Playbooks · 6 min read
How to Answer the Price Question Instead of Deflecting It
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Open any Indian business account and read the comments under the last ten posts. The single most typed thing is one word, sometimes two.
price
kitne ka hai
rate?
It is the most common question in this entire category, and the standard answer to it is not an answer. It is "DM for price", which means: type the question again, somewhere else, and wait.
The cost of deflecting is a whole conversation
There is a theory behind DM for price — get them into the inbox, sell them properly, do not let competitors see your rates. The first part is fine and the automation does it for you. The rest is where it goes wrong.
A person asking price is deciding whether you are in their range. That is a fast decision, taken in the space of one message, usually while doing something else. If the reply does not help them make it, most of them stop. Not because they were offended, but because there is a next account and it took twelve seconds to find.
And there is a clock. In a DM thread you have twenty-four hours from their message. A reply that says "let me get back to you with pricing" spends the one turn you were guaranteed and starts a countdown you now have to beat. Why speed is a permission problem rather than a competitive one goes into that properly.
A price reply that does not contain a number, a range, or a reason there is no number is not a reply. It is a second question.
Four price questions wearing the same word
They look identical in the comments and they need different automations.
- The catalogue price. One product, one number, printed on your site. There is no reason on earth for a human to type this. Automate it completely.
- The range. Sarees from twelve hundred to nine thousand, depending. The honest automated answer is the range plus one question that narrows it.
- The it-depends. Wedding photography, interiors, a legal retainer. The price is a function of things you do not know yet. The automated reply gives the starting point and asks for the two inputs that decide the rest.
- The negotiated. Bulk, wholesale, a corporate order, a long engagement. Do not automate this at all. Route it to a person and say so.
Most accounts have two or three of these at once, which is why one generic price automation always reads badly to somebody.
Never put a number in the public reply
This is the rule people break first and regret longest.
A public reply lives under the post. It is read by everybody who scrolls past, including whoever finds the post through search in eighteen months. If it says "₹1,499 only!", that sentence is still there when the price is nineteen hundred, and the customer who screenshots it is not being unreasonable.
So the public reply is a receipt, four to eight words, pointing at the DM. "Sent you the details." The private reply carries the number, because you can change a template today and every subsequent conversation uses the new one.
Public reply
Private reply
Write the range as an answer, not as a hedge
"Prices vary" is not a range. "Depends on the design" is not a range. A range has two numbers in it and it does more work than most people expect: it filters out the people who were never going to buy, before either of you spends twenty minutes finding that out, and it signals confidence to the ones who stay.
A version that works: "Kurtas start at ₹899 and go up to about ₹2,400 for the hand-embroidered ones. Full list is on the site — link here. Aap daily wear dhoondh rahe hain ya wedding ke liye?"
Range, source of truth, one easy question. The question is not decoration: their answer is the only thing that reopens the window and gives you a second turn.
The keyword set, and one thing that catches Indian accounts out
Price arrives in more spellings than any other question. Start with price, cost, rate, rates, charges, fees, how much, kitna, kitne, kitne ka, kya price, mrp.
Matching folds case and punctuation, so PRICE?? and price are the same thing. It also folds Latin accents. It does not fold Indic vowel signs, which means दाम and दम are two different words as far as the trigger is concerned, and listing one does not get you the other. If a meaningful share of your comments come in Devanagari, write out the forms your customers actually type rather than assuming a near-miss will match.
Negative keywords matter more here than anywhere. wholesale, bulk, dealership, negotiable, discount, sponsor — every one of those wants a person, and every one of them will otherwise receive your retail range and go quiet.
What should never be quoted automatically
If AI is writing the reply rather than a template, price is the single best reason to use the review queue. A templated reply says exactly what you wrote and nothing else, which is why it is the safer instrument for a number. An AI-written reply is more natural and can be more specific — and it is also the one you want a person to glance at before it goes out.
It costs nothing to run
A templated reply is free and unlimited. A price automation answering the same question four hundred times this month spends no credits at all, because a credit is only spent when the AI writes a new reply. One credit, one reply.
So the calculation on the most common question in your inbox is straightforward: writing a good price template is a one-afternoon job with no running cost, and it removes the thing your team is most tired of typing.
If you are still deciding what your prices should be rather than how to say them, that is a different problem. And if the comments are arriving but the DMs are not, the funnel between the two is where the leak usually is.
