How to sell on WhatsApp in 2026
Selling on WhatsApp is five things done in order: get a business number, put your products somewhere the customer can see them, give people a link or a QR that opens a chat, take the order inside that chat, and take payment or ship cash on delivery. The free WhatsApp Business app covers all five for a shop doing a handful of orders a day. The Business Platform, the API, is what you move to when replies start arriving slower than customers will wait.
Last updated
The two ways to sell on WhatsApp
Everything on this page can be done two ways, and picking the wrong one is the most expensive early mistake. The free app is a phone app for a person. The Business Platform is an interface for software. They are not tiers of the same product.
| WhatsApp Business app | WhatsApp Business Platform (the API) | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free to download and use | No license fee, but Meta charges per delivered template message, and the software you connect has its own price |
| Runs on | One phone, with a few linked devices | Servers. You reach it through a provider inbox or your store software |
| Catalog | Up to 500 items, entered by hand | Synced from your store data, with no manual entry and no item ceiling in practice |
| Automation | Greeting message, away message, quick replies, labels | Anything programmable: AI replies, order buttons, cart reminders, shipping updates |
| Who answers | A person, during your opening hours | Software at any hour in the customer's language, with a person taking over when needed |
| Messaging a list | Broadcast lists cap at 256 contacts and reach only people who saved your number | Approved templates to any opted-in customer, inside Meta's messaging limits |
| Set-up effort | About ten minutes on the phone | Business verification with company documents, a display-name review, and template approvals |
One rule decides a lot: a number lives on the app or on the Platform, never both at once. Migrating a number to the Platform ends its life in the app, so test the market on the free app first and keep the migration for the point where volume justifies it.
Step 1: get a number and get it verified
Any mobile or landline that can receive one verification call or SMS and is not already on personal WhatsApp. Keep the number already printed on your sign if you can.
Name, category, opening hours, address, website, plus a greeting message and an away message. This is the shopfront people judge before they type.
Free, done in Meta Business Manager, and it needs official registration documents whose business name matches your display name exactly.
The verified badge comes from Meta Verified, a separate paid subscription. It is a trust signal, not a requirement, and nothing here depends on it.
Business verification matters because of messaging limits, which cap only the conversations your business starts, never your replies to customers who messaged first. Meta's messaging limits documentation, checked August 2026, puts a new business portfolio at 250 business-initiated conversations per 24 hours, then 2,000, 10,000, 100,000 and unlimited; verification is the fast path to the 2,000 tier, and the tiers above it arrive automatically while message quality stays high. Source: Meta, Messaging Limits.
Step 2: put your catalog where the customer can see it
Customers will not leave the chat to look at products. Whatever you sell has to be viewable without switching apps. There are three honest options.
| Option | What it takes | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|
| The in-app catalog | Free. Up to 500 items with up to 10 photos or videos each, per WhatsApp's own business resources, checked August 2026 | Every price change is manual, and items are reviewed against Meta's commerce policy before customers see them |
| A catalog synced from your store | Your product data feeds the chat, so Shopify or WooCommerce stays the single source of truth | Needs the Platform and a tool that reads your catalog, so it only pays off past a certain order volume |
| No catalog at all | Photos in the chat and a pinned price list. Under roughly twenty products this is genuinely fine | You retype the same prices all day, and a stale forwarded price list will eventually be held against you |
Two adjacent cases: a counter business can sell its existing till catalog instead of retyping it, which is what POS ordering is for, and a shop with no store software at all can run on the chat alone, which is the no-website route and what our hosted catalog is built for. Whichever you pick, remember a catalog is a menu and not a salesperson: catalog versus AI sales agent covers what each one can and cannot do. Source for the app catalog limits: WhatsApp Business, using your catalog.
Step 3: give people a way to start the chat
Nobody types a phone number by hand any more. Every place your business appears needs a tap that opens a chat already addressed to you.
| Entry point | How to build it | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| A wa.me link | wa.me/ plus your number in full international format, no plus sign or spaces. Add ?text= to prefill the first message | Instagram bio, Google Business Profile, email signature, anywhere a link fits |
| A QR code | Generated for you in the Business app profile, pointing at the same link | Shop window, receipts, packaging inserts, menus, delivery notes |
| A chat button on your site | A floating button, or a per-product button that prefills the product name | Stores whose visitors have questions that stop them checking out |
| Click-to-WhatsApp ads | A Facebook or Instagram ad whose button opens a chat instead of a landing page | Paid acquisition in markets where chat converts better than a form |
| The number itself | Printed on signage, cards and invoices, saved by regulars | Repeat local customers, who are the cheapest sales you will ever make |
Give every entry point its own prefilled text: "Hi, I scanned the window code" from the shop front, "Hi, about the blue kettle" from that product page, "Hi, I saw your ad" from the campaign. The first message then tells you where each customer came from, which is free attribution with no analytics tool and no tracking consent to collect.
