WhatsApp Business catalogue or a website?

What the WhatsApp catalogue does well

The WhatsApp Business catalogue lets you upload products with a photo, price, description and link, and group them into collections. Customers see it from your profile without leaving the chat, and can put together an order of several products and send it to you.

• It's free and you set it up yourself from your phone.
• It's inside the chat, right where you already talk to customers.
• You can send a specific product in the conversation instead of hunting for the photo in your gallery.
• For someone who has bought before and is reordering, it's quick and convenient.

Its limits: where sales slip away

• It doesn't appear on Google. When someone searches «custom cakes in Surco» or «school uniforms in Arequipa», your catalogue doesn't show. Only people who already have you saved or got your link see it.
• It lives inside the app. Customers need WhatsApp open to see it, and on a computer the experience is awkward. For business buyers comparing at a desk, that matters.
• With many products it becomes a long list. Collections help, but there's no search box or filters by size, price or colour like on a well-built website.
• Little room to explain. Shipping options, delivery areas, guarantees, how to pay, frequently asked questions: all of it ends up being typed by hand in every chat.
• It isn't yours. It depends on Meta's commerce rules: some products and services aren't allowed, and if the account has a problem, the catalogue goes with it.

What a website adds

The website doesn't replace WhatsApp: it brings people to it. It's what shows up when someone who doesn't know you searches for what you sell, and what earns their trust before they message you. It holds everything the catalogue can't explain well.

• People find you on Google and Google Maps, because your profile can link to the site.
• Products organised by category, with visible prices and large photos, easy to browse on a phone or a computer.
• A section on shipping, payment methods and FAQs that answers for you what you currently answer thirty times a day.
• An address of your own to put on your sign, on Instagram, on TikTok and on your bags.
• It's yours: it doesn't depend on an app changing its rules.

How they work together

1. The website attracts and explains

   The customer arrives from Google, Instagram or a shared link. They see your products, prices, how you ship and how you take payment. By the time they reach the button, they know what they want.

2. The button opens your WhatsApp with the order written

   Each product has a button that opens the chat with the message already composed: which product, which size, how much. You receive an order, not a «hi, info please».

3. WhatsApp closes and collects

   You confirm stock, arrange delivery, send your Yape or Plin. The conversation carries on where it always has, it just starts much further along.

4. The catalogue serves returning customers

   For regulars who already have you saved, the in-chat catalogue is still handy. There's no need to remove it.

Signs you've outgrown the catalogue

• You answer the same questions about shipping, sizes and prices several times a day.
• You have so many products that even you take a while to find one in your catalogue.
• Your competitors show up on Google and you don't.
• Businesses or customers message asking for «a page where I can see everything».
• You want to put an address on your sign or your bags and don't have one.