What to do when you cannot fulfil an order

You open the box and there are two left, not five. Three people have paid. One of them ordered nine days ago for a birthday on Saturday, and it's Wednesday.

Tell them today. One message, sent the moment you know, that says what happened, what it means for their order, and what you're going to do unless they say otherwise. A £42 jumper that arrives eleven days late after a warning on day two is an inconvenience. The same jumper, same delay, with silence in between, is a refund request, a bad review and an hour of your Sunday.

The gap between those two outcomes is not the stock. It's the three days you spent hoping the supplier would come through.

Send it the day you know, not the day it becomes obvious

Sellers delay this message for a reason that feels sensible at the time. You're waiting to see if the problem solves itself. The supplier might dispatch tomorrow. The courier might find it. The dye lot might match after all.

Sometimes it does solve itself, and you saved yourself an awkward message. The rest of the time, you've spent the customer's goodwill on a bet, and you've spent it without telling them you were gambling.

Send early and the customer is choosing between options while there's still time for any of them to work. Send late and there's only one option left, which is a refund, and now the decision has been made for them by your silence.

The customers who forgive you are almost always the ones you told before they had to ask. Once they've asked, you're not apologising for the stock any more. You're apologising for the silence, and that's a longer, more expensive conversation with a worse ending.

There is no version of this that gets better with time. There is only a version that gets more expensive.

The message, and the four parts it needs

Every good version of this message does the same four things, in this order.

1. What's happened, in one sentence, with no drama and no excuse-shaped words.
2. What it means for their order specifically. Their item, their date, not a general statement about your supply chain.
3. Options, with one already picked as the default. This is the part almost everyone skips.
4. What you've already done about it, so they can see you moved before you messaged.

Here's the whole thing for an out-of-stock item:

Hi Sarah, bad news on your order and I'd rather tell you now than let it sit. The navy jumper in medium sold out between your order landing and me packing it. My fault, not yours.

Two options. The next batch is with me on the 19th and I'd post it that day, so you'd have it around the 21st. Or I refund you in full today and you've lost nothing but the wait.

Unless you tell me otherwise by tomorrow evening, I'll refund you, because I don't want to hold your £42 for two weeks on a maybe.

I've also taken it off the shop so nobody else can order it in the meantime.

That's under 120 words and it does all four jobs. The refund as the default is what makes it credible. Anybody can offer a choice. Offering the choice that costs you money as the one that happens if they do nothing is what tells a stranger you're not trying to keep their money in your account.

Four versions to copy

It's going to be late

Hi Ade, your order's going to be about a week later than I said. My supplier's shipment cleared late and I've got a date of the 22nd for the fabric, which means I'd post yours on the 24th.

If that's too late, say the word and I'll refund you today, no hard feelings. If you can wait, I'll put a second pair of socks in the box for the trouble.

Either way I'll message you on the 22nd with a yes or a no, not silence.

The last line is the one that matters. A promised update on a named date turns a wait into a plan, and it stops the buyer messaging you every second day to check.

It's a partial order

Hi Kwame, three of your four items are packed and ready. The fourth, the green mug, cracked in the kiln this morning.

I'm going to post the three today so you're not waiting on everything, and refund you £14 for the mug now. If you'd rather I held the whole order until the next firing on the 30th, tell me in the next hour and I'll do that instead.

Ship what you can, refund the rest, decide it yourself, offer the alternative. Holding three good items hostage to a fourth broken one is the most common unforced error here.

You can't do it at all

Hi Priya, I have to give your order back. The pattern you ordered is one I bought in as a one-off and I can't get the yarn again, and rather than send you something that isn't what you paid for, I'd rather refund you.

Money's gone back today, same account it came from, so it should be with you by Friday.

If it helps, the closest thing I make is the cable version, same weight, £38. No pressure at all, and no hard feelings if you'd rather go elsewhere.

Refund first, then offer the alternative. In that order. An alternative offered before the refund reads as an upsell, and an upsell on the back of your own mistake is how a mildly disappointed customer becomes an annoyed one.

The order you should never have taken

Sometimes you can't fulfil because you agreed to something you couldn't do. Say that plainly.

Hi Tom, I've got to be straight with you. I said yes to the 40-piece order and I've now made eleven and I'm not going to finish by the 12th without rushing them, and rushed ones are bad ones.

Here's what I can do: 20 pieces by the 12th, properly made, and I refund half today. Or I refund the whole thing now and you've got two weeks to find someone else, which is honestly the safer option for you.

That last clause costs you the sale. It's also the sentence that gets you the next one, and there is no substitute for it.

Always name a default

The reason to pick a default is not politeness. It's that an undecided customer is a customer who does nothing, and a customer doing nothing means the problem sits open for another four days while you both wait for each other.

Choose the default that costs you rather than them. Refund by default. Ship the partial by default. Then the worst case is that you were slightly too generous, which is a cheap kind of wrong to be.

And attach a deadline to it, a short one. "Unless you tell me by tomorrow evening" is not pressure. It's the thing that closes the loop.

Refund before they ask, and refund on the same rail

Speed of refund is doing more work for your reputation than any wording in this article.

