What a Vendor's FAQ Reveals

Short answer: Nobody writes an FAQ entry about a question nobody asks. Read as a document about the seller's actual problems rather than as help, it is one of the more informative pages on any vendor site.

Each entry describes a recurring problem

An FAQ exists to stop the same question arriving by email. So every entry is evidence that enough people asked to make writing it worthwhile — which makes the list a rough ranking of what customers most often find confusing or unsatisfactory.

Pay attention to the defensive ones

Entries explaining why something is not the seller's responsibility, or why a delay is normal, describe situations that arose often enough to need a standing answer. Those are the most informative entries and the least read.

Compare the FAQ against the policy

Where an FAQ is softer than the written policy, the policy governs. Where it is firmer, the FAQ is doing expectation-setting the policy does not support. Either gap is worth noticing before ordering rather than during a dispute.

Absences are informative too

A vendor shipping internationally with no entry about customs has either never had a parcel held, which is unlikely, or has chosen not to address it. The second is more common and tells you how a held parcel will be handled.

Dates and drift

FAQs are rarely maintained. An entry describing a process that no longer matches the checkout is ordinary, and it means the page is a historical record rather than a current one — which is still useful, just differently.

How this feeds a score

It does not, directly. It is a reading technique rather than a criterion, because an FAQ's contents are too easy to curate. It is most useful for generating the specific question worth putting to the seller.