eDesk's Pre-sales tools help you turn prospective customers into buying customers, by streamlining your pre-sales enquiries and enabling your team to answer quickly to seal the deal.

Before you start

  • You’ll need an Admin login to eDesk. If you don’t have an Admin login, you can request one from an Admin user within your business.
  • You'll need the AI Assist Add-on before you'll see any insights in the Insights > Other > Pre-sales dashboard. 

01 Let's talk about Pre-sales

Pre-sales refer to inquiries from potential customers, usually about product details, availability, shipping options, or other information they need to make a purchase decision.

Pre-sales messages are valuable sales opportunities, but they can become lost opportunities if not handled promptly. That’s where eDesk’s Pre-sales come in. It can help your team prioritize and respond to inquiries quickly, increasing conversions and driving revenue.

02 Pre-sales in eDesk

eDesk helps your team efficiently manage pre-sales enquiries and convert leads into paying customers through:

1) AI Classification of pre-sales enquiries
eDesk’s AI Assist scans incoming buyer messages, identifies the ones with buying intent, and classifies the tickets as Pre-sales for easy prioritization. This includes concluded Chatbot tickets (including Live Chat).
Note: Tickets that already have an order attached are not classified as Pre-sales as it may concern an existing order. 
All tickets that are classified as Pre-sales are listed in the Pre-sales view in the Mailbox (and in the Smart Inbox Product Queries & Pre-Sales group).

2) The Pre-sales view
All Pre-sales tickets are automatically listed in the Pre-sales view in the Mailbox, making it easy for your team to respond quickly to Pre-sales enquiries. The Pre-sales view shows messages that eDesk's AI has classified as Pre-sales and also messages arriving in eDesk that have already been flagged as Pre-sales by a marketplace (Amazon and eBay are two marketplaces that do this).
Learn how to use the Pre-sales view in the next section of this help file.
Pre-sales view in the Mailbox
3) Pre-sales insights
The Pre-sales dashboard in Insights helps you evaluate the success of your sales conversions. A conversion is when a member of your team or chatbot answers a buyer's pre-sales enquiry and it leads to a sale. Section 04 of this help file explains the Pre-sales dashboard.
Insights > Pre-sales Conversion view
4) Pre-sales Report Extracts 
In Insights > Reports > Report Extracts, you can create a Pre-sales Report Extract that provides a breakdown of all the Pre-sales interactions and conversions, including extra information such as lead time (from interaction to conversion). 
Learn more here.

03 Using the Pre-sales view

To access the Pre-sales view:

  1. Go to your eDesk Mailbox.
  2. Select Pre-sales in the left-hand menu.
    If the option isn’t visible, it means there are currently no tickets classified as Pre-sales.
The Pre-Sales view.
How It Works
  • Incoming Pre-sales tickets are automatically added to the Pre-sales view.
  • Unresolved Pre-sales tickets will also appear in the Waiting or To Do views.
  • Once resolved, tickets are removed from the Pre-sales view and moved to Resolved.
  • If a customer replies to a Pre-sales ticket, it remains in the Pre-sales view until an order is attached to the ticket or linked to the customer.

  • Quick Reply is not available for Pre-sales tickets.

SLA Icons

Each ticket in the Pre-sales view is flagged with one of the following SLA icons:

Flame (Hot Lead): The ticket is less than 2 hours old.
Cloud (Not-So-Hot Lead): The ticket is between 12 and 2 hours old.
Snowflake (Cold Lead): The ticket is older than 12 hours.

Ticket Details:

When you select a ticket in the Pre-sales view, you’ll see:

  • The product title and image (if available).
  • A link to the product on the marketplace.
  • The regular ticket layout and Reply Box for crafting responses.

04 Pre-sales insights

The Pre-sales dashboard in Insights allows you to learn how successfully your team handles pre-sales enquiries.

To access the Pre-sales conversion dashboard:

  1. Select Insights.
  2. Select Other > Pre-sales in the left-hand menu.
Select Other > Pre-sales in Insights

​​​​​​Note: This dashboard was introduced in May 2025 and uses Pre-sales data from this date onwards. Pre-sales data that was generated prior to mid-May 2025 may be incomplete or not available. 

What are the Pre-sales insights?
The Pre-sales dashboard in Insights offer the following:

Headline Metrics 
Total number of Pre-sales tickets
Number of those tickets that converted into orders
Total order value (GMV) of those conversions
Average order value (AOV) of converted Pre-sales

Visual Trends
Conversion rate over time (from Pre-sale interaction to completed order)
Attributable revenue over time (value of converted Pre-sales)

Breakdowns
Sales and revenue by channel
Sales and revenue by Agent
Includes Live Agents and any Chatbot tickets

Note: Where the Pre-sales enquiry was handled by a chatbot, they’ll be attributed to “Ava Virtual Agent”.

How It Works
Pre-sales insights indicate the number of Pre-sales conversions. So how does eDesk identifies a successful conversion? When an order arrives, eDesk checks if:
 
  • a buyer with this email address has interacted with an Agent or Chatbot in a Pre-sales ticket.
  • the order was placed within the conversion window, which is a time period set by the seller (default: 7 days) from when the ticket was created.
If both of the above are true, then eDesk counts the order as a conversion. If multiple matching Pre-sales tickets exist, the conversion is attributed to the most recent qualifying Pre-sales ticket.

Note: If a Pre-sales ticket does not provide the customer's email address or if the customer email address in the order differs from the one in the Pre-sales ticket, it will be in the Pre-sales view in the Mailbox but won't be included in the conversions insights. This applies to: 
 

  • Non-email channels (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Voice) because there is no email address to match with an order.

  • Chatbot Pre-sales tickets for which the customer hasn't provided an email will be displayed in the Pre-sales listing, but without an email address, will not be included in the Pre-sales conversions insights.

  • Orders for which the customer used a different email address to the one they used in their Pre-sales enquiry.

Changing the conversion window
The default time frame for the conversion window is 7 days. To set this to a different time period, go to Settings → Company → Company → Mailbox tab → Pre-Sales section.

Pro-Tip: If your products are high-value, buyers often need longer to think about whether to go ahead and buy so you might want to extend the conversion window to a longer time period in oder to capture these slower conversions.
Settings for conversion window time frame

Further Reading

To find out more about our Report Extracts, click here.
Learn how to use Tag Groups in eDesk here.