Avito bot: replies to buyers and deals in amoCRM

A button bot vs an AI agent: the difference shows at the first “Still available?”

Saturday, 11:20. A buyer opens a listing for sliding gates and writes in the Avito chat: “Still available? How much for a four-metre opening, with automation?” A button bot sends back a menu: “Prices”, “Delivery”, “Contact a manager”. The person asked a question in words and got a form. Most of the time they close the chat and message the next seller in the search results.

A button bot works like a tree: pre-drawn branches and canned answers. It fits where there’s one predictable question: the warehouse address, opening hours, whether an item is in stock. As soon as a buyer writes in their own words, with a typo or three questions in one message, the tree breaks.

An AI agent reads the whole message. It understands that the buyer is asking the price of a specific configuration, answers from your price list and knowledge base, and remembers which listing the conversation is about and what the buyer wrote yesterday. It asks the next question itself. We wrote more about the line between the two in the article AI agent or chatbot.

We tested blind, on real chats, whether such a reply looks human. In 80% of cases the assistant's reply was rated no worse than a human's. For Avito that's enough for the buyer to keep the conversation going instead of leaving for the next listing.

First reply: you have minutes, not hours

Avito's messenger has long been the main channel. According to CNews data for February 2024, it accounted for 55% of first contacts between the platform's users, and almost 4 million new chats are started every day. Calls have given way to messaging.

Buyers won’t wait long. Avito’s head of communication products told ComNews in June 2023: the wait for answers to basic questions had come down to 10–15 minutes. After that, the person is already chatting with whoever got there first.

Speed affects the account itself too. According to CNews in November 2023, Avito factors how often and how quickly a seller answers messages and calls into its seller service quality score. A slow seller loses both the buyer in question and standing in the eyes of the platform.

Tuesday, 22:15. “Still available? Do you install in Mytishchi?” The agent replies right away that you do and asks for the width of the opening. In the morning the manager opens a card that’s already filled in. In a live GetGate project, 27% of enquiries came in during evenings and weekends, and before that they all waited until morning.

Clarification, measurement, site visit: what the agent gathers before the manager steps in

The first reply opens the conversation. Then the agent gathers what a manager needs before quoting a price: dimensions, address, timing, preferences. For gates it’s the width of the opening and the type of drive, for a kitchen the room plan, for a used car a convenient day for a viewing.

Buyers often reply with a photo: “Here's the opening, the post here is crooked, is that a problem?” The agent recognizes the photo, describes what it sees and says honestly where a surveyor needs to come out. It asks questions one at a time, in the order you set, not as a form that fills the whole screen.

Once it has enough information, the agent offers free slots from the measurer's or salesperson's calendar. The buyer picks Thursday afternoon. On Avito their number is hidden, so the agent asks for a phone number for the visit right in the chat and explains why: the measurer will call before arriving.

Here’s what the agent usually takes over in Avito chats:

• the first reply to any message, including at night;
• clarifying order details and budget;
• booking a measurement, site visit or consultation;
• handing a hot buyer over to a manager with a short summary of the conversation;
• creating and managing the deal in the CRM: fields, stages, tasks.

When it's time to hand the conversation to a person

The line is drawn in advance, in the language of your own process. Haggling below the threshold you set. A non-standard order. A complaint. A request for a call. Readiness to pay right now. As soon as one of these signals shows up in the chat, the agent hands the conversation to a manager.

An example. A buyer writes: “Will you make it cheaper if I order two gates at once, for the house and the garage?” The agent doesn't make up a discount. It replies that it will check the terms with a manager and sends the manager a notification: who's asking, which dimensions are already known, what exactly the buyer wants.

The manager doesn’t reread the chat from the start. They see the summary in the card and carry on in the same Avito chat. For the buyer the conversation continues without a break: same chat, same listing, just a person answering now.

Irritation is a separate signal. The agent doesn't smooth over “This is the third time I'm asking about delivery” with stock politeness. It apologises in one sentence, calls in a manager and notes in the notification that the buyer is unhappy. The manager opens that conversation first.

Official ways to connect to Avito

Avito has a business API, including one for messages. The platform opens access to the messenger API on paid plans for professional sellers. The terms have changed before and may change again, so before starting work, check in your account that your plan includes it.

