Playbooks · 5 min read
Specs, Stock and Warranty: Only One Is Safe to Automate
The launch reel lands. Within an hour the comment section is a spec sheet argument, and the DMs are three questions repeated in different words.
Does it work with my phone. Is it available. Mine stopped charging.
They look like three variations of "tell me about the product". They are not. One is a conditional answer dressed as a fact, one is something no automation here can know, and one is a commitment your company has to honour afterwards.
Compatibility is not a fact, it is a table
"Will it work with my laptop" feels like the most automatable question in electronics. It is the one that catches people out.
Whether it works depends on the model, the exact variant, which region it was sold in, the operating system version, the firmware, and frequently the cable somebody already owns. That is a lookup table with hundreds of rows, and a generated reply does not consult a table. It produces a plausible sentence, fluently, and the sentence will be right often enough that nobody checks it and wrong often enough to generate returns.
A confident yes about compatibility is a return you have already accepted, three weeks before it arrives.
The template that works points instead of answering. "Full compatibility list is here — check your exact model, and if it's not on the list tell me and I'll get you a proper answer." That reply is correct on every day of its life, and it survives every firmware update without anybody editing it.
Stock is something we cannot see at all
Worth stating flatly, because it is a limitation and not a design choice.
There is no shop integration here. No product catalogue, no inventory, no orders, no order lookup, no shipment tracking, no payments. Nothing in this product knows whether anything is in stock, and it cannot find out.
So an automated reply must never say "in stock", "back in stock next week", "we've got a few left", or anything else about availability. It sends a link to the page that does know — your store, the marketplace listing, the retailer — and lets the page carry the truth.
The same applies to "where is my order". Nothing here can look that up. Route it, do not answer it.
Never automate a warranty commitment
This is the one that costs real money, and it is the one gadget brands automate by accident, because the words involved are ordinary.
"Yes that's covered." "We'll replace it." "Send it to the service centre and they'll sort it out." "You're within warranty."
Each of those is a commitment made in writing by your brand account to a customer who will screenshot it. Whether the unit is covered depends on the purchase date, the seller, the region, whether the fault is physical damage, whether it was opened, and what your actual warranty terms say — none of which is in the DM.
- Put the whole vocabulary on the negative-keyword list.
warranty,guarantee,replace,replacement,refund,return,service centre,service center,repair,defect,faulty,not working,dead,damaged,kharab. Matching folds case, punctuation and Latin accents, and it matches whole words —repairwill not catchrepairs, so write both. - Send one honest sentence and a route. "Sorry — service is handled by our support team, here's the form and they'll need your invoice." No promise, no diagnosis, no timeline.
- Do not collect serial numbers, invoices or addresses in the DM. People will send photographs of bills unprompted. The support form has the fields and the consent wording. The DM has neither, and everything typed there ends up in a lead record and then in a CSV.
- Leave first-time-senders-only switched off for this path. A warranty message usually comes from an existing customer who has written before, and filtering them out is exactly backwards.
What is genuinely worth automating
After the three carve-outs, what remains is most of the volume and it is all fixed information.
Where to buy, by country or by retailer. The spec sheet. The manual and the firmware page. Box contents. Charging standard. Whether there is a warranty registration page. Which variant has which colour. All templates, all free, all correct for as long as the product exists.
Launch content deserves one extra rule. A pre-order automation, a launch-day price, a festival bundle — each of those is a temporary structure and gets its own automation with a switch-off date written down the day it is created. An evergreen automation edited to mention a Diwali bundle is a bundle you are still promoting in February.
The launch spike needs a cap and a clock
A gadget launch behaves nothing like the rest of the grid. It gets shared into group chats, quoted by review accounts, and the comments arrive in bursts.
Set a rate budget before the post goes up. An uncapped automation answering thousands of comments in an hour is how a good launch starts looking like coordinated spam, and the account it happens to is yours. The cap costs nothing, because a comment stays answerable for seven days counted from each comment, so the queue drains well inside the window.
The DM side is tighter: twenty-four hours from the person's last message, restarted only when they write again. There are no sequences, no broadcasts and no scheduled follow-ups — the platform does not permit the message. So the link goes in the first reply, always.
Cost, and the rest of the limits
Templated replies are free and unlimited, which is what makes a launch survivable: one fixed where-to-buy reply going to four thousand people costs nothing. A credit is spent only when the AI writes a new reply, one credit per reply — the genuinely unusual questions. Free tier is 100 credits with no card; packs start at ₹499.
Official Graph API only. No shop, no stock, no orders, no payments, no CRM sync, no WhatsApp, no analytics. Leads export as CSV. It cannot message anyone who has not written to you first. Takeover stands the automation down the moment a person replies by hand.
If you sell direct rather than through retailers, the ecommerce version covers the ordering side, and what a support inbox looks like on this channel is the closest neighbour to the warranty problem above.
