October 08, 2026
A WhatsApp catalogue takes about an hour to set up and costs nothing. Open the WhatsApp Business app, go to Business tools, then Catalogue, add a product with a photo, name, price, description and link, and it appears on your profile for anyone who opens your chat. That is the right first step for most small businesses in India, and it stays enough for as long as orders are a few a day, every order is a conversation, and someone types each one into a notebook or a sheet.
It stops being enough when the customer needs to search, pay, see stock or get a GST invoice, and when you need the order to reach the packing table without a person retyping it. This piece walks through the three stages, catalogue, order form and store, with what each can and cannot do, and ends with the WhatsApp Business API and what it costs.
Use the WhatsApp Business app, not the personal one; the catalogue only exists in the business app. Fill in the business profile first: name as it appears on your signboard, category, address, hours, and a website if you have one. Customers read this before they read the catalogue.
Then, under Business tools, open Catalogue and add items. Each item takes a photo, a name, a price, a description, a link and an item code. The parts people skip are the parts that matter.
Switch the cart on in settings so a customer can add several items and send them to you as one message. Hide an item when it is out of stock rather than deleting it. On a desktop, Meta's Commerce Manager edits the same catalogue and lets you share it with a Facebook or Instagram shop.
Finally, get your wa.me short link from the app and put it on your Instagram bio, your Google Business Profile and your packaging. The catalogue is only useful to people who open the chat.
Quite a lot, and it is better to know now.
It cannot be searched. A catalogue holds up to 500 items, and a customer scrolls. Past about 40 items, people ask you instead of looking.
It cannot take payment inside the flow in a way that runs a business. WhatsApp's own UPI payment exists in India, but it does not produce an invoice, does not reconcile with orders, and most businesses end up sending a payment link from a gateway anyway. Article 23 covers those links.
It has no stock. There is no quantity field. You hide the item when it runs out, if you remember.
It does not issue GST invoices. You make the invoice in Tally or a billing app and send the PDF by hand.
It does not handle variants well. A saree in six colours is six items, or one item with "tell us your colour" in the description.
It has no order history. A repeat customer scrolls back through the chat to find what they ordered last time. So do you.
It is one number. Up to four devices can be linked, and everyone on them sees every chat. There is no "assign this order to Priya".
It is invisible to Google. Nobody searching for your product by name will ever find the catalogue. It works for people who already know you, and that is its honest limit.
A WhatsApp order form is a page, a Google Form or a small custom form where the customer picks items and quantities once, and the result arrives as a structured message or a row in a sheet instead of as a conversation. About 320 people a month in India search for exactly this, and for many of them it is the right stop.
It fits when your customers are repeat buyers with a fixed price list: dealers ordering stock, a hostel mess ordering vegetables, an office ordering stationery, a tiffin service, a wholesaler's regular retailers. They know what they want; they need a faster way to tell you.
The simplest version is a Google Form linked to a Google Sheet. The next step up is a page on your website with the product list and a button that opens WhatsApp with the order already written in the message (the wa.me link accepts prefilled text). We have built small custom forms of this kind with a pincode check and a live total, and they sit inside our custom tools work rather than ecommerce, because there is no checkout.
What the form gives you: orders in columns instead of paragraphs, less retyping, and a sheet you can total at the end of the month.
What it still does not give you: stock, payment at the time of ordering, a login, a history, or an invoice. When those become the daily problem, you have outgrown the form.
The signs are consistent across the businesses we have watched make this move.
A store solves each of these: search and filters, variants, live stock, a payment gateway at checkout, cash on delivery with a pincode check, a GST invoice PDF on every order, and an order status page. WhatsApp does not go away. It moves to where it is good: an order confirmation and a dispatch message on WhatsApp, and a chat button on the product page for the questions a store cannot answer.
The platform question, Shopify or custom, is article 22. In cost terms a Shopify store designed and set up by a studio runs roughly 60,000 to 2,50,000 rupees plus the monthly plan, and a custom store roughly 2,00,000 to 10,00,000 and above, the range depending on catalogue size, pricing rules and integrations. Both need confirming for your case.
Keep the catalogue when you launch the store. Commerce Manager can take a product feed from the store, so the store becomes the one place you edit products and the WhatsApp catalogue follows it.
The catalogue API is part of the WhatsApp Business Platform, the developer side of WhatsApp that runs on the Cloud API rather than the phone app. It lets software do three things: create and update catalogue items from a feed, send product messages inside a chat (a single product card, or a multi product message with up to 30 items from your catalogue), and receive an order message when a customer sends a cart.
Who needs it: a store with a hundred or more products whose stock changes daily, so the catalogue must update itself; a business that wants to send "here is the product you asked about" as a card rather than a screenshot; and anyone who wants carts from WhatsApp to land in the store's order system without retyping.
What it needs: a Meta Business account with business verification, a phone number that is not already on the WhatsApp app, and either a developer or a WhatsApp business solution provider whose platform sits between you and Meta. Most small businesses use a provider, because the provider gives them a shared inbox and templates without code.
If you only need a catalogue that a customer can browse, you do not need the API. The app does that for free.
First, what it is not for. A "chat with us" button on your website is a wa.me link. It costs nothing and needs no API. About 320 people a month in India search for "whatsapp api for website" and a good share of them want that button.
The API is for the other direction: messages your systems send out. Order confirmations, dispatch updates, OTPs, payment reminders, abandoned cart nudges, offers to people who opted in. It also gives several staff one inbox on one number, with conversations assigned to people.
Meta charges per message, by category, and the rates for India at the time of writing are roughly 0.8 rupees for a marketing message and roughly 0.12 for a utility message such as an order update. Replies within 24 hours of a customer messaging you are free. Those figures move, so confirm them on Meta's pricing page. On top of that the solution provider charges a platform fee, usually monthly and tiered by volume, and there is the one time work of connecting the API to your store or tool.
Two consequences. Utility messages are cheap: a store sending a few hundred order and dispatch updates a month spends less on them than on a courier bag. Marketing messages are not: a broadcast to 10,000 opted in customers is about 8,000 rupees each time, so the API rewards businesses that send fewer, better targeted messages. Every outbound template also needs Meta's approval before it can be sent, and the customer must have opted in.
We connect the WhatsApp Business API to the stores and internal tools we build, so the order confirmation, the dispatch message and the dealer's reorder reminder come from the same system that holds the order. If you are at the "we send every payment link by hand" stage, that is usually the conversation to have.
Yes. The catalogue in the WhatsApp Business app costs nothing, holds up to 500 items and needs no developer. You pay only when you move to the Business API, and then per message plus the provider's fee.
Not in a way that runs a business. WhatsApp's UPI payment exists in India, but there is no invoice or reconciliation, so most businesses send a payment link from Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree or PhonePe after the cart arrives.
No. A button that opens a chat is a wa.me link with your number and an optional prefilled message. The API is only needed when your website or store must send messages to customers on its own.
Yes. Meta's Commerce Manager accepts a product feed from a store, and the catalogue API can update items directly, so the store stays the single place you edit products.
Up to 500 items in the app. In practice a catalogue becomes hard to browse well before that, because there is no search, and collections are the only way to group things.
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