Every marketplace measures how fast you answer customers, and none of them measure it the way you experience it.

You experience a queue: messages arrive, you answer them in some order, some wait. The marketplace experiences a set of stopwatches, one per message, started the moment the customer pressed send, running through the night, the weekend and the public holiday, and stopped only by your reply. When a stopwatch passes the limit, that message counts against you, forever, whatever you do afterwards.

The limit that matters most is 24 hours.

How the clocks work

Amazon tracks the share of buyer messages you respond to within 24 hours, weekends and holidays included. Messages that genuinely need no reply can be marked as such, and that stops the clock; ignoring them does not. The figure feeds your account health, and consistently poor numbers get you warnings and, eventually, worse.

Mirakl marketplaces (Leroy Merlin, Carrefour, MediaMarkt, Worten and the rest) each set their own targets, but the mechanism is the same: the operator computes your response time from the thread timestamps and shows it to you as a seller quality figure, next to your late-shipment and refund rates. Some operators go further and mark threads as awaiting your reply, with a deadline, and nudge you in the thread when it passes. Fall below the target long enough and the operator’s seller-performance process starts.

Two things follow. First, your opening hours are irrelevant to the clock. Second, the number is not about how fast you are on average. It is about how many stopwatches you let expire.

Why “newest first” loses

Open a normal inbox and it shows newest first. That ordering is exactly wrong for a stopwatch problem. The message that arrived a minute ago has 23 hours and 59 minutes. The one from Saturday at 21:40 has, on Sunday morning, about twelve hours left, and on Monday morning it has expired.

The only ordering that keeps stopwatches from expiring is least time remaining first. It is not the same as oldest first, either, because different marketplaces have different limits, and a thread the operator has flagged is more urgent than an older one nobody has touched.

If your tool cannot sort by time remaining, at minimum sort by oldest unanswered, and know which channel each thread came from.

The weekend, honestly

Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. A message at 18:00 on Friday expires at 18:00 on Saturday. If nobody looks at the queue until Monday 09:00, every message from Friday afternoon to Sunday 09:00 has expired. For a seller with a few dozen messages a day, that is most of a week’s misses in one go.

You do not have to work weekends to fix this. You have to look on weekends, briefly, in the right order. A ten-minute pass on Saturday evening and another on Sunday evening, sorted by time remaining, answers the handful that would otherwise expire. Everything else waits for Monday.

Three tactics make those ten minutes shorter:

Replies that are facts, not compositions. “Your parcel is with GLS, last scanned Friday 16:10 at the Madrid hub, expected Monday. Tracking: …” takes twenty seconds when the tracking is in front of you and four minutes when it is not. Get the facts next to the thread.
Shorthand in, full reply out. Type the content; let the tool add the greeting, the sentences and the sign-off, and translate it. Read it, send.
Rules for the noise. If half the weekend queue is marketplace notifications and newsletters, the ten minutes become thirty. Rules should have removed those before you looked.

What “no response needed” is for

Not every message needs a reply. Amazon lets you mark a message as not needing one, and that stops the clock without a reply. Mirakl threads that are purely informational from the operator often do not count either.

Use this honestly. A customer’s “thank you!” needs no reply. A customer’s “still waiting, any update?” does, even if the update is “nothing new from the carrier since Friday”. Marking a real question as no-response-needed to save a stopwatch is the kind of thing operators notice.

Auto-replies do not help

The tempting fix is an automatic “we have received your message and will reply within 24 hours”. On your own shop that is harmless. On a marketplace it is worse than nothing: it does not count as a response on Amazon’s side in any way you should rely on, it fills the thread with noise the operator reads, and it tells the customer you have a queue. The stopwatch stops when a person answers the question. There is no shortcut through it.

A weekly number to watch

Do not watch response time. Watch how many stopwatches expired this week, per marketplace. The target is zero, and it is reachable. When it is not zero, the cause is almost always one of three things: a weekend nobody looked, a thread that was waiting on someone else (the warehouse, the carrier) and got forgotten, or a message that was read and not answered because the answer needed a fact nobody had.

Each of those has a boring fix: the two ten-minute passes, a “waiting on” state that resurfaces the thread, and facts next to the thread. Do those three and the number stays at zero, and you can stop thinking about it, which is the only response-time metric that matters to a small team.