Most sellers here are one person. They are not a support desk, and silence for a few hours usually means they are packing, filming or asleep rather than ignoring you.
But there are clocks, and knowing them tells you when waiting stops being reasonable.
How long is reasonable
A working day, for an ordinary question. Metzee measures stores on Replies within 24 hours for buyer enquiries, which is a fair expectation and the standard they are held to.
48 hours, on a return. That is the hard one: once you have opened a return, the seller has 48 hours to answer before you can ask Metzee to step in. You do not have to keep waiting past that.
Immediately, during a live show. A seller in a show is at their phone. A question in the chat that goes unanswered while they answer others is information rather than an accident. The seller is holding it up and I still cannot see it
What to try, in order
1. Message from the order, not the show chat. A show chat scrolls away; an order message does not.
2. Make it answerable in one line. "Has this been posted?" gets a reply. Three paragraphs of context does not.
3. Wait a working day. Genuinely — most replies arrive.
4. Check whether they are away. A store on vacation mode or with holidays set is not ignoring you.
The point at which you stop waiting
Raise it from the order. Not as a punishment — as the mechanism. A dispute is decided within 48 hours of being opened, and it does not depend on the seller engaging.
The cases to raise rather than keep messaging:
- Past the dispatch window with no tracking and no reply. Courier orders are due 24 or 48 hours after payment depending on the store. When will my order be sent?
- A return opened more than 48 hours ago with no answer.
- Tracking says delivered and it is not with you. Time-sensitive; do not wait on a reply for this. Tracking says delivered but nothing came
What does not help
Messaging five times. It does not speed anything up and it reads badly if the record is later read by somebody deciding a dispute.
Posting in their next show chat. Tempting, and it puts a seller on the defensive in front of their room. Use the order.
Waiting a month out of politeness. Courier records age, and a complaint raised late is decided on thinner evidence.
If they reply but will not resolve it
That is a disagreement rather than silence, and the route is the same: state your case on the order with evidence, propose an outcome, and let it be decided. How to raise a problem
The one thing worth remembering
Your money is still inside the system. An unresponsive seller is frustrating, not dangerous — the order holds the payment, and a dispute can return it without their cooperation. How buyer protection works
More: how to escalate a complaint, how to find a seller you trust, how to raise a problem.