To turn WhatsApp chats into orders for your online store, we recommend this setup: answer the product question in the chat, send the customer to the right product page and take payment at your site’s checkout. When a customer asks about a product, you send a clear answer the same day, within working hours, along with a link that opens that product’s page with the color and size they have chosen. The customer takes care of the cart and payment on your site, and you send the order confirmation, the bank transfer details and the shipping updates over WhatsApp. You never ask for card details in the chat, and on price and stock you only repeat what your site says.
The first decision to make is which orders you will take in the chat and when you will send the customer to your site; your quick replies, bank transfer messages and order confirmations all follow from that decision. You can tailor the sample messages to your own products and see what to watch for in the rules on distance contracts and commercial messages when selling on WhatsApp. Messages that your store initiates, such as campaign announcements and cart or back-in-stock reminders, come under WhatsApp marketing; the steps below focus on chats that customers open by writing to you of their own accord.
Should you take the order on WhatsApp or on your site?
For a store with a website, we recommend combining the two: the decision is made in the chat, and the order is created on the site. WhatsApp’s catalog and cart features are better suited to businesses that have no website or sell only a small number of products. According to Meta’s catalog documentation for the WhatsApp Business Platform (API), when the cart feature is turned on, customers can add multiple products from the catalog to a cart and send them as a single order. The same documentation states that a business cannot send a cart to a customer, and that a cart cannot be changed once it has been sent. A customer who wants a different size or has forgotten an item has to send a new cart. You also need to keep the prices and stock levels in the catalog in sync with your site separately.
Having the order created on your site also has a legal side. Türkiye’s Distance Contracts Regulation (Mesafeli Sözleşmeler Yönetmeliği) requires the consumer to be informed before the contract is concluded (Article 5). The seller must also have the consumer confirm, in a way suited to the means of distance communication used, that they have received this pre-contractual information; Article 7 ends that obligation with the sentence “Otherwise, the contract is deemed not to have been concluded.” If your site’s checkout shows the pre-contractual information form and the distance sales contract, and collects the customer’s approval, moving the sale there takes care of this requirement as well. For orders you create manually from a chat, work out with a lawyer how you will provide the information and obtain the confirmation.
Taking an order manually in the chat makes sense in only a few cases:
- The product is not sold on your site: made-to-measure pieces, custom embroidery or printing, corporate or bulk orders.
- The customer has repeatedly run into errors while paying on your site and wants to complete the order with your help.
- A long-standing customer who finds it hard to shop on their phone asks for help.
Even when you take an order in the chat, create it in your admin panel if your e-commerce platform allows it. Send a customer who is paying by card to your site’s payment page; if they have tried repeatedly to pay by card without success, suggest whichever alternative your site offers: bank transfer (havale or EFT) or pay on delivery. An order created in the panel then goes through stock deduction, invoicing and shipping the same way as every other order on your site.
Placing an order through a WhatsApp conversation does not take away the consumer’s right to withdraw from the contract within fourteen days without giving any reason (Article 9). The exceptions are listed in Article 15 of the same regulation; for example, unless the parties agree otherwise, the consumer cannot exercise the right of withdrawal for goods prepared in line with their own requests or personal needs. If a product you sell through a chat is made to the customer’s measurements, or embroidered or printed at their request, say so clearly in the pre-contractual information; the regulation requires that information to set out the cases in which the right of withdrawal cannot be exercised (Article 5).
Know which product brought the customer to the chat
A first reply that begins with “Which product do you mean?” adds an extra round to the sales conversation. When a customer taps the button on a product page and writes “Hi, could I get some information?”, you first have to find the product and then work out the question. If the button on the product page opens the chat with a pre-filled message that already includes the product name and link, that extra round of questions and answers disappears and your team can go straight to the question.
