Messages, listings and order numbers without looking at the keys

In a one-person shop, you are the writer

According to the SBA Office of Advocacy, the US has about 36.2 million small businesses, and 82.3% of them have no employees. If you sell on Etsy, Shopify, Amazon or eBay, there is a good chance you are one of them. That means there is nobody to hand the writing to. The reply to a return request, the new product listing, the email to your supplier and the shop announcement are all written by the same person: you.

Writing is easy to overlook because it doesn't feel like real work, yet it fills a large part of the day. In 2023, Microsoft looked at usage data from its own office apps and found that the average employee spent 57% of their time communicating: in meetings, email and chat. A shop owner adds listings, order notes and replies to reviews on top of that.

A typical day might start with answering the messages that came in overnight, move on to orders, shipping labels and invoices, continue with listings for new stock in the afternoon and end with a reply to a review in the evening. Every one of those tasks is typing, even if nobody calls it that.

Touchtypely won't change how much you have to write. It can change how it feels: less hunting for letters, fewer corrections and more attention left for what you actually want to say.

When you do all the writing yourself, every minute at the keyboard is your own minute.

Buyers write in, you write back

Online shopping is a big and growing part of how Americans buy things. The Census Bureau estimates that 17.1% of all US retail sales in the second quarter of 2026 happened online, after seasonal adjustment. Etsy alone reported 86.5 million active buyers at the end of 2025. Every one of those orders can come with a question, a change request or a problem to sort out.

A fast, clear reply is part of good service, and on marketplaces it can also affect how your shop is seen. If you search for letters while you type, each message takes longer, and it gets easier to miss a typo in a name, an address or a dollar amount.

Saved replies and templates cut down on typing, but you still adjust them every time: the greeting, the order number, the specific problem, the new delivery date. Those small pieces are exactly where a typo hurts the most, because they are about one particular person and their money.

When you touch type, your eyes stay on the screen, so you can see a typo the moment it happens. And when you are unsure about the tone of a reply, you have time left to read it once more before you hit send. These are the messages most sellers write over and over:

• answers to questions before a purchase,
• confirmations of changes and delivery dates,
• returns, refunds and damaged-item claims,
• replies to reviews and comments,
• emails to suppliers and shipping carriers.

Time is money, so let's count honestly

How much of your week goes into typing depends on your shop. If you write a lot of custom listings or handle many buyer messages, it is a lot. If most of your work is packing and photography, it is less. Be honest with yourself about which kind of seller you are before you expect big savings.

It also matters what you are typing. When you write your own text, you are thinking at the same time, so the keyboard isn't the only thing slowing you down. In a 1999 study by Karat and colleagues, people averaged 33 words per minute when copying text, but only 19 words per minute when composing their own.

Here is an example to make it concrete. Say you type 2,000 words a day. At 26 words per minute, which marked the slowest tenth of the 168,000 people in a large Aalto University study, the typing alone takes about 77 minutes. At the study's average of about 52 words per minute, it takes about 38 minutes. That is close to 40 minutes a day.

Be realistic about goals, too. If you type 25 words per minute today, don't expect to double it in a week. A better plan is to watch your exercise history over several weeks and be glad that your errors are going down and your eyes drift to the keyboard less often.

The course won't make your admin disappear. It can take away the time you spend hunting for letters.

Typing while the customer talks

A call with a customer, a supplier or a carrier often means listening and typing at once. An order number, an address, a new pickup time. If you have to look down at the keys, your attention is split three ways: the call, the screen and the keyboard.

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland tracked where people look while they type. Touch typists looked at the keyboard about a fifth of the time, while self-taught typists looked at it 41% of the time. The authors note that self-taught typists may be at a disadvantage in tasks where you need to keep an eye on the screen.

When you touch type, your hands know where the letters are, and you can focus on what the customer is saying and whether you got it down correctly. We won't promise that listening and typing at the same time becomes effortless. But once you stop searching for keys, you have more attention left for the conversation. Situations where you'll notice the difference:

• changing a shipping address or delivery date during a call,
• taking notes on a damaged-item claim while the buyer describes it,
• tracking numbers and codes read out to you by a carrier,
• writing down an agreement with a supplier during a video call.