There are two official routes through this API. The first is a CRM integration with Avito: amoCRM and Bitrix24 can receive the platform's chats. The second is partner services that pull messages through the same API and pass them on to a CRM or an agent. Either way, access is granted with API keys from your account dashboard, without your account password.

There are also built-in tools: auto-reply and quick replies, which are saved templates. They’re useful as a safety net overnight, but they don’t hold a conversation. A “Thanks, we’ll reply in the morning” template is more honest than silence, though it won’t keep a buyer who is already writing to a competitor.

Before connecting, ask the contractor three questions. How does it get access to the chats? Does it need your password? Who updates the integration if Avito changes its API terms? The answer you want to hear: through the API on your plan, no password needed, and the integration owner keeps track of changes.

What an unofficial bot puts at risk

You'll come across offers of an “Avito bot in one evening, no paid plan needed”. Usually such a service asks for your login and password and enters the account the way a person would: it reads and sends messages through a browser or an app emulator. From the outside everything works, until the platform notices unusual activity.

The outcome is predictable: the account gets blocked. Along with it you lose your listings, reviews, rating and chat history with buyers who haven’t bought yet. Monday, 09:05, the owner opens the dashboard and finds a block notice. Buyers who wrote over the weekend will never get an answer.

Mass messaging is a separate risk. The agent replies to people who wrote first and comes back to the same chat with a reminder. Writing first to people who never asked you counts as spam on the platform, and no official API will cover that scenario.

Checking how your bot is connected is easy. If the contractor asked for your account password and an SMS code, it works around the API. If you issued keys in the integrations section, the connection is official. In that case you can revoke access at any time without changing your password.

Four ways to connect, side by side: what each can do and what you risk.

amoCRM integration: every chat becomes a deal

A new chat about a listing creates a deal in the amoCRM pipeline: the buyer's name, the listing they came from, their first question. The agent replies straight from the CRM, and the whole conversation sits in the deal card. The head of sales sees every conversation, not just the ones a manager chose to show.

As the conversation goes on, the agent fills in the fields: dimensions, address, budget, measurement date. The deal moves through the stages by itself: “New chat”, “Clarification”, “Measurement booked”. The measurer gets a task with the address and phone number, the manager gets a reminder to call after the measurement.

If the same buyer later called or wrote on WhatsApp, the cards need to be merged by phone number, otherwise the CRM will show two clients. This is set up when building the pipelines; more on the page about amoCRM implementation. We covered how one robot works across several channels at once in our article on Telegram, WhatsApp and Avito.

After the measurement the deal doesn't stall. If the buyer goes quiet for a week, the agent writes in the same chat: “You were looking at gates with an automatic opener — your quote is ready, shall I send it?” The reply lands in the deal card again.

Where a bot won't help

The agent answers based on what’s in the listing and the knowledge base. If the listing has an old price or someone else’s photos, it will politely deal with unhappy buyers, and that won’t add a single sale. Get your listings in order first.

Booking a survey achieves nothing if the surveyor doesn't show up on the agreed day. The agent fills the calendar, but keeping the commitments is still up to people. So along with the agent it's worth setting up control: who took the lead, who went out, how it ended.

The third case is long deals where more than one person decides. A buyer of gates for a warehouse agrees the estimate with the director and the accounts department, and the conversation in the Avito chat stretches over weeks. Here the agent is useful at the start: it replies, gathers the details and books a meeting. From there, the manager runs the negotiations.

How to start connecting

Start with the conversations you already have. Read the latest dialogues in your Avito chats and note what people ask most often and at which question buyers drop off. You usually end up with a dozen typical questions and a couple of places where the conversation breaks off.

• Define what a ready lead means for you: a phone number and address, a survey date or a paid order.
• Check your Avito plan and access to the messenger API.
• Build a pipeline in the CRM with stages that match your process.
• Define the boundaries: where the agent answers on its own and where it calls in a manager.
• Launch the agent on one category of listings and read the first 20 conversations in full.

After the first check you'll see where the agent gets confused, which answers in the knowledge base are out of date and which questions you didn't anticipate. Those get filled in, and the agent is connected to the rest of your listings.

This is how we built our sales robot: it works on Avito through amoCRM alongside Telegram, WhatsApp and the website. If you want to see where AI can help across your whole sales team, not just on Avito, take a look at our breakdown of implementing AI in business.