How do you answer Chinese enquiries without speaking Chinese?

Your Chinese page starts working, and a message arrives that you can’t read. The risk isn’t that you’ll miss a word. It’s that you’ll promise something you can’t check.

This guide covers who replies, on which channel, and what to do before you press send. It’s part of our guide on how to find Chinese customers.

Can you really handle this without Chinese?

Yes for simple exchanges, and no for anything that commits you. The dividing line is the cost of a mistake, not the difficulty of the sentence.

This table is our judgment. We found no study that sets these levels.

Message	Who can handle it	Check before sending
Acknowledgment	You, with a reviewed template	Once, when you write the template
Product facts already on your site	You, with a translation tool	Names and numbers
Quote, delivery date, guarantee	You, then a native reader	Every line
Complaint or refund	A Chinese speaker	Every line, tone included
Contract	Qualified translator and lawyer	Every line

The tool can draft all of these. What changes is who reads the result before it goes out. Our guide to machine translation has the evidence on error rates.

Who should answer your Chinese enquiries?

Start with one named owner and a native reader on call. One person keeps track of every thread, even if others draft the Chinese.

Option	Fits when	Weak spot
You, a tool and reviewed templates	Few enquiries, simple offer	Nobody catches a wrong nuance
Freelance reviewer on call	Occasional quotes or complex replies	Not immediate, and needs privacy terms
Bilingual hire	Steady flow from China	Cost, and cover during absences
Support vendor	Volume, or wider hours	Hard questions still return to you

Vendors don’t remove your role. AppInChina’s page, last updated in 2019, says its representatives handle first-level issues and pass the rest to the client’s team.⁴

Their hours vary too. Nanjing Marketing Group lists human support from 9:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday, with AI cover around the clock.⁵ AppInChina doesn’t state its own hours. Its page says you need 24-hour support, with peaks in Beijing daytime and evening.⁴

We found no public price we’d trust, and no reliable volume at which hiring beats outsourcing. Ask for written quotes based on your real message count.

Which channels should you reply on?

Reply where the buyer wrote first, as long as that channel works in China. Then make sure the thread doesn’t depend on one staff member’s phone.

WeChat is the default recommendation in vendor guides. CNNIC counted 1.094 billion instant messaging users in China at the end of 2025, a figure for all messaging apps, not WeChat alone.¹

Email is less settled. A 2018 article from a business network, posted by Crayfish.io, describes it in China as mainly for first contact and documents.³ Nanjing Marketing Group says email and phone matter only for very large brands or niches.²

Neither gives data, and neither is specific to your sector. If a buyer emails you, email is the right channel.

Channel	What’s on record	How to use it
Website form	reCAPTCHA doesn’t work reliably in China, says a vendor, and forms may not submit 28	Test your form and captcha first
Email	QQ’s help center lists 550 frequency-limit responses, according to Suped 8	Save bounce messages, and confirm key mail another way
Personal WeChat	Using it to win customers “breaks the rules on paper,” says an agency 9	Contact with known clients, not acquisition
WeCom	One agency says overseas documents are accepted 9	Confirm with Tencent first
Service Account	2026 guides say some foreign entities can open one 1112, while a 2024 guide requires a Chinese license or WFOE 31	Confirm country and procedure with WeChat
WhatsApp	http://web.whatsapp.com was blocked in GreatFire’s single test 6	Don’t make it your only contact option

What’s the Service Account reply rule?

WeChat’s developer docs set a window. After a user sends a message, the customer-service interface can send 5 messages within 48 hours.¹³

Certain menu clicks, a new follow or a QR scan allow only 3 messages, valid for 1 minute.¹³ The docs say the list can change. So a follower who never writes to you can’t be chased through this interface.

The docs cover this developer interface. We didn’t find the rule for replies typed by hand in the admin console, so test it on your own account.

Our guide to WeChat for foreign businesses covers opening an account.

