Using Telegram to take orders for a small business

You have 900 people in a Telegram group, half of them ask prices in the group, and the other half message you at midnight with a screenshot and the word "this".

Somewhere in that mess are about forty real orders a month and you are tracking them in your head.

Telegram works as an order desk for one reason that most guides skip: a link can arrive with the order already written. t.me/yourshop?text=... opens a chat with you and the message is sitting in the compose box, item, options, address, total, waiting for the buyer to hit send. Instagram cannot do that at all. WhatsApp can. Telegram can, and Telegram also gives you a public username so buyers never see your phone number, groups that hold up to 200,000 people, and channels with no subscriber ceiling at all. A Sailo shop is $0 on the free plan for 10 products, and Telegram is one of its order rails, so the prefilled message is built rather than pasted.

Check the link behaviour on your own phone before you build on it. Send yourself one. Clients differ, and desktop, iOS and Android have not always agreed.

Why a prefilled message is worth more than it sounds

Consider what happens without it, which is what happens on Instagram.

A buyer taps "message us". A blank chat opens. They now have to remember which of your four products they wanted, whether they said the large or the medium, and what colour. Most of them type "hi is this available" because that is the least effort available to them, and now you are eleven messages away from an order with no address, no size and no total.

With a prefilled message, the buyer taps once and sends this:

Hi Preeti Notes! I'd like to order:

Biology revision notes (printed, spiral bound)
Quantity: 1
Delivery: Standard India post
Total: ₹899
Name: Arjun M
Deliver to: Flat 3B, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad 500034

You have the item, the option, the quantity, the address and the total in the first message, before you have said a word. That is not a small convenience. It is the difference between forty orders a month costing you four hours and forty orders a month costing you fourteen.

Put the important lines at the top of that message. Buyers see the first few lines of a prefilled compose box and press send without scrolling, so anything you bury at the bottom, a reference number, a note field, a delivery instruction, may as well not exist. Item, quantity, total, address. In that order.

Set up: a username, not a phone number

The first practical advantage over WhatsApp is that Telegram lets you publish a username and keep your number private.

Claim @yourshopname in settings. It is free and it is the string that appears in every link, every group, every forwarded message. Make it the same word as your shop link and your other handles. If your shop is sailo.store/preetinotes, your Telegram should be @preetinotes and not @preeti_notes_official_1.

This matters more than it sounds for anyone selling from a personal phone. A WhatsApp business line means handing your number to every stranger who buys a ₹299 PDF. On Telegram they get a username, they can message you, and they never see the number. For a woman selling alone from a flat, that is not a feature comparison. It is a safety decision.

Telegram has also put a set of business tools behind its Premium subscription over the last couple of years: greeting messages, away messages, saved quick replies, opening hours on your profile. What is included has moved around, so open your own settings and see what is there rather than trusting a list in an article. The quick replies are the one worth paying for if you type the same four answers every day.

Channel, group, or just your chat

Three surfaces, three jobs. Sellers muddle them and then wonder why the group is unreadable.

Surface	What it is for	What goes wrong
Channel	You broadcast, nobody replies in-line	Sellers post nothing but product photos and lose subscribers
Group	Buyers talk to each other and to you	Order questions drown the actual conversation
Direct chat	One order, one thread	You lose track of who paid

The arrangement that holds up: a channel for drops, restocks and prices, with a linked discussion group if you want comments. Orders never happen in the channel. Every post ends with the same line and the same link, pointing at the shop page, and the shop page hands the buyer back into a direct chat with the order already typed.

A group is worth running only if the people in it want to talk to each other. A group of 900 people who all want to talk to you is not a community, it is an inbox with a worse interface, and every price question in it is a price question forty other people now feel entitled to ask.

Keeping track when forty threads are open

This is the part nobody writes about and it is where Telegram sellers actually lose money.

Telegram gives you chat folders. Use three, and no more:

• Waiting on payment. Every buyer who has sent an order and not yet sent proof.
• To send. Paid, not yet packed or delivered.
• Done. Everything else, out of sight.

Move a chat between folders at the moment the thing happens, not in a batch that evening. A chat you meant to move is a chat you will forget, and the failure mode is not that you lose the order. It is that you send a ₹899 parcel to someone who never paid, and you only find out three weeks later when you reconcile.

Pin the five chats with money outstanding. Unpin them the moment it lands.

The other habit worth building: forward the order message to your own Saved Messages the moment it arrives, with the date typed underneath. Telegram's search across Saved Messages is fast and it survives the buyer deleting the chat, which they do more often than you would expect.

Getting paid, and the part Telegram will not do

Telegram moves the conversation. It does not move the money, and no amount of setup changes that.

In India that usually means UPI. The buyer sends the order, you send your UPI ID or a QR, they pay, they screenshot, you confirm. In Nigeria it is a bank transfer. In the Philippines it is often GCash or cash on delivery. None of those are Telegram features and none of them are Sailo features either, which we will come back to.