Eyes on the screen, ears on the customer, hands on the keyboard.

Order numbers, SKUs, prices and dates

An online shop is full of numbers: order numbers, SKUs, ZIP codes, phone numbers, prices, quantities and delivery dates. Spell check can't help you with any of them. A swapped digit in a price or a ZIP code is easy to miss and can be expensive to fix.

Module 6 of Touchtypely is all about numbers and symbols: the digit row, punctuation, the @ sign, the dollar sign and the numeric keypad, which is handy for prices, quantities and spreadsheets. The keypad lesson is optional, so if your laptop doesn't have one, you simply skip it.

SKUs and codes have their own traps: hyphens, slashes, mixed letters and numbers. Entering exactly this kind of code was the subject of a classic 1978 study on learning to type. British postal workers learned to type letter and number codes used for sorting mail. Those who practiced one hour a day learned more efficiently than those who trained in longer blocks.

After every exercise, Touchtypely shows you which keys slow you down and which ones you mix up. If digits, the dollar sign or the @ sign give you trouble, you can pick those keys and drill them on purpose.

Product listings and shop copy

A good product listing rarely comes out right on the first try. You write, delete and rearrange sentences, and you tweak the title so that it reads well and still helps buyers find it in search. When you write like this, typing speed matters less than when you copy text, because much of the time goes into thinking.

Something else does help, though. The Aalto researchers noticed that fast typists press each letter with the same finger every time. In their view, that reduces the uncertainty about which finger should press which key, and with it the need to look at the keyboard. When you don't have to look for letters, you don't have to interrupt the sentence you are building in your head.

Editing copy also calls for confidence beyond the letters: Shift, punctuation, quotation marks, parentheses, percent signs and inch marks for sizes. Touchtypely covers all of these in its lessons on capitals and on numbers and symbols.

When a new collection arrives and you write dozens of listings in one sitting, every small delay adds up. Hunting for a parenthesis, fixing a typo in a product title, moving your eyes from the keyboard back to the text. Each one is a few seconds. Together they can take a good part of an afternoon.

The goal isn't speed. The goal is a keyboard that doesn't interrupt your thinking.

What you see after every exercise

After every exercise you get a breakdown that even your accountant would appreciate: words per minute, error rate, accuracy, corrected and uncorrected errors, rhythm, reaction time for each key and the keys you mix up most often.

For a shop owner, uncorrected errors matter most. Those are the ones that would reach the customer. In the large Aalto University study, the text people submitted as finished still contained about 1.2% wrong characters on average, even though they made more than two corrections per sentence along the way.

Reaction time per key shows where you hesitate. If, for example, you pause noticeably longer on the 7 or on the dollar sign than on other keys, your daily training will bring those keys up more often. You don't have to set anything up. The training builds itself.

An uncorrected error is the one your customer sees. Watch that number most closely.

Practice on texts about business

The practice texts in Touchtypely aren't random strings of words. You pick a genre, for example business, science or history. After you finish a text, a short comprehension question follows, so you also keep your mind on the content and not only on your fingers.

Daily training takes 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes. It is built from your weak keys, the keys that are starting to slip and a text from the genre you chose. Five minutes fits between packing two orders.

If you already know what slows you down, you can choose specific keys to drill. For example, the number row if you keep retyping prices, or the punctuation keys if your listings are full of measurements and bullet points.

The question at the end of each text is a small reminder that text isn't just a row of letters. It is content that someone is going to read, and in your shop, that someone is a customer.

How much time it takes

The course has 26 lessons in six modules, plus a final exam. A lesson takes 5 to 8 minutes, so the whole course adds up to roughly 2 to 3.5 hours. At one lesson a day, you'll be through it in about a month.

The basics come fairly quickly. High speeds, according to researchers, take hundreds of hours of focused typing. That is why daily training continues after the course and targets exactly what is holding you back.

At first, typing may feel slower than before while your hands get used to new positions. So start in a quieter week, not right before Black Friday or the holiday rush.

After the course, take a 3 or 5 minute typing test every few weeks. Compare your results with your own earlier ones, not with other people's, and you'll see whether the training is showing up in your speed and in your error count.

Start in a quiet week, not in peak season.