Nexus: what to write The wording of the messages a buyer has to compose

A reference site. Not the market, not connected to it, and it cannot pass a message to anybody.

Home Before you order While you wait When it goes wrong In a dispute Afterwards Every message Addresses The skeleton What to leave out Timing Questions
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Nexus market mirrors

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Published as supplied. Nothing here is monitored, so this is not a claim that any of them opens right now.

What to leave out

Most weak messages on this site are not missing anything. They contain too much. This page collects the material that keeps appearing in them and says what each piece costs.

The habit underneath it

Extra detail goes in for one of two reasons. Either it feels like proof that you are honest, or it feels like it will head off a question. Both instincts are wrong in this setting and they are wrong in the same way. Detail does not make a message more credible. It makes it longer, and length is read as uncertainty.

The second cost is separate and worse. Every detail is a fact about you that now exists in somebody else's records, and it stays there long after it has stopped being useful to you.

The list

What goes inWhy it goes inWhat it costs
Your reasons for orderingFeels like honestyNobody asked, and it is now written down
Where you live, even roughlyFeels like context for a shipping questionNarrows you, permanently, in a thread you cannot edit
What else you have orderedFeels like establishing you are experiencedLinks two things that were separate
Your scheduleFeels like it explains the urgencySays when you are and are not there
How much you can affordFeels like it explains the requestSets the ceiling of every offer you get afterwards
Threats about feedbackFeels like leverageConverts a solvable problem into a fight, and reads badly to a third party
Apologies for writingFeels politeSignals the message can be deprioritised
Speculation about causesFeels helpfulGives the other side a version of events to agree with instead of yours

Two tests that catch most of it

Neither takes long, and between them they cut most messages by a third.

  1. The stranger test. Read each sentence as though it were being read by somebody who is neither you nor the vendor, six months from now, deciding something about you. Anything that only makes sense with your context is doing nothing for you.
  2. The deletion test. Take out the sentence. Does the message still get the same answer. If it does, it was never doing work, and every sentence that does no work is pure cost.

The thing not to cut

The one thing people cut that they should keep is dates. A message with no dates in it is a feeling. A message with dates in it is a record, and it is the only kind that survives being read by somebody else later.

Where this bites hardest

In public, and in disputes. Asking a question in public is the sharpest case, because the details that make a question easy to answer are exactly the details that identify the person asking. Opening a dispute is the other, because a long statement invites a reader to find the weakest part and treat it as the whole.

The two refusal pages are the mirror image. Refusing to pay outside escrow works precisely because it leaves out the reason, and adding one is what turns a closed door into a negotiation.

Questions people ask about this

Is being brief the same as being rude?

No, and the confusion costs people a lot. A short factual message with a clear question reads as competent. It is padding that reads as either anxious or difficult.

What if leaving something out makes the reply wrong?

Then it belonged in. The test is whether the detail changes the answer, not whether it feels relevant. Almost nothing on the list above changes any answer.

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