On card, refund it in your own Stripe account and tell them the date it'll show. Card refunds take a few days to appear on the buyer's statement, and a buyer who doesn't know that will message you twice in the meantime, so say it in advance.

On bank transfer, send it back to the account it came from, manually, and screenshot it. Never to a different account, whatever the reason given. That request is a scam pattern that arrives dressed as a house move or a closed account.

On cash on delivery, if the parcel hasn't gone, there's nothing to refund. If it has, you'll need their details for a transfer, and you should ask for them in the same thread as the original order rather than in a new conversation.

The full mechanics, including what to do when the buyer wants the money somewhere else, are in refunding on a manual payment rail. What your published policy should say about all of this, before any of it happens, is in writing a refund policy people trust.

One thing worth checking rather than guessing: in most countries, a seller who can't supply what was paid for owes the money back, and there are rules about how quickly. That's a rule where you live, not a rule you get to write, so look up your own country's consumer rules on non-delivery before you invent a timescale in your policy.

Three things not to say

"Due to unprecedented demand." Nobody believes it, and it converts your supply problem into a boast. If the honest version is "I sold more than I could make", say that. It's more flattering anyway, and it's true.

Blame with no plan. "The courier has lost it" is a fact about your day and a nothing about theirs. "The courier has lost it, I've opened a claim, and I'm sending you a replacement on Thursday whatever they say" is an answer.

Silence with a vague promise. "I'll update you soon" with no date is worse than no message, because it resets the buyer's patience without giving them anything to hold you to.

What to offer instead of money, and when not to

Substitutions and sweeteners work, in a specific order. Money back is always on the table first. Then, if they'd rather wait, something small on top.

Reasonable: free delivery on the delayed order, a small extra item, a discount on the next one, an upgrade to the better size at the same price.

Not reasonable: a store credit instead of a refund when they'd rather have the money. A 10% code as compensation for a failed birthday present. A substitute in a different colour sent without asking, which is how you turn one problem into a return.

The rough test: if the sweetener only has value when they buy from you again, it isn't compensation, it's marketing. Give it as well as the refund, not instead of it.

When it's twelve customers, not one

A batch failure, a fire, a supplier that vanished, a holiday you have to cancel. Now you're sending the same bad news twelve times.

Send twelve separate messages. Not a broadcast, not a story post, not a group. A broadcast tells the customer they're part of an incident. An individual message tells them you know which order is theirs.

Order the messages by delivery date, soonest first. The person expecting it Thursday needs to know before the person expecting it in three weeks, and if you work alphabetically you'll get that backwards.

Write the base message once, then change one specific detail in each: their item, their date, their amount. Ninety seconds each. Twenty minutes for the lot, and it's the highest-return twenty minutes in the whole mess.

Worked example: Ellie, knitwear, Leeds

Ellie hand-knits jumpers and hats from a spare room in Leeds. A jumper is £42, a hat £18, and she takes about 25 orders a month through Instagram and a shop link, mostly paid by bank transfer with a few on card.

Last November her yarn supplier had a shipment stuck and she was 14 jumpers short with Christmas coming. She waited nine days before telling anyone, because each morning the supplier said "this week".

By the time she messaged, four customers had already messaged her first. Those four were the only four who asked for refunds. Every single customer she reached before they asked chose to wait.

That's a small sample and she knows it. She also knows the pattern held again in March with a smaller problem, and it matches what she'd have guessed if she'd thought about it for two minutes: the refund isn't triggered by the delay, it's triggered by the customer having to chase.

What she does now is a Sunday-night stock check that takes about ten minutes, counting what's physically in the room against what's live in the shop. Twice it's caught an item she'd have oversold by the following Wednesday.

Her cost of doing this: she now marks things as unavailable earlier than she needs to, and she reckons she loses a couple of sales a month to items she could probably have made in time. That's a real cost and she takes it, because a sale she didn't get costs £42 once, and a sale she can't deliver costs £42, the postage, the apology and, in one case, a review that sat on her page for a year.

What Sailo does here, and what it doesn't

The useful part is that the order arrived written down. Item, options, address, total, in one place, which is what lets you send an accurate message in ninety seconds rather than scrolling back through a chat trying to remember whether she said medium or large.

The limits are worth being blunt about. On bank transfer and cash on delivery, Sailo never touches the money, so the refund is you, in your banking app, typing an account number by hand. Sailo can't send it and can't confirm the original payment arrived either. Only your bank can do that. On card, the charge landed in your own Stripe account, so the refund happens there, in Stripe, not in Sailo. And there's no native app, so nothing here is going to push a notification at you when the supplier email lands at 7am.

None of that is a reason to avoid the message. It's a reason to build the ten-minute stock check, because the tooling isn't going to catch it for you.

The next thing to do

Go and look at what's live in your shop right now against what you can physically make or post this week. If anything is listed that you couldn't dispatch in your stated time, take it down or change the date on it before you close the laptop.

Then write the out-of-stock message above into your saved replies with your name and your currency in it, so the next one takes two minutes instead of three days.

The message that comes after this one, once the failure has already happened and the customer is upset rather than merely informed, is a different piece of writing: how to apologise and keep the customer. And the way to have fewer of these at all is upstream, in what you promise before anyone pays, which is building trust before money moves.