Who answers your Facebook inbox at 3am?

Updated 2026-07-26 · 7 min read

Your last reply goes out at 10:30pm. By midnight the phone is face-down on the bed. It keeps buzzing anyway.

At 8am there are eleven new messages. Nine of them arrived after you stopped answering. You will answer all nine before lunch, carefully, and most of them will never write back.

What the overnight inbox actually looks like

Almost every night has the same shape:

• 10:40pm — "Vai eta ki stock e ache?"
• 11:15pm — a screenshot of your own post, no text with it
• 11:52pm — "dam koto?"
• 12:20am — "Dhaka'r baire delivery koto?"
• 1:05am — a nine-second voice note
• 6:50am — "?" from the 11:52pm one

Nothing on that list is hard. Every one of those questions has an answer you have typed a hundred times. They just arrived at an hour when nobody was holding the phone.

The message worth staring at is the 6:50am "?". It is not a new question. It is a buyer checking, before work, whether this page is alive. By then they have usually already been given a price by somebody else.

A morning reply is a second quote, not a first

Bangladeshi buyers do not message one page. They open four, ask all of them, and buy from whoever answers first with enough information to act on. The full version of that argument, with the timing table, is in why your Facebook page gets messages but not orders.

At night it gets sharper, because the session ends completely. A daytime buyer who waits twenty minutes is still in the app. A midnight buyer who waits nine hours has slept, woken up, and been answered by two other pages in between.

A reply sent at 9am is not a late first answer. It is a second quote on a decision that was already made at midnight.

Second quotes get bought on price and nothing else. That is the trade you are making every night without noticing — by morning the buyer comes back to you only if you are cheaper than the answer they already have.

How much this actually costs

Arithmetic beats feelings here. One example shop, with deliberately pessimistic assumptions:

One in six is a low assumption. If your night messages behave anything like your day messages, the real figure is worse. Either way, do not take my numbers — count your own for seven days, in two columns: messages that arrived between 10pm and 8am, and how many of them were genuine buying questions.

Four ways to cover the night, honestly

A helper is the version that genuinely works and the hardest to arrange. The cost is not only the salary. They need every price, every delivery charge, and a clear list of what they are not allowed to promise. A helper who guesses a price at 1am costs more than the order was worth.

Saved replies are worth writing whatever else you do. One paste-ready message carrying price, delivery charge, delivery time and payment method removes three round trips from every conversation. It solves your typing problem. It does not touch the timing problem, because pasting requires someone awake.

An away message beats silence, and most shops write it wrong. "We are currently away, we will get back to you soon" tells a comparing buyer exactly which page to give up on. Put facts in it: the price range, the delivery charge inside and outside Dhaka, and the hour you actually reply. An away message with numbers in it is a weak reply. An away message with only an apology in it is a goodbye.

Automation is the only option on the list that answers at 1:05am with nobody awake. It is also the one with the most ways to go wrong, so it is worth being exact about what it does.

What overnight automation does, and what it does not

Tanet Chat was built for this hour specifically. What actually happens:

• The reply goes out when the message arrives. There is no working-hours check anywhere on the message path — 3:10am is handled exactly like 3:10pm.
• It answers in the language your shop is set to, Banglish or Bangla script or English, even when the customer writes in a different one.
• A voice note is transcribed and answered as text. If the transcription fails it asks the customer to type the question rather than guessing at it.
• When it is not sure, it hands over instead of guessing. A question outside your catalogue and FAQs — a delivery date you never set, a custom order, a complaint — gets a short "ektu check kore apnake janacchi" to the customer. Then the bot pauses itself on that conversation, marks it as needing attention, and sends you the customer's actual words on Telegram. Those alerts can be set to arrive silently, so the night does not wake the house.
• You can answer that alert from bed. Reply to the Telegram message and your answer goes to the customer on the page, with the bot paused there for 30 minutes so it does not talk over you. Replying from the dashboard instead pauses it for 30 minutes or 3 more customer messages, whichever comes first — both numbers are in Settings, and the whole bot has an off switch on the dashboard.
• At 9am your local time it sends yesterday's numbers — conversations, orders, revenue. This and the alerts above need a paired Telegram account; without one, nothing reaches your phone and everything waits in the dashboard.

What it does not do:

• It does not know anything you did not load. Replies are built from the products, prices and delivery charges in your catalogue and FAQs, and the standing rule is to escalate rather than improvise a delivery date or a discount. An empty catalogue is a bot with nothing to say, so the setup work is not optional. An order confirmed below a product's floor price is always blocked and reported to you; the stricter check that throws away a whole reply for quoting under the floor stays off until you switch it on in the safety settings.
• It does not message people at night. Nudges to buyers who went quiet are off by default, and even when they are switched on they only send between 9am and 9pm in your timezone, at most twice per conversation. Answering at 3am is service. Knocking at 3am is spam.
• It is not open to everyone yet. Access is invite-only — apply for an invite; there is no self-serve signup. The free tier covers 500 conversations a month, counted once per conversation per month however many messages it takes, and Starter at ৳599 a month raises that to 1,000 conversations across two pages, paid by bKash.

Do this week

1. Count seven nights. Two numbers only: messages between 10pm and 8am, and how many were real buying questions.
2. Rewrite your away message so it contains a price range and a delivery charge. If you do not have one, that is ten minutes for a real return.
3. Tomorrow, answer the overnight messages before the morning ones, oldest first, with price and delivery charge and delivery time and payment method in the first reply. A few of them are still alive at 8am.
4. Then decide who owns the night: a person, a paste you will actually use, or software. Choosing none of them is also a decision. It just never appears in the inbox as a lost order.