Updated on September 30, 2023

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WhatsApp Native Ecommerce – Product catalog message

You can showcase and share your products and services with your customers for them to browse items and add to a cart without leaving the chat.

Please note:

  • test WhatsApp phone numbers don’t support testing product catalogue messages.
  • Also, WhatsApp cloud API doesn’t support product catalog features yet. You have to use BSP(like 360dialog) for now. Once WhatsApp cloud API is supported, we will make updates.

But once this message type is supported, you will be able to build the native ecommerce shopping experience with Cloud API as well.

For now, you can use our 360Dialog integration for it.

You can find the step by step training below & demo as well.

You can watch the demo and build with the product catalog message here (opens new window).

To use products and catalogs in your WhatsApp Business API account, please follow the next steps.

  • Create product catalog & Upload Inventory to Facebook

First, you need to upload your inventory to Facebook. You can use the API or Facebook’s Commerce Manager to do that.

Your inventory needs to be uploaded to Facebook in a catalog format — see About Catalogs (opens new window)for more information.

If you already have a Facebook catalog set up, we suggest that you leverage that catalog for WhatsApp commerce use cases.

If you need to create a catalog, there are two possibilities:

You can upload only one catalog per WhatsApp Business Account (WABA), but the same catalog can belong to multiple phone numbers.

  • Special requirement for selling in India If you are selling in India, you need to comply with Facebook requirements regarding the product catalog, more details, you can find out in the video below:
  • Sync the products from Facebook to Dot Com Conversations Now back to Dot Com Conversations, go to the WhatsApp Cloud channel, you can click “View Catalog”, and then it will pull all the catalogs under your current business account.

And select the “Facebook to Local” button as per the screenshot above. You should be able to sync all the products in your Facebook catalog back to our built-in eCommerce.

And the most important thing here is to make sure the “SKU” in Dot Com Conversations is the same as “ContentID” with your Facebook Catalog.

And here is the same value in Facebook Catalog.

  • Connect Product catalog with WhatsApp number

You need to connect your WhatsApp number with a product catalog. Only after that, you can send the product catalog messages.

  • Send product catalog message

Now you have to sync the product catalog into UChat built-in eCommerce, you can now use the send product in the send message node.

If you go to your WhatsApp Cloud API, when you click “View catalogue”, you will be able to see the catalog ID that is connected with your WABA account.

You can select to send single product message or multiple product message

If you are sending multiple product messages, you can select how many sections you want to include, and then choose the retail ids(which are contentID in the Facebook Catalog).

If you have already synced Facebook Catalog with UChat ecommerce, you can use the “Get products” action to dynamically populate the retails IDs.

You can go to Actions, and then select “ecommerce”, and then “Get products”

You can use built-in filters to dynamically populate the retail IDs to use in sending product catalog messages.

  • Set up product inquiry trigger

You will learn more about setting up a “WhatsApp product inquiry trigger”. This will trigger the message every time your customer sends you a message inquiry on the product detail page.

  • Set up WhatsApp order created trigger

WhatsApp order received trigger will be triggered when the user sends the cart.

You can use the value inside of this trigger to generate the checkout link for the user.

  • Collect the payment

In this section, you will learn how to generate the checkout links and collect the payment for the WhatsApp order.

#Collect payment through Stripe & Paypal

Checkout with Paypal & Stripe is supported natively with Dot Com Conversations. 

Collect payment through RazorPay

Dot Com Conversations has very flexible checkout options, you can easily integrate with 3rd party payment gateway.

You can find these integrations from our mini app store.

Checkout with template messages

WhatsApp only supports buttons that link to external websites.

Dot Com Conversations supports you to send template messages, you need to submit the template message in 360dialog or Cloud API, and then sync the approved template message back to Dot Com Conversations.

Then you can send these template messages in our flow builder.

Mark order as paid – Stripe & Paypal

In the last step when the payment has been completed, you can:

  1. mark the order as paid.
  2. Send notification
  3. Sync the order information to Google Sheets.

P.S: If you are using Stripe & Paypal to make the payment, you will see 2 same value orders in Dot Com Conversations. This is because a custom product is created to make the payment.

Mark order as paid – RazorPay

If you are using RazorPay to make the payment, when the Razorpay has completed, you should be able to update the order status. If you are using another local payment gateway, you can do the same.