July 20, 2026
Selling in Multiple Languages: Handling Urdu, Arabic, and English DMs Without Splitting Your Inbox
Most sellers in Dubai and Pakistan don't get DMs in one language, they get English, Arabic, Urdu, and Roman Urdu, sometimes from the same customer in one conversation. Here's how to handle that without splitting your team by language.
Why one inbox ends up in three languages
A boutique in Dubai selling to a mixed local and expat customer base gets DMs in English and Arabic within the same hour. A D2C seller in Pakistan gets Urdu, Roman Urdu (Urdu typed in Latin letters, how most people actually type on WhatsApp), and English, often switching mid-conversation as a customer gets more comfortable. Neither pattern is unusual, it’s just how DMs actually look for a seller whose audience isn’t monolingual.
The usual fix is hiring someone who speaks the second or third language, or asking whoever’s available to switch between languages themselves. Both work, until volume grows past what one or two people can keep up with, at which point language switching adds real friction on top of an already busy inbox.
What actually goes wrong with a single-language setup
If your team, or your automation, only handles one language well, a customer writing in Roman Urdu to an English-only setup gets a mismatched or generic reply, if they get an accurate one at all. That’s a lost sale in a market where the customer will simply message a competitor who replies in their language. The problem compounds during busy periods, when there's no time to hand off a message to "whoever speaks Arabic."
How to handle it without splitting your team
Castor's agent auto-detects the language a customer writes in, including Roman Urdu and mixed-language messages, and replies in kind, using the same real product and pricing information regardless of which language the question came in. If your business needs every reply to default to one specific language instead (say, always Urdu even if a customer opens in English), that's a setting you choose once during setup, not something you have to manage conversation by conversation.
The result is one inbox, one agent, and no language-based triage, whether the DM arrives in English, Arabic, Urdu, or Roman Urdu. See how this plays out for D2C sellers in Pakistan or abaya boutiques in Dubai, both of which deal with this daily.