What to say when a buyer says they paid

"I have sent it." Three words, a screenshot, and no money in your account. The parcel is packed. The buyer is waiting. Whatever you type next decides whether you keep them.

Start here: assume it's true. Most of the time it is. The money is sitting in a batch, or it went in with a reference you can't read, or it landed in an account you closed in March. Outright lies are the rarest cause on the list, and treating an honest customer like a thief over a KSh 2,400 order costs you the order, the repeat orders, and quite possibly a comment under your next post that costs you three more.

Below is the order of operations and the actual wording. Copy it, change the names, keep it somewhere you can paste from at nine at night.

Don't answer in ninety seconds

The instinct is to reply immediately, and the immediate reply is always the worst one, because you're writing it while annoyed and while you still know the least you will ever know.

Send a holding message instead. It takes ten seconds, it buys you an hour, and it makes you sound like someone who has a process.

Thanks Wanjiru, let me check and come back to you within the hour. Nothing's wrong, transfers sometimes take a while to show on my side.

That's it. Notice what it doesn't do. It doesn't confirm you've received anything. It doesn't accuse. It doesn't promise to ship. It says "I am handling this", which is what the buyer actually wants to hear, and it gives the banking system time to do the thing it was probably about to do anyway.

The order of operations

Work down this list. Stop as soon as you find the answer, because most of them are found in the first three steps.

1. Check your own statement again, filtered by amount rather than by name. Sellers miss their own payments constantly because they're scanning for a name and the bank printed something else.
2. Ask which account they paid into. Before anything else. This is the step everyone skips.
3. Ask which rail they used, and check whether its window has actually passed.
4. Ask for the amount, the last four digits of the sending account, and the time.
5. Search your statement for that amount across the last three days, not just today.
6. Check your other accounts. Old business account, personal account, the till, the account on the invoice template you stopped using.
7. Only then treat it as unpaid, and even then, say so carefully.

Step 2 sits that high for a reason. Roughly once a quarter, a seller who asks it discovers the buyer paid into an account that isn't theirs, and the hour after that answer is the only hour in which the buyer's bank can realistically do anything about it.

Why that happens, and what to do about it

Someone copies your shop. Same photos, same bio, a handle with an extra underscore. They watch the comments under your posts and DM everyone who asks "price?", using your product names and your prices and their own account number. Your buyer paid in good faith. They just didn't pay you.

It's common enough in Instagram and WhatsApp selling that it should be on your checklist rather than in your nightmares. When the account details they read back to you aren't yours:

That account isn't mine, and I think someone's copied my shop. Please call your bank right now and tell them it was a fraudulent transfer, today gives you the best chance of a recall. My real details are [account name] / [number], and I'll never send them from a different account. I'm reporting the fake page now. I'm sorry this happened on my page.

Say it fast and say it warmly. This buyer has lost money and is about to feel humiliated. How you behave in the next ten minutes decides whether they ever buy from anyone on Instagram again, let alone from you. Some sellers ship the order anyway in this situation. That's a generous choice and a defensible one, but make it a decision, not a reflex, and don't make it on a high-value item.

When the timing explains it

Most "I paid" messages arrive inside the window where the money genuinely hasn't landed yet. Knowing your buyer's rail lets you say something specific instead of something defensive.

What they used	What you can say
NEFT in India	It settles in half-hourly batches and can take up to two hours after that. Ask if they can use UPI or IMPS next time
ACH in the US	One to three business days, and weekends don't count
SEPA standard	Next working day. Friday afternoon means Monday
A brand-new payee, UK	The bank may hold the first payment to a new payee for checks
International wire	Two to five working days, and it usually arrives short
M-Pesa, GCash	Seconds. If it hasn't arrived, something else is wrong

The script:

Thanks, that helps. NEFT goes out in batches and the RBI allows up to two hours after settlement for it to land, so 14:02 could easily mean it reaches me around half four. I'll check again at five and message you either way. Your order's packed and ready to go.

You've explained rather than doubted, given a specific time you'll come back, and told them the parcel exists. Almost every one of these is over by the follow-up message.

When it still hasn't arrived

The window's passed. You've checked twice. Now you need facts, and the way you ask for them determines whether you get them.

Still nothing on my side, which usually means the reference didn't come through. Can you send me three things: the exact amount, the last four digits of the account it came from, and roughly what time it went out? With those I can find it in my statement even without a reference.

Three things it gets right. It blames the reference, not the buyer. It asks for details that exist on your side of the transaction, so they're checkable. And it explains why you're asking, which is what stops the request feeling like an interrogation.

Don't ask for a screenshot. If they send one, fine, thank them, and use it only for the amount and the time. A screenshot proves a screen existed and nothing more, and honest buyers send them constantly, so it isn't a signal of anything either way.

