Message us for the price

The question is always there. The tell is the answer to it.

Under the photograph of a dress, a cake, a sofa, a bag of coffee, somebody asks the price in the first comment.

Sent you a message. Kindly check your inbox. A private answer, posted in public, in front of everyone else who scrolled that far.

The reasoning is usually that a price should be a conversation, or that the competition is watching, or that a message gives the seller a chance to sell. What the other twenty readers of that thread learn is that the number is not fixed.

A price that has to be asked for in private reads here as an opening position, in a market where a great many transactions genuinely have one. So the customer who was ready to pay does not pay. She waits, or she asks what can be done for her, and she is right to, because the seller has just told her there is room.

From the platform side, with a great many small accounts in view at once, the ones that grow answer in public with the number. The thread fills with answers. Somebody arriving on a Friday evening, four days after the post, reads the price without asking, and nobody had to be holding the phone.

Hiding a price does not make a thing look expensive. It makes the seller look as though they will come down, and the comment thread is not a leak. It is the counter.