A customer asks one short question: “Do you have the black one in 40?” Nine seconds later the assistant answers with a warm paragraph about how comfortable the shoe is and invites her to visit the website.
She didn't ask for a website. She asked for a yes or a no.
The seller's reaction is always identical: the AI is stupid, turn it off. I have opened a lot of these accounts and looked at why the answer came out like that. Almost every time, the problem is not the assistant's brain. It's that nobody ever told it there is such a thing as size 40, or whether that box has anything left in it.
Your assistant knows exactly what your catalog says and nothing else. So the real work isn't picking a smarter assistant. It's writing a catalog a machine can sell from.
Bad answers are missing data wearing a costume
There are only a few ways an assistant can fail a customer. It can invent something, which is rare and mostly preventable. It can dodge with a generic line. It can push the person to a link. Those last two are what sellers actually see, and both mean the same thing: the answer wasn't in the catalog, so the assistant reached for the safest sentence it had.
You can test this in about a minute. Take the last question your assistant fumbled and ask yourself: if a new employee had only your product pages in front of them, could they have answered it? If the answer is no, you found your bug. Most of what looks like weak AI is really the questions nobody wrote down, which I've covered in the DM questions that quietly kill sales.
The fields that do the selling
Product data written for a shop window and product data written for a conversation are different animals. A conversation needs facts you can say out loud. For each product, an assistant needs:
- The real name, plus the names customers use. Your listing says “Aria Crossbody 02.” Your DMs say “the small brown bag from the story.” Put both in.
- Every variant, spelled out. Colors, sizes, capacities, scents. Not “multiple colors available.”
- Price, and what the price includes. If there's a discounted price, when it ends. If there's a bundle price, what's in the bundle.
- Stock state per variant. Not per product. “In stock” on a shirt that has no medium left is a lie that costs you a customer.
- Physical facts: measurements, weight, material, what's in the box, how to wash it, how long the battery lasts.
- Who it's for and who it isn't. One line. “Fits up to a 15-inch laptop.” “Too warm for spring.”
- The objection you already know is coming. If half the buyers ask whether the color runs, write the honest answer once.
Look at that list and count how many of those live only in your head, or in a voice note you sent your shop manager six months ago. That gap is your assistant's accuracy ceiling.
Write it like you'd say it, not like a spec sheet
Marketing copy is written to impress. Catalog copy for an assistant is written to be repeated. Short, factual, no adjectives doing the work of numbers. “Ultra-spacious” tells a machine nothing. “Fits a 15-inch laptop, a notebook and a 500ml bottle” gives it a sentence it can hand a customer.
A rule I like: if a question showed up twice in your DMs this month, its answer belongs in the product, not in your memory. Two people asking is a pattern. The third one is coming tonight at 11pm, and you'll be asleep.
The rules that don't sit on any product page
Half of what customers ask isn't about the product at all. It's about the deal around it. This is the part sellers forget entirely, and it's the part that closes orders.
- Shipping: cost, carriers, how fast to the capital versus other cities, cutoff time for same-day dispatch, what happens on holidays.
- Payment: which methods, whether you take partial payment, whether cash on delivery exists and where.
- Returns: the window, who pays return shipping, what condition you accept, and how a customer starts one.
- Sizing help: your own guidance in your own words. “Runs one size small” beats a chart nobody opens.
- Discounts: what's negotiable and what is never negotiable. Write this one carefully, because it's the promise you'll have to honor.
- Hours and handoff: when a human is around, and what the assistant should say when one isn't.
That last one matters more than it looks. An assistant with clear limits sounds confident. An assistant improvising policy sounds like a risk, and sooner or later it promises free next-day shipping to a city you don't ship to.
Stock is where trust dies fastest
A wrong color description annoys someone. Selling something you don't have loses them permanently, and often loudly in your comments.
If your stock changes daily, connect it so the assistant reads the live number instead of a snapshot from Tuesday. If you can't connect it, teach it a smaller, safer job: confirm the customer's interest, collect the size and the name, and say you'll confirm availability within the hour. Slower, honest, still a lead. And when something is gone, the assistant should be allowed to offer the nearest alternative and take a name for the restock, instead of ending the conversation with the word “unfortunately.”
Ten lines of voice beat a hundred pages of rules
Sellers overthink tone and underthink facts, usually in that order. You don't need a brand bible. You need about ten lines: how you greet, whether you use formal or casual address, the two or three phrases you always use, the ones you never use, how you say no, and how you handle someone who's annoyed.
The fastest way to write them is to steal from yourself. Open your DMs, find five replies you were proud of, and paste them in as examples. Your assistant will copy that pattern far better than it copies an adjective like “friendly.” The longer version of that idea is in the piece on raising an assistant instead of building one once.
Test it like a customer, not like the owner
Owners test with easy questions they already know the answer to. Customers don't.
Build a list of 20 real questions pulled straight from your inbox, including the ugly ones: the price haggler, the “is this original?”, the person who sends a photo of a competitor's product, the one asking if it arrives before Thursday. Run all 20. Mark each answer right, vague, or wrong.
Then read only the vague and wrong ones and ask which field was missing. In a fresh account this exercise usually rewrites 10 to 15 catalog entries in one sitting, and the assistant gets visibly better the same afternoon. Keep the list. It's your regression test every time you add products or change a policy.
Twenty minutes, once a week
Catalogs rot. Prices move, a supplier vanishes, you sell three products on a live and forget to write them down. A weekly slot does the job:
- Add anything you sold this week that isn't in the catalog.
- Fix prices and stock states that drifted.
- Take the two most-repeated new questions and turn them into fields.
- Delete discontinued products instead of leaving them out of stock forever.
Twenty minutes. It's the highest-paid twenty minutes in your week, because every fixed field answers the same question for the next thousand customers. Skipping it is how a good assistant slowly becomes the thing you resent, which is the usual road to switching it off.
Start with fifteen products, not four hundred
Nobody finishes a 400-product catalog by hand, so don't try. Pull your DM history and find the products people actually ask about. It's a short list, usually the newest arrivals and the two bestsellers. Write those properly, with every field. Everything else can stay thin until it earns the attention.
A well-written 15-product catalog answers more conversations than 400 half-written ones. That's not a trick, it's just how demand is shaped.
If you'd rather not wire all this together yourself, Vardast connects your Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram and website to one assistant that answers from your product knowledge in your own voice, keeps stock and policy rules in one place, and hands the conversation to you when it hits something it shouldn't decide alone.
Your assistant isn't guessing because it's careless. It's guessing because you left the field empty. Fill it in, and it stops guessing tonight.