Step 4: take the order without losing anything
A chat order is only an order once you hold every field a courier and an accountant will ask for. Before anything is packed, the thread should contain:
- The exact item, including the variant they picked, and the quantity of each.
- The money: item prices, the delivery fee, any discount, and the total the customer will actually hand over.
- A findable address: street, building, floor or flat, plus a landmark or a pinned location. Pins prevent more failed deliveries than any other single field.
- The name and contact number of whoever receives it, which is not always the person chatting.
- The payment method, agreed explicitly, so nobody argues at the door.
- A delivery window the customer has agreed to, even a loose one like "Tuesday morning".
Then send the whole summary back in one message and ask for a plain yes. That single habit removes most order disputes, because the agreed order exists in writing above both of your keyboards. Doing this by hand works fine until the chats start arriving after closing time. That is the job an AI sales agent takes over: it reads the question, answers from your real catalog, and assembles the order in the same thread.
Step 5: take payment, including cash on delivery
| Method | What it takes | The honest trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Cash on delivery | Nothing at all. The default across the Gulf, South Asia, much of Africa and LATAM | Nothing is at stake for the buyer until the doorbell rings, so some parcels come back. Confirm before dispatch and most of that cost disappears |
| A checkout link from your store | Paste a cart or checkout link into the chat | Cleanest option if you have a store: the order lands in your normal system with tax, stock and receipts already wired up |
| A payment link from your processor | Most card processors generate a one-off link for an amount | Works with no store at all, but each link is manual and reconciliation is on you |
| Bank or wallet transfer | You send account details, the customer sends a screenshot | Free, but screenshots can be faked. Check the balance, never the image |
| In-chat payment | Meta has enabled this in a short list of countries only, India and Brazil among them | Excellent where it exists. Confirm your country is on Meta's current list before planning around it |
If you take cash on delivery, add one step before dispatch: send the order back to the customer with a Confirm and a Cancel button, and ship only what comes back confirmed. It gates the expensive action, sending a parcel, behind a free signal, a tap. The full breakdown of why returned parcels happen and every other prevention method is in our guide to fake COD orders, and the automated version is COD confirmation.
Step 6: confirm, ship, and say so
Three messages cover the entire post-order relationship, and sending them unprompted removes almost every "where is my order?" chat before it is typed:
- Order confirmed: items, total, payment method, and roughly when it will arrive.
- Shipped: the courier name and the tracking link, sent the moment the label is created.
- Delivered or ready for pickup: the closing message, and the natural moment to ask for a review.
On cost, the mechanic worth knowing is the 24-hour window. Any reply you send within 24 hours of the customer's last message is free on Meta's side, however many messages it takes. An update sent outside that window uses a pre-approved template, and utility templates such as shipping notices are the cheap category. The whole fee structure is broken down in our WhatsApp API pricing guide, and the automated version of these three messages is order updates. On Shopify these three are only the beginning; the longer list is in Shopify WhatsApp automations.
Step 7: bring the customer back
The number in a customer's chat list is worth more than an email address, and it is easier to burn. Three rules keep it usable:
- Respect the window. Outside 24 hours you may send only approved templates, and marketing templates need an opt-in the customer actually gave you.
- Send things a person would want: the restock of the item they asked about, the cart they left behind, a reorder nudge for a consumable at the interval it runs out. Nothing else.
- Watch your quality rating. Blocks and reports drag it down, and a low rating cuts your messaging limits, so a bad broadcast costs you the channel, not just the campaign.
The highest-value follow-up is the cart or checkout somebody abandoned an hour ago, because intent is still warm and the message is expected rather than intrusive. Timed reminders that stop the moment payment lands are what cart recovery automates, and the timing and wording worth copying are in our cart recovery guide.
When a paid tool is not worth it
If one person can answer every chat during your opening hours and you are taking a handful of orders a day, the free WhatsApp Business app is the correct answer and any subscription is a worse one. We sell software and that does not change the arithmetic: a tool has to save more hours or more parcels than it costs, and at low volume it does not. The signals that it has started to are specific:
- Chats arrive after you close and are cold by the time you open.
