Selling Online? Stop Giving Every Supplier and Stranger Your Personal Email

My cousin's shop runs on an inbox that's older than his shop

My cousin sells phone accessories online — Daraz store, a Facebook page, the odd OLX listing when stock needs to move. Last month he showed me his email while we were waiting for our order at a dhaba, and I just stared.

Supplier invoices sat next to his daughter's school emails. Daraz notifications rubbed shoulders with family photos people had sent him. A "verify your account" mail from some wholesale site in another country was sitting two rows above a password reset he'd requested and forgotten. Everything — the business, the personal, the risky, the precious — all in one tired old inbox with his own name in the address.

He's not careless. He's normal. Selling online just quietly turns your personal email into company infrastructure without ever asking your permission.

Count how many strangers have it. Go on, I'll wait.

If you sell anything online, sit down one evening and make the list. Every supplier you ever requested a price list from. Every marketplace account, every courier portal, every printing guy, every "register to see wholesale prices" website you used once during a stock hunt at 1 a.m.

Each one of those has the keys to one inbox. And that one inbox resets the passwords to... what, exactly? Your Daraz seller account. Your Facebook page, maybe. The wallet your payouts land in. If a single one of those supplier sites leaks its list — and small supplier sites leak lists the way old taps drip — the person who buys that list doesn't just get an email address. They get the address that unlocks your whole business.

That's not a scare story, it's just maths. One address, everywhere, forever. The fix isn't complicated either. It's just boring admin you do once.

Give the shop its own inbox. A proper one.

Here's the setup I talked my cousin into, and the one I'd give any seller starting today.

The shop gets its own address, used for nothing except the shop. Marketplaces, couriers, the Facebook page, supplier accounts you actually order from every month — the repeat, serious stuff. On that's what a permanent inbox is for: an address that doesn't expire, tied to your account, so order mail and reset links are still there next month when you need them. If you're comparing the two kinds, the temporary vs permanent guide lays it out side by side.

Your personal email then goes back to being personal. Family, your own banking, your own life. If the shop inbox ever starts drowning in junk, you've lost nothing you love. You can even walk away from it and start a clean one — try doing that with the address your kid's school has.

And the one-off signups? Those get the disposable treatment

Not every account deserves the shop address either. Think about the maybes. The new marketplace you're testing with ten products to see if anything sells. The wholesale site that wants registration before it shows a single price. The design tool for making one banner. The "marketing guru" course that will definitely, absolutely email you every day for the rest of your life.

Those get a temporary inbox. Verify the account, look around, decide. If the service turns out to be gold, switch the account over to your permanent shop address while the temp inbox is still alive. If it turns out to be junk — and you'll know within a week — let the inbox expire and let every follow-up sales email fall into an empty room.

One more habit worth stealing: keep the shop's OTPs and your personal OTPs out of each other's way, and never, ever read a code out to anyone who calls asking for it. Our OTP safety guide covers the tricks that get used on sellers, including the fake "courier" call. That one happens more than people admit.

An hour of admin that pays you back every week

My cousin did the switch over a weekend. New permanent inbox for the shop, the big accounts moved over one by one, temp inboxes for the trial-and-error stuff. He says the strangest part is how calm his personal email has gone — it just has his life in it again.

You don't need to move everything tonight. Start with the next signup. The next supplier, the next portal, the next "create your free seller account" — give that one the right address instead of the only address. If you want the shop inbox to handle heavier work, longer storage and no ads, the Premium plans are there, but the free setup honestly covers most small sellers I know. Your personal email has done enough unpaid overtime. Retire it from the business.