Two rules that stop most of the disputes:

1. Ask for a reference, not a screenshot. A screenshot proves someone pressed a button. A UPI reference number or a bank reference is a thing you can look up on your own statement. Screenshots get faked, and they get reused across sellers by the same three people.
2. Confirm from your own account, never from their proof. Open your banking app. Look. Then mark it paid. The full argument, including what to say when someone insists they have paid and they have not, is in how to know a bank transfer actually arrived.

The seller who confirms from a screenshot is not saving five minutes. They are borrowing five minutes at a rate they will find out later.

Digital goods on Telegram, and the piracy you are signing up for

Telegram is excellent at moving files. Large ones, up to a couple of gigabytes per file on a normal account and more with Premium. That makes it the default place people sell PDFs, sample packs, presets, study notes and course recordings across India, Nigeria and Indonesia.

It is also the single easiest place on the internet to forward a paid file to 4,000 strangers, and it will happen to you.

You cannot stop it. You can make it slower and less appealing: watermark each copy with the buyer's name, deliver from a page with a download limit and an expiry rather than as a chat attachment, and put the file in a shop rather than in a message. Sailo's digital products unlock on payment confirmation and support download limits and expiry dates, which shifts the leak from "one forward" to "someone deliberately re-uploading". What is worth doing and what is a waste of your evening is set out in stopping people sharing your paid files.

Preeti in Hyderabad, ₹299 and ₹899

Preeti sells handwritten biology revision notes for NEET students. A PDF set at ₹299 and a printed spiral-bound version at ₹899. Her audience is a Telegram channel of about 6,400 students that grew off two years of posting free diagrams.

Her first year was a mess. She posted "DM for the notes" and got somewhere between sixty and a hundred messages a week, most of which were "price?", "is it updated for this year?" and "can you send sample". She was answering each one by hand from her phone between tuition classes, and she reckons she lost a third of the people who asked simply by replying eleven hours later.

What changed:

1. She built a shop page with four products on it, prices visible, and one line about what edition the notes are.
2. Every channel post ended with the same sentence and the same link. Same wording every time, so regulars stopped reading it and new people always saw it.
3. Telegram became an order rail on that page, so buyers arrived in her chat with the item, the quantity, the total and, for printed orders, the address already written.
4. Her UPI ID went into the payment instructions on the page, so most people had already paid before they messaged.
5. Three folders. Waiting on payment, to send, done.

The message volume did not drop much. The nature of it did. Instead of a hundred "price?" messages she gets forty prefilled orders and about twenty real questions, and she answers the real ones properly because there are twenty of them instead of a hundred.

The printed set is the one that changed the business. It was ₹899 against a ₹299 PDF and she assumed nobody would take it. It is now about a third of her orders and more than half her revenue, and the only reason she found out is that putting both on a page let people choose without asking her.

Where Telegram is the wrong tool

Two situations, said plainly.

Your buyers are not on it. In the US, the UK and most of the Gulf, a shopper who has never used Telegram is not going to install it to buy a £14 candle. If your audience lives on Instagram, take orders on Instagram, badly prefilled and all, and read turning Instagram DMs into orders instead. Asking a buyer to install an app is a bigger ask than any checkout friction you are trying to avoid.

You are selling one thing to strangers who found you today. Telegram rewards an existing audience. A cold visitor who has never heard of you is better served by a page with a price and a card button than by a chat with a stranger.

If you are still deciding where the time goes at all, which platform should you actually sell on works through it without pretending every platform suits every seller.

What this costs, and what Sailo cannot do for you

Sailo's free plan is $0, holds 10 products, and takes no commission on Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram, email, phone, bank transfer or cash-on-delivery orders. The money never passes through Sailo on those rails, so there is nothing to take a cut of.

Cards are the exception. They need a Stripe account Stripe has cleared for charges, and Sailo takes 1–3% of the goods on each card order, after discounts, excluding delivery and tax. On Preeti's ₹899 set that is about four and a half rupees to Sailo, plus Stripe's own fee.

Now the part that matters for her and for a lot of readers. There is no UPI rail. Sailo does not integrate UPI, or M-Pesa, or GCash. What Preeti does is put her UPI ID and a QR into the bank transfer instructions field, which the buyer sees at checkout, and they pay exactly the way they always have. Sailo records the order, the options and the address. It cannot tell her the money arrived, and it never will. Only her bank can. She checks and marks it paid herself, every evening, and that is a real cost in minutes that no article should pretend away.

Do this today

1. Claim a username that matches your shop name, and stop giving out your phone number.
2. Send yourself a prefilled t.me link and check it opens with the text in the box on your actual phone.
3. Put the item, quantity, total and address at the top of that message. Everything else below.
4. Make three folders and move one chat into each right now, so the habit exists before the next rush.
5. Write the one line that goes at the end of every channel post, and never change the wording again.

If you already run orders on WhatsApp and are wondering whether to move, do not. Run both rails on the same page and let buyers pick. The WhatsApp side of that is covered in how to take orders on WhatsApp, and the setup is almost identical, which is the point.