Playbooks · 5 min read
Jewellery DMs: Never Automate Availability or Price
Two messages dominate a jewellery designer's inbox. "Is this still available?" and "how much?". They are also the two messages you should be most careful about handing to a machine, which is an awkward place to start a post about automation and is the honest one.
The reason is not caution for its own sake. It is that a jewellery inbox has two properties that most retail inboxes do not: the stock is frequently one of one, and the price of anything made to order does not exist until somebody works it out.
Availability, when there is exactly one
A boutique selling t-shirts can say "yes, in stock" and be wrong in a way that is fixable. You made one of these. It sold on Saturday, at an exhibition, off the table, and nobody updated anything.
An automation cannot see that. It has no inventory access of any kind — no catalogue sync, no stock count, nothing. It knows which words arrived in a comment. So a reply saying "yes, available!" is a guess, and when it is wrong you are not correcting a fact. You are taking something back from someone who had already decided to buy it.
Every "yes it's available" your automation sends to a one-of-one piece is a promise you may have to break by hand, individually, to a person who is now upset.
The fix is to never let it confirm and to make the non-confirmation useful rather than evasive. "Let me check on this one and come straight back to you. Meanwhile: it is hallmarked 22k, and this design can be made in sizes 10 to 18." Nothing in that is a promise, all of it is information, and it lands in four seconds at eleven at night.
Price, when the piece does not exist yet
For made-to-order work, the number depends on weight, on the stone, on the metal rate on the day, on making charges for that design, on size. A price sent by template is a price you will be held to.
What you can publish safely is the structure, not the figure. That you quote on weight plus making charges. That the metal rate is taken on the day of confirmation. That a custom design gets a quote after the drawing, not before. Whether there is a design fee. Say the mechanism and people accept it, because it is how the trade actually works and most customers already half know it.
Stock pieces with a fixed listed price are the exception, and the only jewellery price you should ever automate. If the number is already on your website, sending the same number in a DM adds no risk.
The message your triggers cannot see
Here is the part specific to this business, and the part most automation writing skips.
The highest-intent enquiry a jewellery designer receives is a photograph. A screenshot from Pinterest, a picture of a grandmother's ring, a snap of something a friend was wearing. "Aisa bana sakte ho?"
A trigger matches words. An image has none. If the photo arrives with no caption, no automation fires, nothing is captured, and nothing appears anywhere except the inbox itself.
The practical consequence is a workflow one. Do not let automation make you check the inbox less often. The messages it handles are the cheap ones; the ones it cannot see are the ones worth thousands. Some designers put a line in their bio and their public replies — "send us the picture" — which is genuinely good advice and, satisfyingly, moves the valuable conversation to the surface where a human is looking.
What is safe, and it is more than it sounds
Everything that is fixed about how you work, rather than about a specific piece:
- Metal and purity. What you work in, what is hallmarked, what is plated and what is solid. Say "plated" plainly if it is plated; the customers who care will ask anyway and the ones who find out later will post about it.
- Sizing. How you take a size, what happens if it is wrong, whether resizing is possible on that design. This is the single most common follow-up question and it has one answer.
- Turnaround. How long made-to-order takes, in weeks, as a range. Not a date.
- Care and warranty. Polishing, replating, what the guarantee covers.
- Returns, split by type. Stock pieces and custom pieces almost never have the same policy, and putting both in one template prevents the argument.
- Shipping and insurance. Whether it is insured in transit, and whether you ship internationally.
Those are templates, and templated replies are free and unlimited. A credit is spent only when the AI writes a new reply — which, for this inbox, should mostly be the messages that are genuinely unlike the others.
Let the gate do the worrying
Two of the ten matter unusually much here. Takeover, because you will jump into a thread the moment you see a photo, and the automation must stand down mid-conversation rather than follow your reply with a template. And content safety, which is the last check before a send.
Use the review queue more aggressively than a lower-ticket business would. The economics are not symmetrical: a delayed reply to a serious enquiry is a mild annoyance, and a confidently wrong one is the enquiry.
What to build first
One automation, on your best-performing piece reel, answering the fixed facts and asking for a size or a metal preference. Capture to Leads so you know which designs people ask about, and export the CSV when you plan the next collection — there is no CRM sync, and for a studio this size the file is genuinely enough.
For the full list of what can stop a reply, the ten checks are documented here. If you also sell through a shop rather than only DMs, the Etsy post covers that shape, and the ecommerce one covers the catalogue side.
