WhatsApp Business profile setup: the fields that stop the questions
The short answer
Fill in the business name, category, description, hours, address if you have a physical one, and the website or link where people can see what you sell. Hours and the description do the most work, because they are what a stranger checks before deciding whether to write, and getting them wrong produces questions rather than answering them.
The WhatsAssist team ·
The profile is not branding. It is the page somebody reads in the four seconds between finding your number and deciding whether to bother writing to you, and about a third of the questions in a small business inbox exist because it was left half empty.
You edit it in the WhatsApp Business app under Business tools, in the profile section. Field names and their order move between app versions and phone makers, so treat the list below as what to say rather than where to tap.
The fields that do real work
Business name. The name people call you, spelled the way they would type it. Not a legal entity, not a tagline. If a customer cannot tell from the name that they have reached the right shop, nothing further down the profile rescues it.
Hours. The single most consulted field, and the one most often wrong. Set the hours you actually answer messages, which for most small businesses is not the same as the hours the door is open. A profile claiming 9 to 6 while messages get answered until 10pm trains people to expect a reply at 9am and be annoyed at 9:30.
Description. You have a short paragraph. Spend it on what you sell and who for, not on adjectives. Compare:
- Weak: “Quality service, customer satisfaction guaranteed, established 2019.”
- Better: “Cakes to order, collection from Clifton. Two days notice for most orders, longer for tiered.”
The second one prevents three questions. The first prevents none.
Category. Pick the closest one and move on. It affects how you can be found more than how you are read.
Address. Fill it if customers come to you. Leave it out if they do not, because a delivery-only business with an address gets people turning up.
Website or link. Whatever page shows what you sell. If you have no website, a link to your catalog is more useful than nothing.
The two that quietly cost you sales
A profile photo that is a logo on white. At the size WhatsApp renders it, most logos become an illegible smudge. A photo of the actual thing you sell, or the shopfront, or you, is recognisable at that size and reads as a real business rather than a placeholder.
Hours that do not match reality. Worth saying twice, because it is the field that generates the complaint you never hear about. Somebody writes at 8pm on a profile claiming you close at 6, gets nothing, and buys elsewhere. They will not tell you that happened.
What the profile cannot do
It answers who are you and when are you open. It does not answer do you have this, how much for my situation, or can you do it by Friday, and those are the messages that actually arrive.
That is the honest ceiling on all of the free tools together. The profile handles identity, the away message handles timing, quick replies handle the four questions you can predict. What is left is the specific question, and it is usually the majority.
For that last part, WhatsAssist writes each reply from the business details you hand it once, which is largely the same information you just typed into your profile. One default worth knowing before you switch it on, because it is not what people assume: once setup is finished it replies by itself, on every plan. A single switch turns that off and every reply then waits in the app for you to read, edit and send. Either way, a reply that fails one of our safety checks does not go out. It waits for you as a draft with the reason attached.
A ten-minute pass worth doing today
- Read your own profile on a phone that is not yours. It renders differently from the edit screen.
- Fix the hours to the hours you genuinely answer.
- Rewrite the description as two facts and one constraint.
- Replace the logo with something legible at thumbnail size.
- Check the link goes somewhere that loads on mobile.
Most profiles fail step one and nobody ever notices, because the owner only ever sees the edit screen.
Related reading
What away messages can and cannot do is the next free tool to set up, and how to set up a catalog people actually use covers the link field above. If the specific questions are the problem rather than the profile, what it does and what it costs are a page away, starting at a hundred free messages with no card.