A WhatsApp button that overlaps the “Add to cart” button, covers the product image or clashes with pop-ups makes it harder for customers to do what they actually came to do; position the button with a phone screen in mind. To add a WhatsApp button to your site without writing any code, you can use the free WhatsApp button tool. The ready-made code it gives you fixes the button to the bottom-right or bottom-left corner of the page; on every page, the button opens the chat with the same pre-filled message and does not add the product name to it automatically. For the message to include the product name and page address as well, you will need to build the pre-filled message in the link separately for each product page in your theme. Once you have added the code, open a product page on your phone and check that the corner button does not cover the “Add to cart” area.
If you send people to WhatsApp from an Instagram story or an ad, make sure the customer’s first message contains a phrase that tells you which post they came from. A pre-filled sentence such as “I’m writing about the linen shirt in your story” saves your team from having to ask which product it is.
Use a single sales number across all channels and make it clear who is responsible for the chats on that number. When conversations are split between the store owner’s personal phone, the warehouse manager’s phone and the company line, a customer may ask the same question on each number separately, and order details can get lost in between. To sort messages arriving at the same number by topic, you can use Pushouse’s WhatsApp question routing module to place single-tap buttons such as “Product question,” “My order” and “Returns” under the greeting message, and to route free-text messages according to rules and keywords you define.
Speed up the first reply, but don’t hand the chat over to a bot
A customer asking about a product may be close to a decision, and could be looking at similar products in other tabs at the same time. If your reply slips to the next day, they might make that decision in another store. Speed starts with writing the answers to your most frequent questions in advance. WhatsApp’s guide for businesses likewise recommends setting up quick replies for the questions you hear most often, and using greeting and away messages to show customers straight away that their message has arrived. The same guide suggests sorting chats into lists so you can keep track of the stage each customer has reached.
Build your list of quick replies from the questions your customers actually ask. Read through the past month’s chats and count the questions that keep coming up. In clothing, questions about size and fit may top the list; in cosmetics, skin type and expiry dates; in electronics, warranty and compatibility. Consider adding questions about delivery times, return and exchange terms, pay on delivery and installment options as well. Write each answer once, matching the terms on your site exactly, and add a link to the relevant policy page.
Put a real time in your away message. “We’ll get back to you as soon as possible” tells the customer nothing, whereas a customer who knows when they will get an answer may be willing to wait.
Hello, we’ve received your message. Our team replies on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and we’ll answer your question first thing on the next business day. If it’s about an order, including your order number will help us respond faster. Please note: we never ask you for your card details.
There is one more time limit if you message customers through the WhatsApp Business Platform (API). According to Meta’s documentation on service messages, a customer’s message opens a “customer service window” of 24 hours, and each further message from them resets the clock to 24 hours. Once the window has closed, you can write to the customer only with pre-approved template messages, and only if they have opted in to hearing from you. Leave a product question that arrives on Friday evening until Monday, and the chance to reply in free-form text will long since have closed; put someone in charge of checking the chats at least once a day over the weekend.
Automation makes the first greeting faster and gets questions to the right person sooner, but don’t try to close the sale with automated replies. The WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy does allow automation within the 24-hour window, but it requires you to offer clear paths that let the customer leave the automated replies and reach you promptly and directly. The policy lists these paths in the following order: transfer to a human agent within the chat, phone, email, support on your website, an in-store visit and a support form. In the question routing module, once a conversation is handed over to an agent, the bot goes quiet and your team picks up the chat in the panel.
End every reply with a single product link
A chat turns into an order more easily when the customer doesn’t have to think about the next step. Before you send the link, try it once on your phone: if your platform supports it, the page should open with the color and size the customer chose, and the “Add to cart” button should be visible without scrolling.
Avoid these mistakes in sales chats:
- Linking to your home page or a category listing instead of the product itself. The customer has to hunt for the product again.
- Sending a screenshot of the product image. A picture cannot take anyone to the cart; the customer has to ask for the link separately.
- Quoting a price in the chat that does not appear on your site. Seeing a different amount at checkout can shake the customer’s trust and lead them to abandon the cart. If you are going to offer a special discount, create a code that actually works on your site and include it in the message.
- Sending an undecided customer five options in a single message. Two options and one sentence explaining the difference between them are usually enough.
- Guessing at the shipping date or stock availability. When in doubt, check with the warehouse and come back a few minutes later with a firm answer.
