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Overview

What this platform does, and the five steps between signing up and a customer receiving a message.

This platform sends WhatsApp messages to your customers when something happens in your store. An order is placed, a parcel ships, a payment clears, a cart is abandoned. Your store says what happened; the platform works out which approved WhatsApp template that maps to, fills in the values, hands it to Meta, and records what came back.

It runs on the WhatsApp Business Cloud API, so messages arrive from your own business number with your verified business name on them, not from a shared sender.

How a message travels

There are four parties. Your store decides a message is due, the platform turns that into a template send, Meta delivers it, and the customer receives it in the same WhatsApp they use with their family. Nothing here is a simulation of WhatsApp. It is WhatsApp.

Your store never talks to Meta directly. It sends an event; the platform does the rest.

The five steps

Between creating an account and a customer's phone buzzing there are five things to do, and they have to happen in this order. Steps two and three are the ones people skip.

Link a WhatsApp Business number
The number becomes a WhatsApp Business number owned by your Meta business account. It cannot already be in use in the WhatsApp or WhatsApp Business app, Connect your WhatsApp number explains what to do if it is.
Register that number on the Cloud API
A separate action from linking it, done with a 6-digit two-step PIN. Until it is done, Meta rejects every send with error 133010, with approved templates and a full balance. This is the single most common "nothing works at all" cause.
Submit the template catalog and wait for Meta
18 templates cover the transactional events a store needs. Submitting them is one click, or one API call. Approval is Meta's, takes minutes to a few hours, and nothing business-initiated sends until it lands. See Message templates and approval.
Connect your store
Install the WooCommerce plugin or the Shopify app, or call the API from your own backend with an API key. All three end up making the same request.
An order happens, and the customer gets a message
Your store sends the event and its variables; the platform picks the approved template for it, orders the parameters correctly, charges the message and returns Meta's message id. From there you can follow the delivery from sent to delivered to read.

The dashboard after setup: the connected number with its quality rating and daily messaging limit, the message credit balance, and a chart of messages sent, delivered and failed over the last seven days. — The dashboard once a number is connected and templates are approved.

Two ways to send

There is one messaging engine and two doors into it. Which one you use decides how much you have to know about WhatsApp.

Notifications: POST /v1/notifications/send. You send an event key such as order_shipped plus named variables. Template selection, parameter ordering, approval state and the 24-hour window are handled for you. This is what the WooCommerce plugin and the Shopify app call, and what a custom store should call.
Core messaging: POST /v1/messages/send. A thin pass-through to Meta for free-form replies, media, interactive menus and templates you wrote yourself. You choose the message type and build the positional {{1}}/{{2}} arrays by hand, and a non-template type is refused when the window is closed.

If you are telling a customer about something that happened in your store, use notifications. The low-level endpoint makes it easy to build a send that Meta silently refuses.

What it costs

Meta prices a WhatsApp conversation, not a message, and the price depends on the category. A marketing conversation costs several times more than a utility one, and a free-form reply inside an open window costs nothing at all. Message credits mirror that: the charge for a send is derived from the recipient's country, the template's category and your plan.

Because of that, never assume a flat price per message. Every successful send returns X-Message-Category, X-Message-Price and the balance left in response headers, read those. Credits and billing has the detail.

Where to go next

Quick startA new account to a delivered order confirmation, in order, with nothing skipped.Connect your WhatsApp numberLinking a number and registering it on the Cloud API, the step whose absence breaks every send.The 24-hour windowThe rule that decides whether a message can be free-form or must be a template.Templates and approvalWhy business-initiated messages must be templates, and what each approval state means.IntegrationsWooCommerce, Shopify, Zapier and form plugins, a store connected without writing code.API referenceEvery endpoint and every field, for a custom or headless store.

If something is already not working, Troubleshooting is ordered by how often each cause turns out to be the answer, so start at the top and stop when it fires.

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