They ask the price by Instagram DM — how to stop replying six hours late

You post a photo of the new product, or today's special, or the renovation you just finished. Twenty minutes later you have eight likes and a direct message: "how much is it?", "do you have it in a medium?", "do you deliver to my area?". You carry on with your day, open Instagram in the evening, and reply six hours later — by which point whoever asked has already decided, usually somewhere else.

It's not that you don't want to answer. It's that Instagram isn't an inbox you check every ten minutes, it's an app you open when you have a spare moment, and the window where someone is genuinely interested is much shorter than that.

What changes: someone answers for you, instantly

With the ChatME assistant connected to your Instagram, the direct messages you receive get answered on their own, instantly, with your business's real information — hours, prices, stock, whatever you've loaded into your dashboard. It's the same assistant and the same knowledge base already running on your web chatbot and your WhatsApp: train it once, and it answers the same way across all three.

You make the connection yourself, from your own dashboard, in a couple of minutes. You need a professional Instagram account — Business or Creator, both free — and the Pro or E-commerce plan (Instagram DMs sits alongside WhatsApp Business on those two plans; see the rest at pricing). If you have a personal account today, switching takes a minute in Instagram's settings and you don't lose a single follower.

There's one requirement almost nobody checks, and it's exactly the one that blocks the connection without any warning: message access for connected apps has to be turned on in Instagram (Settings › Messages and story replies › Message controls). If you connect and the bot doesn't respond to anything, that's the first place to look.

What it answers, and what it doesn't — without dressing it up

Here's the honest part, and Instagram is a very visual network so this isn't an edge case: the assistant reads text messages. If someone sends you a photo, replies to a story, shares a post or sends a voice note, the assistant can't read it — it answers by politely asking "could you type it out?", so nobody is left without a reply, and that conversation sits in your dashboard in case you'd rather pick it up yourself.

It's also not the channel for comments on your posts or stories — you keep handling those from Instagram, same as now. The assistant covers direct messages, which is where the sale actually gets lost when you take hours to reply.

No per-message cost

The channel is included on the Pro and E-commerce plans, with no cost per conversation: your assistant only replies to people who message you, it never starts conversations or sends promotions on its own. And since it replies in each person's language automatically, it keeps working the same way if your post reaches someone who doesn't write in your language.

As the EU AI Act requires, it identifies itself as an automated assistant in its first reply — nothing for you to configure there.

Who this is actually for

• Shops and brands: someone sees your post, asks about size or stock by DM, and you want to answer while they're still interested — not six hours later.
• Restaurants and venues: hours, menu or directions, asked right after someone sees a photo of tonight's dish, in the middle of a dinner rush.
• Appointment-based businesses: treatments, pricing and availability handled by DM without the front desk having to put the phone down every time.

If your Instagram generates more questions than you can handle between posts, this is the channel for you. If almost nobody messages you by DM yet, you're probably better off starting with WhatsApp, which tends to carry most of the conversation volume — there's no single rule here, it depends on where people are already writing to you.

Instagram conversations show up in your dashboard next to your website and WhatsApp conversations, with the same leads and forms working the same way. You can disconnect the account whenever you want, from your dashboard or from Instagram's own settings; your account and your messages stay yours either way.

If you get stuck connecting your account, the step-by-step guide is at connecting Instagram DMs, or write to us directly at info@chatme.es.

*Availability may vary by country.*