Sample replies to product questions
A good reply answers the product question directly and adds a piece of information the customer has not asked about yet but needs in order to decide. For a size question:
Hi {{customer name}}, the {{product name}} is a regular fit. You mentioned you’re 1.70 m tall and usually wear an M; an M will be comfortable in this style too, and if you prefer a looser fit, you could go for an L. The black M is in stock, and this link opens with that option already selected: {{product link}}. If the size doesn’t fit, we’ll exchange it free of charge within {{exchange period}}.
Take the exchange period and conditions from your returns page: if you don’t offer free exchanges, remove the words “free of charge”; if you don’t offer exchanges at all, remove the whole last sentence. Every promise in the message has to match your returns page.
When a product is sold out, don’t send the customer away empty-handed; suggest the closest alternative and tell them how they can find out when the item is back in stock:
The {{product name}} is currently sold out in navy. The same fit is available in charcoal: {{product link}}. If you’d like to hear when the navy is back, tick “Notify me when back in stock” on the product page.
Delete the last sentence if your site has no back-in-stock notification option; don’t make the customer a promise you can’t keep.
If the customer says “Let me think about it”
Don’t push; just ask whether they’d like a reminder: “If you’d like to take another look tomorrow, shall I send you a short reminder?” If they say yes, send a single message the next day. On the Business Platform (API), send that message within 24 hours of the customer’s last message; after that, you can only send an approved template. If they don’t reply, leave the conversation there.
If a customer added the product to the cart on your site and then left, and your automatic cart reminder is switched on, a separate message may go out to them as well. If your agent has promised a reminder, check whether that automatic message will go out; if it will, your agent should not send one of their own. The logic of the automated flow is explained in our article on how cart reminder messages work.
Decide what to write in the chat for each payment method
In the chat, don’t ask for a card number, expiry date, security code or the verification code sent by the bank; take card payments only on your site’s payment page. The WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy also prohibits sharing full card numbers or asking customers to share them. Add the sentence “We never ask you for your card details” from your away message to your WhatsApp profile description as well; it serves as a warning against scammers who message your customers using your store’s name.
Another request you may come across in the chat is “Can you send me your IBAN?” from a customer who has not placed an order yet. If your site offers bank transfer, ask them to place the order on the site with that option instead of sending the IBAN right away; a payment that arrives without an order number is harder to match with the right order. Once the order has been created, give the bank details, the amount and the order number to enter in the transfer description in a single message; splitting the information over several messages, or saying “Our IBAN is on the website,” sends the customer off to look for it before they can pay.
With pay-on-delivery orders, the risk is a parcel that comes back because nobody accepted it. Before you hand such an order from a chat to the carrier, send a short message asking the customer to confirm the address and the amount. That way, you can catch an order that was entered incorrectly, or one the customer has changed their mind about, before the parcel leaves the warehouse.
If the customer gets stuck at checkout
A customer who writes “The payment isn’t going through” has made it all the way to checkout; move that message to the front of the queue. First, ask where the problem appears: a declined card, a verification code from the bank that never arrives, a discount code that won’t work or a required field left empty in the address form are among the possible causes. If the customer types their card details into the chat unprompted, ask them to delete the message with the “Delete for everyone” option and, if necessary, to contact their bank; delete the message on your side as well, and don’t save it anywhere.
Let’s look into it right away, {{customer name}}. Does the error come up when your card is being approved, with the code from your bank, or when you enter the discount code? You can simply type the warning you see on the screen, or send a screenshot with your card details out of view. Please don’t write your card details here.
Confirm the order in the same chat
When the customer writes “I’ve placed the order,” close the conversation with the order number. Doing so ties the sales conversation to the order record; when the customer later comes back to the same chat and asks “What’s happened to my parcel?”, you won’t have to search for the order.
We’ve received your order, {{customer name}}. Your order number is {{order number}}. Your {{product name}} will ship {{ship day}}, and we’ll send you the tracking details here. If there’s a mistake in the address or size, let us know and we’ll fix it before it ships.
