450 taka. Dhaka'r vitore delivery 60 tk, baire 120 tk.
Order korle 2-3 diner moddhe pouche jabe. Cash on delivery
ache — hate peye taka diben. Kon size lagbe apnar?Reply A is faster to type and loses the sale. Reply B ends with a question, so the conversation continues on your terms — and "kon size lagbe" is already the first field of the order.
Put the price in the post
"Inbox koren" is the single most expensive habit in Bangladeshi F-commerce.
The theory is that hiding the price starts a conversation. In practice it does three bad things: it buries genuine questions under a wall of identical price comments, it attracts people who were never going to buy at your price, and it adds a round trip to every single sale.
Publishing the price inverts all three. The people who message you have already seen the number and accepted it — so the conversation starts at "how do I get it" rather than "how much".
You will get fewer messages. You will get more orders.
Where the time actually goes
If you handle the inbox yourself, the arithmetic is unforgiving. Say you get 60 messages a day and each one takes four exchanges to reach an order. That is 240 replies. At even 30 seconds each — which assumes you never have to look up a price or a stock level — that is two hours of typing, spread across a day where you also have to pack and ship.
Nobody does that consistently. So replies drift to whenever there is a gap, the ten-minute window is missed, and the orders quietly go elsewhere.
This is the problem Tanet Chat was built for: it answers in Bangla or Banglish within seconds, at 11pm, with the price and the delivery charge already in the first reply — and it hands you the order once the customer has committed.
What to change this week
If you do nothing else:
- Put prices in every post. Stop writing "inbox koren".
- Write your four-part reply once and keep it somewhere you can paste from — price, delivery charge, delivery time, payment method.
- Answer evening messages before you answer morning ones. Evening buyers are still deciding; morning ones already decided last night.
- End every reply with a question. A reply that ends in a full stop ends the conversation.
None of that costs money. It just moves the reply inside the window where the buyer can still act on it.
Common questions
How fast should I reply to a Facebook message to get the order?
Inside ten minutes while the buyer is still in the app. Bangladeshi F-commerce buyers typically message several sellers in one session, so the first useful reply usually wins the order even at a higher price. After about an hour the buyer has normally already bought elsewhere.
Should I put my price in the Facebook post or make people inbox me?
Put the price in the post. "Inbox koren" filters out buyers rather than qualifying them, and it buries every real question under a hundred "dam koto?" comments you then have to answer one by one. Publishing the price means the people who message you have already accepted it.
Why do customers ask the price and then disappear?
Usually because the reply arrived after they had already been answered elsewhere, or because it answered only the price and left them to ask three more questions — delivery charge, delivery time, and whether it is cash on delivery. Answering all four in the first message removes the reasons to keep shopping.
Is cash on delivery hurting my margins?
It costs you in returns, not in the sale. COD is what makes a first-time buyer trust an unknown page, so removing it usually costs more orders than it saves. The lever that works is reducing the cancel rate — confirming the order by phone or message before you ship, and being specific about the delivery date.