Everything That’s New in the Sales Assistant

We just pushed the biggest Sales Assistant release we’ve done. Some of it you’ll notice straight away, some of it is a sentence of wording that will quietly save you a support ticket. Here’s all of it, grouped so you can skim to what matters to you.

New features

Things you couldn’t do at all before.

Post-sale monitoring

When a drop ends, the Assistant used to stop watching. Now you can tell it to keep going for 7 days on anything that didn’t sell. If someone comments a bid or a Buy It Now on an old post in that window, they get a checkout link automatically.

You set how picky it is: your price or nothing, anything at all, or anything within a set dollar amount or percentage of your price. It’s off until you switch it on, in your Sales Assistant settings.

Read the full guide →

Run a Sale, with three sale types

There’s a new Run a Sale button sitting next to Create a Drop. Tap it and you pick one of three ways to go after your unsold stock:

• Repost them as a fresh drop. Select your unsold items, confirm or change the pricing, and they go back out as new posts with the Assistant running them normally.
• Re-read your updated captions. If you’ve already gone and edited prices on your existing Instagram posts, we go re-read them and show you what changed before saving.
• Code word sale. Post a code word on your story, buyers comment it on the item they want, and the Assistant DMs them a checkout link with the discount already applied.

All three explained →

Unsold items in the grid

Posts in the grid now carry one of three statuses — New, In Inventory, or Unsold — and you can filter to show or hide the unsold ones. Pulling last week’s leftovers into this week’s drop no longer means deleting the item and re-syncing it.

Re-analyze post

Instagram doesn’t tell us when you edit a caption, which has always been a gap. Now there’s a Re-analyze post action on any linked item: we re-read the caption, pull out the new starting bid, Buy It Now price and end time, and show you a summary before anything saves.

Posting capacity, visible before you schedule

Instagram allows 50 posts every rolling 24 hours per account — rolling, not “resets at midnight.” You now get a banner showing how many posts you have left and roughly when your full capacity returns.

And when you pick a scheduled time, we check it against what you published in the last 24 hours, what’s posting now, and any other drops you have queued. If it won’t fit, you see a warning before you confirm, with a suggested safer start time. We also re-check right before a scheduled drop begins, so a drop can’t quietly start and die at item 16.

PayPal at checkout

PayPal is now an option on your checkout page alongside Venmo. It’s external — the buyer pays you directly, you confirm when the money lands, and there’s no 2% platform fee on those orders. How to turn it on.

Exact drop end times in captions

Create a Drop now has an end time field, the same as linking a drop does. Set one and every caption shows the real closing time — “Drop ends Sunday August 31 at 11:59 PM EST” — instead of “ends in 24 hours.” Someone who sees your post six hours late now knows exactly how long they have. There’s an [END_TIME] variable for your caption examples too.

Item photos in winner DMs

An optional setting, off by default. Turn it on and the item’s photo is attached above the winner or claim DM, so a buyer who won five things knows which one this checkout is for.

A few more new switches

• The bag close confirmation DM is now editable. It used to be fixed; now it can sound like you.
• Two different winner comments when you delay invoices. Bid winners and Buy It Now claimers won in different ways, so they now get different public comments — each with its own template.
• An on/off toggle for the next-in-line reply, so you can stay silent on claimed items if you’d rather.
• Payment links that never expire, for a buyer you know and trust who just needs longer.

Every message the Assistant sends is now listed in one place: Every Message the Sales Assistant Sends.

Improvements

Things that already existed, working better.

It reads your comments more carefully

This was the biggest single chunk of work, and it’s the thing sellers worry about most. The Assistant now gets these right:

• “Me pls” counts as a Buy It Now claim. Not everyone types BIN.
• “18 hehe” is a bid of $18. A number with a word stuck to it still counts.
• “Bid20!” is a bid of $20, punctuation and all.
• A height like 5’2 is not a bid. Someone telling you how tall they are isn’t offering you five dollars.
• “<333” is not a bid of $333. It’s a heart.
• Replying to a bid rejection isn’t a Buy It Now claim. “Aw ok” after being outbid no longer reads as wanting to buy it outright.
• Buy It Now–only sales handle a wider range of comments correctly.

Everything else that got better

• “Next in line” now means next. The reply only goes to the person who’s genuinely next, rather than telling five people they’re all next.
• Greyed-out button? We tell you why. If Post Drop or Link Drop won’t click, we name the item that’s missing a price instead of leaving you to hunt.
• Photo order and thumbnails are handled correctly when photos are grouped into items, whether you group them yourself or let it do it.
• Your inventory pricing shows in the item modal, so you’re not flipping between screens to check a price.
• Resending a checkout tells you when it won’t work. Instagram limits how long we can DM someone after they last interacted with you — past that point we now say so up front, so you go straight to the manual link.
• A heads-up before posting more than 50 items, since that’s a hard ceiling for a 24-hour stretch.
• Changing your mind mid-checkout works. A buyer who taps Checkout and then taps Start Open Bag used to get silence. Now they get pointed back to their link and told to choose Open Bag on the form — no duplicate order.
• Venmo buyers are told to come back. Before we send them over, there’s a screen explaining that paying in Venmo doesn’t finish the Thryft Ship order on its own.

Clarifications

No behaviour changed here. The words did — because the old ones were causing real confusion.

• The checkout DM now says what to do. “Here’s your checkout link!” became “Tap below to open checkout. Fill out and submit the form to complete your order,” with the button reading Open checkout. Buyers were tapping the button and assuming they were done.
• “Checkout and Ship” is just “Checkout.”
• Picking a time doesn’t schedule your drop. Confirm at the end of captioning is what does it — and now there’s a visible reminder the whole time a time is selected but unconfirmed. This one was losing people entire drops.
• It’s every 24 hours, not every day. The posting limit is a rolling window, and we now say so everywhere.
• Tracking goes out by email, not DM. The old wording said DM, which was simply wrong.
• Settings labels rewritten throughout — particularly the three that kept getting mixed up: a top bidder losing to a Buy It Now, a late bidder trying after the claim, and someone commenting on an item that was already sold.
• Support links updated so they point at the right articles.

Fixes

Bugs, squashed.

• Deleting a photo or an item no longer breaks the next photo you click.
• Item names are no longer cut off on mobile in the expired and needs-attention cards.
• Reminder DM timing no longer displays strangely when a drop ends early.
• Mark sold now works on expired orders.
• A paid badge no longer shows under an expired winner after you’ve made a manual sale.
• You can actually turn off bid replies now — it used to refuse to let you continue without one, even switched off.

Where to start

If you only do one thing today, go turn on post-sale monitoring. It costs nothing to leave on and it catches sales you’d otherwise never see.