What about Gmail?

GreatFire shows http://mail.google.com blocked in all 3 of its recent tests.⁷ That concerns the web address, and it says nothing direct about mail sent between servers.

We found no current test of Gmail delivery to Chinese mailboxes, so ask for confirmation by a second channel on anything important.

How do you reply safely with a translation tool?

Write simple English, translate it, then check every fact that survives the trip. Most of the protection comes from what you do before and after the tool.

1. Translate the enquiry. Ask what the sender wants, and note anything unclear.
2. Write short English. Use one idea per sentence, with no idioms or jokes.
3. Use your glossary. Keep one approved Chinese name for your company and each product.
4. Ask for formal business Chinese. Say who the reader is and which script you need.
5. Check the digits. Compare each price, date, quantity and unit with your English.
6. Add your English below. A buyer’s colleague may read it, and your team can audit it.
7. Route it. Send anything from the bottom three rows of the first table to the person named there.
8. Save both versions. Keep the Chinese and the English together in the thread.

Have that template reviewed once, and you can reuse it without another check.

1. 1Message received
2. 2Acknowledgment
3. 3Qualification
4. 4Translated draft
5. 5Figures check
6. 6Native reviewer if committing
7. 7Send
8. 8Archive both versions

Why you can’t judge the output yourself

A smooth translation can still be wrong, and you have no way to feel it. Even native readers don’t always catch problems in chat translation.

Li and colleagues showed people machine-translated chats in their own language, with some messages deliberately broken. Of the 325 Chinese participants who did the no-warning round first, 228, or 70.2%, said they noticed the errors without hints.¹⁴

So around 3 in 10 didn’t say so, even though those errors were severe by design. The answers were self-reported, the paper doesn’t make clear whether warnings had been seen by then, and it was a simulated chat, not a business exchange. Still, our reading is that a buyer won’t always flag a bad sentence.

They may just act on it.

The number check

Chinese groups large numbers in fours, not threes. That makes large figures a classic place for errors to slip through a quick read.

Chinese	Value 20	Written out
1万	Ten thousand	10,000
2.5万	Twenty-five thousand	25,000
100万	One million	1,000,000
1亿	One hundred million	100,000,000
1.2亿	One hundred twenty million	120,000,000

Using WeChat’s own translation

WeChat can translate received messages. Press and hold a message, then tap Translate, and it uses the language set in your app.¹⁶

Version 8.0.56 and later can also translate incoming messages automatically.¹⁵

Sending is less clear, and the sources conflict. A 2019 staff reply on WebNots’ guide said you couldn’t translate text before sending.¹⁶ Remio says the mobile app already had type-and-translate, and that desktop version 4.1.10 gained it on May 28.¹⁷

Reports from May 25 and August 13, 2026 both call that desktop version a beta.²⁹³⁰

Check your own version. We found no published accuracy figure for WeChat chat translation, and Remio found none either.¹⁷

If your reviewer sits in mainland China, plan their tools as well. GreatFire recorded trouble on http://translate.google.com in 2 of 2 tests, and on http://www.deepl.com in 3 of 5.¹⁸¹⁹

How fast do you have to reply?

Nobody has published a measured target that we could find. Sooner is better, but a time you state and keep beats a pledge you’ll break.

The claims are loud and the data is thin. Nanjing Marketing Group says online shoppers want a reply in “seconds,” with no data behind it.²

A survey of 7,078 people in seven countries, run by CANDID for CM.com, is firmer. It puts China among the markets that most value fast support, and says Chinese consumers pick speed over empathy when forced to choose.²¹

It comes from a vendor, its article dates from 2023, and it gives no reply time for China.

These are the practical limits you can plan around.

• Time zone: Mainland China uses UTC+8 all year, with no daylight saving.²²
• Their morning: In winter, 9:00 in Beijing is 2:00 in Paris and 20:00 the previous evening in New York.
• Auto-reply: Send a reviewed acknowledgment with your working hours and next reply time.
• Contact page: State your reply time in Chinese, so the wait is expected.