Don’t leave later notifications for your agents to write by hand; confirmation, preparation and shipping messages should go out as the order status changes, at the same stage and with the same content for every order. In Pushouse’s WhatsApp order updates module, a message goes to the customer at the steps you choose, whether that is when the order is received, confirmed or shipped; a customer who chooses bank transfer as the payment method also sees your IBAN, along with your bank name and account name, right in the WhatsApp message. When the order ships, the WhatsApp order tracking module sends the customer a message with the order number, the carrier’s tracking number and a link to follow the shipment, so the customer gets the information without having to write “Where’s my order?”
Get separate consent for campaign messages
After the order, be clear about which message relies on which kind of consent. Türkiye’s Regulation on Commercial Communication and Commercial Electronic Messages (Ticari İletişim ve Ticari Elektronik İletiler Hakkında Yönetmelik) requires recipients to give their consent before commercial electronic messages are sent to them (Article 5). Under Article 6, however, if recipients have given their contact details so that they can be contacted, “no separate consent is required for commercial electronic messages concerning changes to, or the use and maintenance of, the goods or services supplied.” Sending washing instructions for the linen shirt a customer bought falls within that scope, for example; adding the new season’s sale to the same message does not.
For order confirmations, bank transfer details and shipping notifications, the more direct provision is in the second paragraph of the same article: prior consent is not required for “messages containing notifications relating to purchases and deliveries or similar situations,” but such notifications may not be used to “promote or advertise” any goods or services. Keep coupons, campaign announcements and product recommendations out of your order and shipping messages.
WhatsApp’s policy, for its part, lets you write to someone on WhatsApp only when they have shared their number or username with you and have also opted in to messages from you. Although the regulation lets order and shipping notifications go out without prior consent, WhatsApp’s condition still applies to them. When someone says they don’t want to receive messages, you must honor the request, whether they said so on WhatsApp or through another channel.
A customer who asks about a product or orders through a chat has not thereby agreed to receive campaign messages in the future. To send campaign and discount announcements, ask for consent explicitly, keep a record of it and immediately remove any customer who says “I don’t want to receive messages” from the list. Our guide to separating customer groups in campaign messages shows which groups among your opted-in customers should get messages of their own.
Where you record consent matters too. Under the current text of the regulation, consent can also be obtained through İYS (İleti Yönetim Sistemi), Türkiye’s official system for recording consent to commercial electronic messages. Consent obtained in any other way must be registered in the system within three business days, because “consents not registered in İYS shall be deemed invalid” (Articles 5 and 7). When a customer submits an opt-out request, you also have to stop sending campaign messages; Article 10 sets an upper limit of three business days for this. Check with your lawyer whether consent you collect on WhatsApp needs to be entered into İYS and, if so, how.
Measure which chats turn into sales
To see the return on the hours your team spends in chats, you need to know how many orders selling on WhatsApp actually brings in. Label chats by stage or sort them into lists: “New question,” “Link sent,” “Ordered,” “Gave up.” A weekly look at these lists shows how many chats turned into orders and at which stage the others were lost. If the “Link sent” list is crowded and the “Ordered” list is empty, look for the problem first on the product page, in your pricing and shipping terms, and at checkout.
Tag the product links you send in chats with source parameters (UTM). Adding parameters such as “?utm_source=whatsapp&utm_medium=chat” to the end of a link lets you see visits and orders from WhatsApp chats separately in your web analytics tool. If the address already contains a “?”, as links that open with a color or size selected do, add the parameters in the form “&utm_source=whatsapp&utm_medium=chat”; a second “?” can break both the selection and the source information. Every agent should write the parameters the same way; if one writes “whatsapp” and another “WhatsApp,” the report will show two different sources. Saving the links in your quick replies in this format makes the job easier.
Feed recurring questions back into the product page. When the same product draws questions such as “Does the fabric make you sweat?” or “Is there a charger in the box?” every week, the answer is missing from the product description. Once you fix the description, the question may come up less often, and customers who want to decide without writing to you on WhatsApp will find the information they need on the page.
