The replies stopped coming

Messages go out and nothing comes back. The first assumption is usually technical. The market messaging is broken, or the message did not send, or something got eaten.

Message systems on these markets are simple and they work. Silence is almost always a person not replying.

Confirm the message left, once

Check the sent folder or the thread view. If your message is visible in the conversation, it was delivered to the market and is sitting where the vendor will see it. That is the end of the technical question and it took ten seconds.

Do not send it again to be sure. A repeated message does not increase the chance of a reply and it does change how you look to whoever eventually reads the thread. This is a small version of acting twice.

What silence usually means

• They do not have an answer yet and would rather say nothing than say that.
• They are away, and did not mark the account as away.
• The answer is bad for them and delay is cheaper than admitting it.
• They are overwhelmed and are answering the easy messages first, which yours is not.
• They have stopped operating, which is a separate case.

Four of those five are ordinary human behaviour and none of them get better because you wait longer. That is the useful part.

Silence as a clock

Every protection you have runs on a window. Escrow releases. Dispute windows close. A buyer who spends the window being reasonable arrives at the end of it with the same silence and fewer options than they started with.

So set a limit before the silence starts, not during it. Decide in advance how long you will wait before opening a dispute, and then hold to it even though it will feel premature at the time. It always feels premature. That feeling is exactly what the delay is exploiting.

What follows from getting it right

You act inside the window, which is the only thing on this page with money attached. You also stop generating support tickets about a messaging system that is working, which are tickets that go nowhere and slightly harm your standing.

And you stop escalating in public, which people do when they believe a technical fault is hiding a message. Public accusations about silence age very badly, because silence has a lot of innocent explanations and you will not know which one applied until later, if ever.

The one technical exception

There is a narrow case where the system really is involved, and it is worth knowing so that the rest of this page stays honest. Some markets drop messages containing certain patterns, or hold anything that looks like an address for review. A message that never appears in your own sent view is the one genuine signal that something was refused rather than ignored.

Check the sent view before concluding anything. If the message is there, the technical question is closed. If it is not there, try sending a short plain one with no addresses, no links and no unusual formatting, and see whether that lands.

• Back to the cases the vendor caused
• When the thread went wrong at your end
• The cost of blaming wrong