WeChat also has an AI option. CNNIC reports a smart reply feature for Official Accounts, from September 2025, that learns an account’s content and answers private messages.¹

We don’t know whether foreign accounts can use it.

Holidays change the calendar

Chinese public holidays move each year, and some weekends become working days. Check the State Council notice rather than a generic calendar. The 2026 dates below have passed, so read them as the pattern to expect.

2026 period 23	Days off	Working weekend days
Spring Festival	February 15 to 23	February 14, February 28
Labor Day	May 1 to 5	May 9
National Day	October 1 to 7	September 20, October 10

We didn’t find the 2027 notice as of November 1, 2026. The 2026 notice came out on November 4, 2025, so watch for the new one.²³

Free check

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How do you spot enquiries that aren’t real?

Treat any demand for money before an order as a warning. Translation can make these harder to judge, because a tool may smooth out signals you’d otherwise notice.

Alibaba.com’s seller blog lists patterns that target exporters generally, not ones specific to Chinese buyers:²⁴

• Fee first: A large order, then a request for a registration, verification or insurance fee.
• Free samples: Many samples requested, then silence after they ship.
• Overpayment: A payment above the invoice, a request to refund the difference, then a reversal.
• New bank details: A near-identical email address asking for money to go elsewhere.

Before you quote, ask for the company’s full Chinese name. Your reviewer can look it up on the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System, which shows mainland company name changes.²⁵

We couldn’t open that registry ourselves, so we can’t say what else it shows. And a real company name doesn’t prove that the person writing to you works there.

Where do privacy and contracts come in?

Enquiries contain personal data, quotes can become obligations, and support itself may touch licensing. All three need a professional, so this section only flags the points to raise.

A name, phone number and message pasted into an online tool or sent to a reviewer is still personal data. PIPL, where it applies, sets rules for entrusting data to another party or sharing it.²⁶

Use tools and contractors whose terms you’ve read, and ask a local adviser what your setup needs. Start with whether China’s privacy law applies to your website.

On licensing, AppInChina’s 2019 page says support in China needs a B24 call center license, and that its service removes that burden.⁴ That’s a vendor describing its own offer, and we didn’t check it with a regulator. Ask a local adviser whether it touches your setup.

For contracts, don’t rely on a machine draft. China Justice Observer wrote in 2021 that Chinese courts use Chinese, so you’d need a Chinese version or translation to enforce one there.²⁷

The article recommends a bilingual contract with a clause on which version prevails.²⁷ Confirm that wording with a local lawyer.

For the wider picture, see how to sell to Chinese clients without being in China.

What to set up before the first enquiry

Do this before your Chinese pages go live. A contact option you haven’t tested is a guess.

• Name one owner and one backup for Chinese enquiries.
• Find a native reader and agree on a turnaround time.
• Build a glossary of your company name, products and units.
• Have five templates reviewed: acknowledgment, request for details, quote cover, delay, polite refusal.
• Add a second contact option that doesn’t rely on one blocked service.
• State your working hours and reply time in Chinese.
• Send a test enquiry from China and follow it to the reply.

Replies also shape how far a buyer trusts you. See how to earn the trust of Chinese buyers.

For the site itself, use the China-ready website checklist.

The bottom line

You can answer Chinese enquiries without speaking Chinese if you separate drafting from checking. Let a tool draft, and let a native reader approve anything that commits you.

Pick a channel that works from China, state a reply time you can keep, and test the whole path before you need it.

How Index in China can help

We translate your site into Simplified Chinese with a human reviewer, work on getting it indexed on Chinese search engines and send a monthly report on Chinese traffic. We can’t promise that enquiries will follow.

Replying to buyers stays with you or a partner you choose. See what we do, or book a 30-minute call to go through your contact setup.

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