How to set up a WhatsApp Business catalog that actually helps people buy

Most small sellers discover the catalog after their fortieth “how much is this?” of the week. It is free, it takes an evening, and it removes a specific kind of question from your inbox. It also gets abandoned more often than any other WhatsApp Business feature, for reasons that are predictable.

What it is

A catalog is a small storefront inside WhatsApp. Each item has a photo, a name, a price, a description and optionally a code or a link. Customers browse it from your profile or from a message, and they never leave the app to do it.

You add items under Business tools, then Catalog, in the WhatsApp Business app. The exact wording of the menu moves between app versions and between phone makers, so if it is not where this says it is, look under Business tools first.

The three things that decide whether it works

Photographs, not screenshots. A catalog is judged the way a shop window is. One clear photo of the actual item on a plain background will outperform a better product with a dark, cluttered picture. If you sell services, photograph the result rather than a logo.

Prices, or an honest reason there is no price. An item with no price reads as “ask me”, which is exactly the message you were trying to stop receiving. If your pricing genuinely depends on specifics, say what it depends on in the description rather than leaving the field empty.

A short description that answers the next question. Look at what people ask after they see the item. Sizes? Materials? Delivery time? That is the description. Not marketing copy, the follow-up question.

Keep it small on purpose

The catalog has a generous item limit, and treating that as a target is the most common way it fails. A customer scrolling forty near-identical entries does not feel served, they feel lost, and they go back to typing a question, which is where you started.

Put your best sellers in it. Group the rest into collections if you have them. An item nobody has bought in six months is costing you attention on the ones that sell.

What the catalog does not do

This is the part worth being blunt about, because the catalog is often sold as a solution to a problem it does not touch.

It does not know what is in stock. The catalog shows what you put in it. If the blue sold out this morning, the catalog still shows the blue until you change it, and a customer who orders it has a bad experience that looks like your fault.

It does not answer questions. It answers browsing. “Do you have this in medium”, “can you deliver to my area by Friday”, “is this the one my sister bought in March” are all still messages you have to read and reply to.

It does not reduce your inbox by itself. It reduces one category of inbound question and often increases another, because a browsable catalog produces more enquiries, which is a good problem and still a problem.

That last point is the honest reason people set up a catalog and still feel buried a month later. The catalog handled what do you sell. It did nothing for what about this specific thing for me.

Pair it with the thing it cannot do

The two halves fit together. The catalog answers the browsing question once, for everyone, for free. Something that reads the incoming message handles the specific questions that come back afterwards, using the same facts you already typed into the catalog.

That is what WhatsAssist does: you hand over your price list and your policies in whatever form you already keep them, and it answers the question in front of it from those. Worth knowing before you switch it on: it replies by itself once setup is finished, on every plan. One switch turns that off and every reply then waits in the app for you to read, edit and send. A reply that fails one of our safety checks does not go out either way. It becomes a draft with the reason attached and waits for you.

A sensible order to do this in

1. Photograph and list your ten best sellers. Stop there for now.
2. Add prices to all ten, or a description saying what the price depends on.
3. Write descriptions that answer the question people ask second.
4. Watch your inbox for a week and note which questions the catalog killed and which it did not.
5. Handle the survivors. Some are template material, some need reading.

Step four is the one worth actually doing. It converts an opinion about your inbox into a list, and the list is what tells you whether you have a browsing problem or an answering problem.

Related reading

If your inbox is mostly availability questions, answering “is this in stock” on WhatsApp and Instagram is the specific version of this. If it is mostly out-of-hours, what away messages can and cannot do covers the free tools first. And what WhatsAssist does with your business details is the longer answer to the pairing above, with the plans starting at a hundred free messages.