The WhatsApp Business catalogue, done properly

A shop window inside the chat

The catalogue is a set of items, each with a photo, a name and, if you like, a price, description and link. It shows on your business profile and you can send any item inside a conversation. It is free, and it comes with the app, under Tools (the help centre spells it ‘Catalog’).

It was designed for shops, but a service business gets as much out of it, if not more. A salon, a garage or an academy gets the same five questions every day: what do you do, how much is it, how long does it take, what’s included, how do I book. A good item answers all five with one tap, and the customer can forward it to whoever they like.

How to add a catalogue in WhatsApp Business

These are the steps in the help centre for Android; on iPhone, the same page has its own version:

1. In Tools, tap Catalog, then Add new item.
2. Add photos or videos: up to 10 per item, with a 50 MB limit per video.
3. Type the name. Every item needs a unique name within your catalogue, according to the help centre.
4. Choose the country of origin. It is required even if you sell a service: yours is the country where you work.
5. Fill in the optional fields: price, sale price, description, website link and code for the product or service.
6. Tap Save.

Then comes the review. According to the same page, every photo, video and item is checked against WhatsApp’s commerce policy, and nobody sees the item until it is approved. If it is rejected, a red exclamation mark appears next to it and you can request another review from the item itself.

One detail that catches people out: the help centre notes that adding prices is only available in some countries. If the price field doesn’t appear, it isn’t something you did wrong.

What to put on each item if you sell services

Five rules that work in any trade:

• The name, in the customer’s words. ‘Cut and blow-dry’, not ‘Service 01’. It is what they will look for.
• The price, the real one. If it depends on hair length or the car model, say so in the description: from how much, and what it depends on.
• The description answers three questions: how long it takes, what’s included and what to know or bring beforehand.
• Your own photos. The result, the premises, the team at work. A stock photo says the opposite of what you want to say.
• The link goes where the sale closes: the booking page, the course page, the quote form.

Three example items, from made-up businesses:

Estudio Ribera · hair salon

Balayage highlights · about 2 h 30 min

Hand-painted graduated colour, with toner and styling included. The price depends on length: send us a photo of your hair and we’ll tell you before you book. This appointment is booked with a deposit.

Taller Sierra · garage

Pre-ITV check (Spain’s MOT) · 45 min

We check lights, brakes, tyres and emissions before your ITV test. If anything needs fixing, we give you a quote before we touch it. Bring the car’s technical data sheet.

Academia Sur · academy

Spanish B1 for adults · Tuesdays and Thursdays, 19:00 to 20:30

Small groups, course from October to June. The first class is a free trial: ask for it right here and tell us your level.

Collections for the catalogue, labels for the chats

They are two different tools, and it helps not to mix them up.

Collections group catalogue items, like the sections of a menu: ‘Colour’, ‘Cuts’ and ‘Treatments’ at the salon; ‘Servicing’, ‘Tyres’ and ‘ITV’ at the garage. With more than ten items and no collections, the catalogue becomes a long list nobody scrolls to the end of.

Labels don’t go in the catalogue: they sort conversations. The help centre allows up to 20 and warns that WhatsApp is gradually replacing them with ‘lists’, so you may already see that name. Four that work well alongside a catalogue:

• ‘Asked about a service’, for someone who opened an item and didn’t book.
• ‘Quote sent’, for the garage waiting for a yes.
• ‘Deposit pending’, for the appointment that isn’t closed.
• ‘New customer’, to greet newcomers differently.

The habit that makes them useful: five minutes at the end of the day looking at ‘Asked about a service’ and ‘Deposit pending’. That is where the half-finished sales are.

How to use it in the conversation

• Send the item instead of describing it. From the chat itself you can send one item or a whole collection, with its photo and price, as the WhatsApp Business site shows.
• Put the catalogue link in your greeting message and in a quick reply (/services), so ‘what do you do?’ takes one second to answer.
• Hide, don’t delete. Whatever you don’t offer this season can be hidden and shown again later, without rebuilding the item.

What the catalogue doesn’t do

A catalogue is a shop window, and shop windows don’t talk. It helps to know where it stops:

• It doesn’t answer. If the customer asks ‘and for very long hair, how much would it be?’, the answer is still yours, whenever you get to it.
• It doesn’t know about free slots. An item doesn’t say whether there is a time on Thursday, and it doesn’t book anything.
• It doesn’t update itself. Change a price, change the item, and every new photo goes through the review again.

And the most common case: someone asks about something that isn’t in the catalogue. A service you offer but haven’t uploaded, a variant, a combination. The catalogue can’t do anything with that, and the conversation waits until you have a moment.

That is where an assistant on the WhatsApp Business Platform comes in: it reads the question, answers from your catalogue and everything else you have told it, checks the real diary and books. If it is asked something it doesn’t know, it says so and passes the conversation to a person, instead of making up a price. That is what Conserjía does; salons shows what a day with it looks like, and in the demo we look at it with your catalogue in front of us. If you haven’t written your greeting message yet, start there: WhatsApp Business auto reply.