How To Save Time with Buyer Message Templates

If you’ve been reading my blogs for any length of time, you know that I try to keep a balance of posts that are theoretical and practical.  Naturally, there is some cross over, but there’s also some pretty clear distinction.  You can look at Which is Worse: Losing $100 or Not Gaining $100 or Why Are You In This Business and see a clear difference from posts like Printing End of Year Reports or Why I’d Sell Pie Face Game If I was New.  This post is going to be much more practical camp.

The more items you sell the more contact you will have with buyers.  If you sell primarily through FBA, then the onus is generally not on you to solve your customers’ problems, but even still, they will contact you.  Even if contact with buyer simply means directing them to FBA customer service (and telling them how to do so) it will require work from you.  All of that is the negative.  The positive is that there are only a few issues that buyers ever have and you really only need to do the work once.  There is absolutely no reason why you need to type a new response to “The tracking shows that my package has arrived, but it isn’t here, What do I do?” every single time you get that message.

One option is simply to open a Microsoft Word files / Open Office Text Document / Google Docs Document and type your responses there, save them, and then copy/paste into Amazon Seller Central when you need to use one.  There’s nothing wrong with this option, but Amazon actually makes our lives quite a bit easier on this issue, if we’ll only take them up on the offer.

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Create an email template

Go to Manage Email Templates to create a template or follow these steps:

1. In the upper right corner of your seller account home page, click Messages to go to Buyer-Seller Messages.
2. Click Manage Email Templates on the right side of the page.
3. Click the Create Template button.
4. Enter a name for your template in the Name field and the email template text in the Template Text field.
5. Create or select tags to associate with this template. Tags will categorize your template and make it easier to find the next time you want to use it.
6. Click Save to finish.

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Use an email template

Go to Manage Email Templates to use an email template or follow these steps:

1. In the upper right corner of your seller account home page, click Messages to go to Buyer-Seller Messages.
2. Click Insert Email Template at the top right of the Reply box.
3. A pop-up box labeled Select a Template will appear. Select the template you want to use by typing a name in the search box. Or you can select from the list of recently used and favorite templates.
4. Click the Select button. The template text appears in the Reply box.
5. Optional: Personalize the message before sending it.
6. Click Reply to send the message.

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In the coming weeks, I’m going to look at what sort of messages you should have templates for and give you some ideas of the ways that I phrase my responses.  I think that this is important because messages are often our very last/only line of contact with buyers.  The next step, if there is a next step, is often a return, refund, feedback, or claim.  If we have the potential to mitigate problems (issue a refund instead of having an A-to-Z claim, stop negative feedback from being posted, etc), then we need to take that opportunity.  Until next time…

As Always, Best Wishes

Mike