If they're on M-Pesa or GCash, ask for the confirmation code from the SMS instead, and check it against your till statement. That code exists on both sides, which makes it worth more than any picture.

When the answer is that they haven't paid

Sometimes the facts don't line up. The amount was never in your statement, the account they name is yours, and the time they give doesn't match anything. Occasionally you'll get a buyer who simply says "I sent it" three times and never produces a single detail.

Say the true thing once, without adjectives:

I've checked my statement for the 3rd and 4th and there's no payment for KSh 2,400 from any account. It's possible something failed at your end without you seeing it. Could you check your own transaction history and confirm it left your account? If it did, your bank can give you a reference number and I'll trace it from there. If it didn't go through, no problem at all, here are the details again and I'll hold the order until Friday.

That message ends an argument rather than starting one. It states what you checked, offers a face-saving explanation, asks for one verifiable thing, and gives them a way out that doesn't require admitting anything. In practice the buyer either produces a bank reference or goes quiet, and both of those are answers.

Then stop. Don't send a fourth message. Don't post about it. Don't block them while an order is open, because a blocked buyer with a grievance goes to your comments, and your comments are worth more than the order.

What never to say

• "You haven't paid." Even if true. Say "I can't find it", which is a statement about your system rather than their character.
• "Are you sure you sent it?" Reads as sarcasm in every language.
• Anything with the word proof in it. Ask for details, not proof.
• "Our system shows no payment." You don't have a system, you have a bank app, and the buyer knows it. Being grand about it makes you sound less trustworthy, not more.
• Silence. The worst option available. A buyer who doesn't hear back for six hours writes the story themselves and you won't like it.

The cost of being right

Run this arithmetic once and it will change how you handle these.

A KSh 2,400 order might carry KSh 900 of margin. One public comment saying "this shop accused me of lying" under a post that reached four thousand people will cost you more than KSh 900. So will half an hour of your evening. So will the repeat customer who quietly stops ordering.

Which means the correct policy on small orders is often to ship and eat it. Not always, and not for anyone who's done it before, but the threshold is lower than pride suggests. Work out the cost of goods on your cheapest item and treat that number as the price of not having the argument.

Above that threshold, hold the parcel and be patient. Nobody has ever regretted waiting two days.

Worked example: Wanjiru, beaded earrings, Nairobi

Wanjiru sells beaded earrings at KSh 2,400 a pair from Nairobi, mostly through Instagram, mostly paid to her M-Pesa till. About forty orders a month, and roughly two "I've paid" messages a month that she can't immediately match.

Her routine now takes about four minutes.

Holding message straight away. Then she checks the till statement by amount rather than by name, because the name on an M-Pesa payment is the registered name on the buyer's line and it's frequently a parent, a spouse or a business. Two of her regulars pay from numbers registered to someone else entirely, which used to confuse her every single time until she wrote their real names next to those numbers in her contacts.

If it isn't there, she asks for the confirmation code. That code either exists in her statement or it doesn't, and the conversation is over in one exchange either way.

The case that taught her the most: a buyer sent KSh 2,400 to a till that wasn't hers. A copied account with her photographs had DMed the buyer within a minute of her commenting "how much?" on a post. Wanjiru found out because she asked which till, not because she suspected anything. The buyer called Safaricom the same afternoon. Wanjiru sent the earrings anyway, wrote a pinned post about the fake account, and got four new customers out of the post. The whole thing cost her about KSh 700 in materials.

One thing she'd tell anyone starting out: the buyer sees a registered business name on the screen before confirming a till payment, so put that exact name in your instructions. "You'll see WANJIRU BEADS LTD before you confirm. If you see anything else, stop." That single line has prevented more losses than any amount of arguing after the fact.

What Sailo can and can't tell you

When a buyer submits a reference against a bank transfer order, the order moves to pending and the reference appears next to it in your admin. That is a record of what the buyer typed. It is not a verification of anything, and it can't be, because Sailo has no connection to your bank and never sees your money on the manual rails.

Only you can move an order to paid. There's no proof upload in the buyer's flow either, deliberately, because an uploaded image would look like evidence while proving nothing. Anything that tells you a transfer arrived without reading your bank account is guessing.

That's the trade you make for a rail that costs nothing and settles directly into your own account. If you'd rather never have this conversation again, cards are the rail where the platform does know, and do you need card payments to sell online works out whether that's worth the subscription at your order volume.

Save the scripts

Put the four messages above into your phone's text replacement or keyboard shortcuts tonight, with your own account details filled in. Name them something you'll remember at 9pm. The whole point is that you don't compose these while irritated.

Then reduce how often you need them: pick a reference format, put it in your payment instructions, and start matching payments daily rather than weekly. The routine is in how to know a bank transfer actually arrived, and it's the difference between two of these a month and two a week. If you're still choosing between rails, how to take payment as a small seller sets out what each one leaves you to chase.