- Two people need the same inbox at the same time, and the app gives you one phone.
- You are retyping the same five answers, in two languages, every day.
- Orders are being copied by hand from chat into your store, and some are getting lost in the copying.
- COD parcels are coming back often enough that you have started to notice the courier bill.
- You want to reach past 256 contacts, or reach customers who never saved your number.
When those appear, price the tool against the hours and the returned parcels, not against the sticker. Ours is flat: $29 per month for 500 conversations, with every feature on every plan and no per-message fee, and the full table is on the pricing page. It is not the only reasonable choice, and we compare the alternatives, including where they beat us, in our honest comparisons.
Measure your own numbers, not the internet's
Published benchmarks for chat commerce describe somebody else's store, in somebody else's country, selling somebody else's product. Four numbers from your own shop are worth more than all of them, and each takes minutes to work out:
| Number | How to work it out | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Chats started per week, by source | Count first messages, split by the prefilled text each entry point sends | Which link, code or ad is actually feeding you, so you stop paying for the ones that are not |
| Chat to order rate | Orders taken in chat divided by chats started, over the same week | Whether your answers close. A falling rate usually means slow replies, not bad products |
| Median first reply time | Take twenty chats and measure the gap between their first message and your first answer | The single number that most often explains a low close rate, especially after hours |
| RTO rate on COD | Parcels returned undelivered divided by COD parcels shipped, per month | What cash on delivery really costs you, and whether pre-dispatch confirmation is working |
Write down all four before you change anything, including before you buy any tool. A month later they tell you whether the change paid for itself, which is a question no vendor case study can answer for you.
Questions people ask about selling on WhatsApp
Can I sell on WhatsApp without a website?+
Yes, and most shops that sell on WhatsApp have no website. The free WhatsApp Business app carries a catalog of up to 500 items, customers browse it inside the chat, and you take the order in the same thread. Payment is cash on delivery, a bank transfer, or a payment link from your card processor. If you want the catalog hosted and the chat answered automatically, that is what our no-website setup does.
Do I need the WhatsApp Business API or is the free app enough?+
The free app is enough while one person can answer every chat during your opening hours and orders are in the single digits per day. Move to the Business Platform, the API, when chats pile up overnight, when more than one person needs the same inbox, when you want the chat connected to your store's live catalog and orders, or when you need to message customers who never saved your number. Below that, a subscription buys you nothing.
How do customers pay me on WhatsApp?+
Five ways, in rough order of how common they are worldwide: cash on delivery, a checkout link from your Shopify or WooCommerce store pasted into the chat, a payment link generated by your card processor, a bank transfer or wallet transfer confirmed by you, and in-chat payment, which Meta has only enabled in a short list of countries. Most stores in the Gulf, South Asia and Africa run on the first option and confirm each order before shipping.
How do I make a WhatsApp link or QR code for my business?+
Your link is wa.me/ followed by your number in full international format, with no plus sign, spaces or dashes. Add a prefilled first message with ?text= at the end, for example wa.me/9715XXXXXXX?text=Hi, I saw your window sign. The WhatsApp Business app also generates a QR code for the same link under your business profile, which you can print on receipts, packaging, menus and the shop window.
Why can I only message 250 people a day on WhatsApp Business?+
That is a messaging limit on the Business Platform, and it counts only the conversations your business starts, not your replies to customers. Meta's documentation, checked August 2026, puts a new business portfolio at 250 business-initiated conversations per 24 hours, then 2,000, 10,000, 100,000 and unlimited. You reach the 2,000 tier by completing business verification, and higher tiers come automatically while your message quality stays high.
Is it allowed to sell products in WhatsApp chats?+
Yes, within Meta's commerce policy, which bans a specific list of categories including alcohol, tobacco and vapes, drugs and drug paraphernalia, weapons and ammunition, live animals, adult products, and some medical and healthcare items. Catalog items are reviewed before customers can see them, and rejected items simply do not show. Check the current policy list before you build a catalog, because a rejected catalog is easier to avoid than to appeal.
How much does it cost to sell on WhatsApp?+
The WhatsApp Business app is free. On the Business Platform there is no license fee either, but Meta charges per delivered template message, with rates by country and category, and every reply you send inside the 24-hour window after a customer messages you is free. On top of that sits whatever software you use. Ours is flat, from $29 per month with every feature included, and we pass Meta's fees through at cost.