Support teams write one reply and send it wherever the customer is. The customer, though, reads it in a specific place, and each place has its own idea of what a message is. Asterisks that mean bold in WhatsApp arrive as literal asterisks in a marketplace thread. A link that is helpful in an email is a policy violation on Amazon. An emoji that is friendly on WhatsApp reads as unprofessional in a French marketplace’s operator console.

If your tool does not know where a reply is going, you will find out from the customer. Here is what each channel does with your text.

Email (your own mailbox, Gmail, Outlook)

Email renders HTML. Bold, lists, links and a proper signature with your logo all work. Line breaks need to be real paragraphs or <br>, or they collapse. Images in the body may be blocked until the reader allows them, so anything important should be text.

The trap: an HTML signature you add to every email will also be added to emails that go through a marketplace, if the tool cannot tell the difference. See Amazon below.

WhatsApp has its own lightweight formatting: *bold*, _italic_, ~strikethrough~, and triple backticks for monospace. Emoji are native and expected. Links become tappable previews. Long messages are fine, but the customer is on a phone, so short paragraphs.

Attachments are files or voice notes, and a customer’s voice note arrives as audio you have to listen to; a tool should at least mark it as such rather than showing an empty message.

Mirakl marketplaces (Leroy Merlin, Carrefour, MediaMarkt, Worten…)

The marketplace message thread is plain text. Formatting markers are shown literally, so *bold* arrives as *bold*. HTML is stripped or escaped. Links are usually allowed but shown as bare text, and some operators frown on links to your own shop.

Emoji technically go through, but remember who reads the thread: the customer, and the operator’s support staff, who see every message and judge your professionalism by it. Plain, polite, complete beats friendly.

The other thing specific to Mirakl: you choose the recipient. A reply can go to the customer, to the operator, or to both. The same text, sent to the wrong party, is a missed reply. The reply box needs a “to” for this channel and no other.

Amazon Buyer-Seller Messaging

Amazon replies are email underneath, but Amazon’s content rules apply, and they are enforced:

No links to external websites, including your own.
No marketing, promotions or requests to leave a review in ways Amazon prohibits.
No tracking pixels, no images that phone home.
Order-related, factual content only.

This is where an automatically appended HTML signature with a logo hosted on your domain and a link to your site turns a routine “your parcel is with GLS” into a policy flag. Amazon replies should be plain text: greeting, facts, sign-off with your shop name, nothing else.

One dialect in, the right rendering out

The workable approach for a team that writes across all of these is to pick one way of writing and let the tool render it per channel. We use WhatsApp’s markers as the writing dialect, because they are the simplest and the largest share of agents already know them:

You write	Email	WhatsApp	Mirakl	Amazon
`bold`	bold	bold (native)	bold (markers removed)	bold (markers removed)
line break	paragraph / `<br>`	line break	line break	line break
a URL	clickable link	tappable preview	bare text	removed or the reply is refused
emoji	kept	kept	kept, or stripped by policy	stripped
HTML signature	appended	not applicable	never	never

The point is not the specific choices in the table but that they are choices, made once, and applied by the tool rather than remembered by the agent at 18:50 on a Friday.

Two house rules worth setting

Emoji policy per workspace. Decide whether emoji go out at all. A single switch that strips them from outbound text everywhere is easier than a per-channel rule, and for a team selling through operators who read the threads, “off” is the safe default.

Signature per channel. A plain text signature for marketplaces and chats (“Best regards, Acme Outdoor”), and, if you want one, an HTML signature that is only attached to email that goes straight to the customer. Never to Amazon.

Attachments

Every channel takes attachments and every channel has limits. Marketplaces cap file sizes and sometimes types. Amazon strips some types. WhatsApp compresses images. If a customer needs a document (an invoice, a return label), PDF is the format that survives everywhere; a link to a document is the one that survives nowhere reliable.

The test

Take your standard “your parcel is on its way” reply and send it to yourself through each channel you sell on. Read it on a phone. If any of them shows asterisks, a stripped link, a missing signature or a warning, the tool is doing the rendering wrong, or not at all. Fix that once, and stop thinking about it.