Kindly DM for price, and the queue it builds behind you

The phrase, and why it caught on

Somebody comments price under a photo of the thing you sell. The reply is four words that anyone selling in this market can recite from memory: kindly DM for price. It is common enough here that people quote it back at each other as a joke in Pakistani tech circles, which is usually a sign that a habit has stopped being a choice and started being a reflex.

It became a reflex for reasons that are not stupid. Publishing a number under a public post invites the comment section to argue about it, in front of every other buyer. It hands your rate card to a competitor who never has to ask. It removes the room you were keeping for the customer who orders twelve pieces instead of one. And there is a real belief underneath all of it, which is that a conversation closes better than a price tag.

Some of that is true. A conversation does close better than a number, on the days somebody is free to have the conversation. The trouble starts on the other days.

What the habit costs, and who pays it

The moment you refuse to publish a number, you have promised to answer every price question personally. That includes the ones from people who were only curious, the ones from students doing market research for an assignment, the ones from a competitor checking your rate, and the ones from someone who was never going to spend that much. All of them arrive in the same inbox as your serious buyer, and they all look identical until somebody reads them.

So the first cost is hours, and they are the hours of whoever is best at selling, because that is the person you trust to quote. The second cost is delay. Your buyer with a wedding in three weeks is sitting behind eleven people who wanted a number for curiosity, and businesses here describe losing orders exactly this way: the enquiry sat, the reply came the next morning, the customer had already ordered elsewhere.

The third cost is the one that surprises people. When the price lives only in conversation, two members of your team will quote two different numbers for the same item, and you will find out at delivery, in front of the customer, with no way to argue.

• The same question typed out by hand, dozens of times a week
• A serious buyer waiting behind people who wanted a number and nothing else
• Two staff quoting the same article differently, discovered at handover
• Every enquiry that arrives after closing time answered the following morning
• No record anywhere of what was quoted, to whom, on which day

A one week tally that settles the argument

Before changing anything, find out whether this is actually your problem. It takes a notebook and one week.

Every time a price enquiry lands, put a mark in one of three columns. Column one: asked the price, got the price, said nothing further. Column two: asked the price and kept talking. Column three: everything else, including people who already knew the price. Do not tidy it up or make judgement calls. Just mark it.

At the end of the week, look at column one against column two. If column one is clearly heavier, you are paying a skilled person to perform the function of a price list, one message at a time. If column two is heavier, the conversation genuinely is doing work for you, and the answer is to protect that conversation by getting to it faster rather than to publish everything.

While you are at it, run the second test. Ask three people on your team to quote the same item from memory, separately, without checking with each other. The gap between their answers is the size of a problem you did not know you had.

The free fix: publish a band, not a secret

You do not have to publish a full rate card to stop paying for this. You have to publish enough that the people who were only after a number can get one without you.

Pick a starting price for each of your main categories and state plainly what moves it upward. Fabric, size, quantity, delivery city, urgency, whichever applies to you. A buyer who sees a starting figure and the reasons it changes can decide for themselves whether to keep going, and the ones who keep going are the ones worth your salesperson's afternoon.

Then make it findable in the three places people actually look, which costs nothing at all.

• Load your main items into the WhatsApp Business catalogue with prices filled in, so the answer is a link rather than a paragraph
• Pin one message in your business profile or bio carrying the starting prices and what changes them
• Write one price sheet in a shared document that the whole team quotes from, including the discount you are willing to give without asking anyone
• Set the discount band in writing, so a junior person can close a normal order without waiting for approval
• Add the price line to the caption of the post itself, so the comment never has to be made

Where a system helps, and where this is the wrong answer

Once the number is written down, a WhatsApp assistant can say it instantly, in the same words every time, at two in the morning, and step back the moment the conversation turns into a negotiation. That is the part worth automating: the identical answer given identically. The part worth keeping human is the discount, the awkward delivery date and the customer who is upset.

But a machine can only say what you decided it may say. If the price rule has never been written down, automating the reply builds a faster stall rather than a faster sale, and buyers can tell the difference immediately.

There are businesses where publishing is the wrong move and you should ignore all of this. If every item is made to a measurement, or priced after a site visit, or quoted against a drawing, there is no honest starting number to publish and inventing one produces arguments later.

If you are a distributor whose agreement forbids publishing a figure, that agreement wins. And if your enquiry volume is small enough that you answer every price question within minutes yourself, this habit is costing you almost nothing and your attention belongs somewhere else in the business.

Publish the number you would have said anyway. Keep the conversation for the decisions that actually need one.

Publish the band first, and what to do if that is not enough

Publish the band before buying anything. It costs nothing, your own team can do it in-house this afternoon, and for most sellers it removes enough of the queue that no system is needed at all. The one week tally above is the test. If the tally comes back small, keep the phrase and keep the queue, because an assistant answering four price questions a week is an expensive way to avoid four messages.

If the tally comes back large, the shape of the work is short. The audit takes the first week and most of it goes on writing the band down properly with the conditions that move it. One assistant answering the published number is live inside a fortnight, because it needs the number and the catalogue and nothing else. Anything that reads live stock or takes an order arrives after that, once the simple version has proved itself in a real week.

The assistant says the published number in the same words every time and then steps back. A negotiation, a bulk enquiry, a custom order and any complaint hand it to a person on the first message. Any figure outside the published band waits for human approval. That boundary is the entire design, because the point of publishing a band was never to automate the negotiation. It was to stop paying a person to say a number that could have been written down once.

The band, the catalogue and the message history sit in an account under your own logins, so you own the system and can change a number yourself on a Sunday without asking anybody. Ibrahim owns build and workflows at Wobble, on the view that a seller who has to message a supplier in order to change a price will have stopped using the system by the second season. Wobble works from Karachi, bills month to month, across 25 engagements in six countries.

Common questions

Should I put prices directly on my Instagram or Facebook posts?

Putting a starting price in the caption removes the most repeated comment you receive and costs you nothing. If you are worried about the comment section, put the starting price in the caption and keep the detailed variations for the chat, so the public number is a floor rather than a full rate card.

My prices change with the dollar and with fabric costs. What do I publish?

Publish a starting price with a validity date attached, for example a figure marked as valid for this month. A dated number is honest, it stops the argument at delivery, and it gives you a clean reason to revise without anyone feeling misled.

Will publishing prices just help my competitors undercut me?

A competitor who wants your prices can get them in one message from any number, so hiding them mostly stops customers rather than competitors. The real question is whether you are competing on price at all. If you are not, publishing the number and the reasons it is higher does more work for you than silence.

Can a WhatsApp bot quote prices for me?

It can quote anything you have written down and approved, instantly and consistently. It should not invent a price, apply a discount you have not authorised, or keep negotiating. Decide the ceiling and the handover rule before it goes live, and give the customer a human name the moment the conversation moves past the published number.

What if my price depends entirely on quantity?

Publish the single unit price and the quantity at which the rate improves, without publishing the improved rate. That tells a serious wholesale buyer they are in the right place and gives them a reason to start the conversation, while retail buyers get the answer they came for and stop asking.