WhatsApp announced a worldwide rollout of shopping carts on December 8, 2020, letting customers choose several products from a business’s catalog and send the selection as one message. The company aimed the feature at businesses selling multiple items together, such as restaurants and clothing shops. For a merchant taking orders through chat, the immediate change is how a customer assembles the request, before the business handles it. [S1]

The product information comes from catalogs, introduced in the WhatsApp Business app in November 2019 on Android and iPhone. Businesses could add a price, description and product code for each item, with WhatsApp hosting the catalog. Customers could browse inside WhatsApp rather than ask for individual photographs or leave for a website. [S2][S1]

To use a cart, the customer finds products, adds them, then sends the completed cart as a message to the business. A catalog supplies the product information; a cart groups the choices into one request. For a shop already answering orders in WhatsApp, the useful change is receiving those choices together instead of piecing them together across messages. [S1][S2]

WhatsApp said carts would make it simpler to track order inquiries, manage customer requests and close sales. That is the company’s expectation, not a measured improvement for a typical small business. Its announcement included feedback from an early-access merchant, but no comparison of processing time or error rates. A merchant could assess the narrower benefit by checking whether incoming carts reduce the follow-up needed to identify the products a customer wants. [S1]

Neither announcement spells out automatic stock reservation, payment settlement or a dispatch commitment attached to sending a cart. A sensible shop procedure would keep the incoming selection separate from an order the merchant has accepted, confirmed as paid and prepared to fulfill. That is a workflow recommendation, not a claim that WhatsApp had no payment services elsewhere: these announcements establish the catalog-and-message steps, not the completion of a sale. [S1][S2]

Source documents

  1. Making it Easier to Shop on WhatsApp with Cartshttps://about.fb.com/news/2020/12/making-it-easier-to-shop-on-whatsapp-with-carts/
  2. Introducing Catalogs for Small Businesseshttps://about.fb.com/news/2019/11/introducing-catalogs-for-small-businesses/