The problem
Buyers arrive knowing what they need the machine to do, not what it is called, and the numbers that decide the purchase sit three clicks into a product page. Every one of those questions used to be typed out by hand, and the ones that arrived overnight were answered the next morning, by which point some of them had bought elsewhere.
What putting it in involved
The catalog is synced rather than crawled once, so an answer about price or availability reflects the store as it is now. That one decision is what moved stock and order-status questions off the desk: an answer that can go stale is an answer somebody has to check.