“Do you have this in blue?” “What sizes?” “Price?” If most of your WhatsApp day is spent sending the same product photos and typing the same details, you are doing by hand what the catalogue was built to do. Customers scroll your items inside the chat, you send a product with two taps, and the details are the same every time.
A WhatsApp catalogue for business works for shops, home bakers, boutiques, salons and service businesses with set packages. This post covers what the catalogue is good for, how to plan it, what to fill in for each item, how collections work, how to share items, how to link the catalogue with your website, and how to stop it going stale.
What the catalogue does well, and where it stops
The catalogue in the WhatsApp Business app is a list of products or services attached to your business profile. Each item has photos, a name, an optional price, a description and an optional link. Customers can browse it from your profile or from a link you send, ask about an item, and in many regions add items to a cart and send it to you as a message.
It is good at:
- Answering “what do you have?” without a stream of photos.
- Sending one item with consistent details, so two staff never quote two prices.
- Giving people a way to browse when they are not ready to ask.
It is not a full online shop. Stock levels, variants, delivery charges and payment are handled outside it, usually in the chat itself or on your website. Keep that in mind when deciding what to put in each item.
Planning a WhatsApp catalogue for business before adding items
A catalogue with every product you have ever sold is hard to browse and hard to keep accurate. Start with the items people actually ask about on WhatsApp.
- Scroll back through recent chats and note which products or services come up most.
- Group them into a few obvious sets, such as “Cakes”, “Cupcakes” and “Custom orders”, or “Haircuts”, “Colour” and “Treatments”.
- Decide how you handle variants. The catalogue has no proper size or colour options, so either list each variant as its own item, or list one item and say in the description which options are available.
- Decide on prices. Show them where they are fixed. Where they vary, say “from” or explain in the description what the price depends on.
Adding an item: what to fill in
You will find the catalogue in the app’s business tools. For each item:
Photos
Use clear, well-lit photos on a plain background, taken in daylight if you can. Show the item from more than one angle, plus a photo that shows scale, such as a bag being worn or a cake next to a knife. Photos of the real item beat supplier images, which customers may have already seen elsewhere.
Name
Name it the way customers ask for it. “Chocolate truffle cake, half kilo” is better than “CTC-05”. Keep your own internal code in the item code field if you use one.
Price
Optional, but showing a price saves a round of messages and filters out people for whom it is not right. If prices change often, decide whether you can keep them updated before you add them.
Description
Write the details a customer needs to decide: size, material, what is included, care instructions, delivery or collection options, lead time for made-to-order items. Short lines are easier to read on a phone than a long paragraph. Our guide on writing product descriptions goes further on what to include.
Link and item code
If the item has a page on your website, add the link. The item code is for your own reference, such as a stock or billing code.
Collections: grouping items so people can browse
Collections are groups of items shown together, like shelves in a shop. Customers see them as sections when they open the catalogue.
- Use a few collections with clear names, not a long list.
- Put your most asked-for items in the first collection.
- Use a seasonal collection, such as “Diwali gift boxes”, and remove it when the season ends.
- One item can appear in more than one collection if that helps people find it.
How to add products to WhatsApp chats and share them elsewhere
Once items are in the catalogue, sharing them is where the time saving comes from.
- Inside a chat: use the attachment menu to pick the catalogue and send an item. The customer sees the photo, name and price as a card they can tap.
- Sharing a link: each item, and the catalogue as a whole, has a share link you can copy. Paste it into an Instagram bio, a broadcast, an email or a social post.
- From quick replies: pair a saved answer like “Here are our current cake options” with a catalogue link, so staff can send both quickly. Our post on quick replies and labels shows how to set those up.
When a customer sends a cart, treat it as an enquiry, not a confirmed order. Reply to confirm stock, delivery and payment, and label the chat so it is not forgotten.
Linking the catalogue with your website
The catalogue and your website should agree. If a product costs one amount on WhatsApp and another online, customers notice and trust both less.
Some practical links between the two:
- Add website links to catalogue items, so customers who want more detail or reviews can see the product page.
- Put the catalogue link near the WhatsApp button on relevant website pages, for people who prefer to browse in the chat.
- Keep one source of truth for prices, usually the website or billing system, and update the catalogue from it.
Businesses on the WhatsApp Business Platform can connect a catalogue managed in Meta’s commerce tools, which can be fed from a store’s product data. That suits larger stores. For a small shop on the app, a regular manual check is usually enough.
Keeping prices, stock and rules in order
The fastest way to lose trust is a catalogue item that is out of stock, discontinued or wrongly priced. Build a small routine:
- Hide items that are temporarily unavailable, rather than deleting them, so you can show them again later.
- Delete items you will not sell again.
- Check prices whenever you change them in the shop or online.
- Review the whole catalogue at the start of each season.
Catalogue items are also subject to WhatsApp’s commerce policies, which restrict certain products. Items can be reviewed and, if they break the rules, rejected or hidden. If an item is rejected, check the reason shown in the app and the policy, then fix the item or leave it out.
Catalogues for service businesses
A catalogue is not just for products. Service businesses can list:
- Salons and spas: treatments with duration, what is included and a “from” price.
- Coaching centres: courses or batches, with class, schedule and mode, online or in person.
- Clinics: consultation types and what to bring. Keep medical claims out of descriptions.
- Repair services: common jobs with what affects the price.
For services, the description does more work than the photo. Say what happens, how long it takes and how to book.
The catalogue also shows on your profile, so set the profile up alongside it using our WhatsApp Business profile setup guide. How the catalogue fits into the rest of your WhatsApp selling is in our WhatsApp marketing for small business overview, and how WhatsApp works next to your other channels is in our digital marketing services hub.
Frequently asked questions
Can customers pay for catalogue items inside WhatsApp?
Payment features inside WhatsApp depend on the country and on what your account supports, and they change over time. Many small businesses take payment through a link, UPI, card on their website or cash on delivery, and use the catalogue only for browsing and choosing. Check the payment options available in your own app before promising customers anything.
How many photos should each catalogue item have?
Enough to answer the questions customers usually ask before buying. For clothing that may be the front, back, a close-up of the fabric and a photo being worn. For a cake, a top view and a side view may do. Too many similar photos slow people down without helping them decide.
Should my WhatsApp catalogue include everything on my website?
Not necessarily. The catalogue works best as a focused selection of what people ask about in chat. A small, accurate catalogue that links to the website for the full range is easier to maintain than a copy of every product, which quickly drifts out of date.
Can several staff update the catalogue?
On the Business app, changes are made from the account itself, so anyone with access to the phone or a linked device may be able to edit, depending on the device. Decide who is responsible for catalogue changes, so prices are not changed by one person and quoted differently by another.
Catalogue setup is part of how we prepare an account in our WhatsApp marketing services, along with the profile and saved replies. A small, accurate catalogue built by you from the steps above will do the job for most shops.
Next in this series: WhatsApp Quick Replies and Labels for Business
