Boost Your Income by Selling on WhatsApp
In today’s digital age, Marketing has become dynamic i.e.360 °. You can do it via WhatsApp platform. WhatsApp has a ‘global reach’. The WhatsApp platform ranges from Marketing and promotion to the actual sales of things followed by a WhatsApp payment facility. These are all parts of WhatsApp Commerce. You can sell your product/service on WhatsApp Shop today. WhatsApp sales is a current trend.
With over 100 countries using WhatsApp with more than 2 billion users, selling on WhatsApp Shop is the most lucrative and smart WhatsApp marketing strategy for businesses across the world. Selling through WhatsApp is always beneficiary!
In this blog article, we will offer a comprehensive guide on how to sell on WhatsApp.
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What is A WhatsApp Shop?
WhatsApp has come up with a WhatsApp Shop facility to encourage businesses to sell on the messaging platform. This simply allows the business to create a WhatsApp Catalogue with product/service details, including prices, an add-to-cart functionality, and a way to accept payments for the orders booked via active integrations using a WhatsApp Business API solution.
What is the necessity to build the WhatsApp Shop?
The need to use WhatsApp shop has reasons. It comes with genuine benefits. Some below interesting facts highlight the importance of using WhatsApp shop for online selling for businesses. Let us throw some flashlights on them here:
- An average person consumes around 18.6 hours per month on WhatsApp.
- A total of 50 million businesses uses WhatsApp Business app.
- WhatsApp Business app has an open rate of 99%.
- Businesses receive replies to more than 40% of the messages from the customers who received those messages (maybe of promotions, offers, discounts, alerts, etc.)
- Every day nearly about 100 billion messages are shared on WhatsApp.
Benefits of Selling on WhatsApp
Businesses benefit from maintaining strong relationships with future buyers and customers on WhatsApp.
Find below some of the most noticeable benefits of Selling on WhatsApp:
| Type of Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| Personalized interaction | One-on-one messaging makes a more personal connection with customers. It helps in selling products and services with a deeper connection with them. |
| Cross-border communication | It helps users easily communicate with international customers, crossing geographical barriers. |
| Reduced advertising costs | Once you connect with customers on WhatsApp, you need not run Advertisement campaigns. |
| Ease of use | Features like status updates, product catalogs, and broadcast lists are easy to use for marketing and sales. |
| Higher opening rates | WhatsApp messages have a high opening rate (98%), making it sure that your communications are seen. |
| Better engagement | Customers are more likely to engage with businesses via quick messaging as compared to other platforms. Regular updates and personal messages support maintaining ongoing customer relations. |
| Integration with other tools | WhatsApp also works with systems like CRM software to simplify sales processes. Integration with other business applications is possible when you use the WhatsApp API platform. |
The Key Benefits of Setting Up A WhatsApp Shop
WhatsApp selling has below key benefits
1. Enhance customer lifecycle conversion rate
Utilizing WhatsApp to communicate with your customers enhances the sales cycle by permitting you to use a single platform for acquiring, engaging, and converting leads.
WhatsApp allows increased personalization, making customer interactions effective, fast, and highly accessible. In short, the entire sales cycle from lead generation to a sale becomes easy and smooth.
Besides the crucial product information, customers can receive timely alerts on purchases, delivery ETAs, and order status alerts on WhatsApp.
Additionally, by improving the quality of customer interactions by carrying out sales on WhatsApp Shop, online businesses can significantly reduce negative feedback that could otherwise hinder the brand’s reputation and damage its online credibility.
2. Reduce cart abandonment rate
Shopping cart abandonment can be a major issue almost all online retail businesses face. This can be due to other distractions or indecisions on the customers’ part or due to competitors with more attractive offers taking off the customers.
Based on statistics, the average cart abandonment rate is around 70%, making it one of the most critical hurdles for any business.
WhatsApp Shop is an excellent opportunity for businesses to remove high cart abandonment rates. With an interesting offer message or setting up a cart abandonment reminder on WhatsApp, you can contact customers and gently push them to return and make the purchase.
3. Create and leverage upselling and cross-selling opportunities
Upselling and cross-selling on WhatsApp get higher when customers have positive experiences with that business in the past and present. This way, WhatsApp Shop is the best platform for gaining trust by offering excellent purchase experiences and utilizing upselling and cross-selling strategies.
By cross-selling, you can promote and display more of your products/services to your existing customers.
Through the chat functionality of WhatsApp, you can actively engage with your customers, sharing information about offers, discounts, and personalized purchase recommendations you have available. This forms a remarkably efficient distribution channel for your business.
4. Develop and improve customer loyalty
WhatsApp makes for more personal and meaningful customer communication, supporting organic growth in your customer relationship.
Hence, WhatsApp Shops can be the ideal medium to develop and build a loyal customer base that can benefit your business in the long term. By promptly tending to your customers, you turn loyal patrons attracted to make regular purchases and transform them into voices for your brand.
5. Provide fast and reliable support
WhatsApp is an easy and reliable platform for customer support and issue resolution.
Customers can bring out queries or raise an issue through the chat window. Your team can also quickly resolve the problem as they can refer to important customer history instantly.
WhatsApp Shops can offer highly personalized and reliable issue resolution, which means more satisfaction to the customers and more lucrative sales.
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Top Statistics on Selling on WhatsApp
50 million companies across the world (except China) use WhatsApp as a marketing channel.
Let’s investigate how many companies use WhatsApp for marketing and sales, and the ways the audience interacts with it.
Find below types of usage with their respective percentage:
| Type of Usage and Users | Usage Percentage |
|---|---|
| Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) use WhatsApp as their marketing channel in India. That is helping them with the growth of their business. | 80% |
| Users use WhatsApp as a customer service channel. | 39% |
| Users like to receive order updates and brand communication mostly on WhatsApp. | 54% |
| Users wish to engage Personalized WhatsApp marketing messages. | 72% |
| Customers interested to receive timely, proactive communications from brands. | 85% |
The lowest average message opening rate for marketing communication on WhatsApp is nearly 17%.
WhatsApp Business has more than 120M daily active users. It has over 32M total monthly downloads.
This proves that an ever-increasing number of companies show their faith in the WhatsApp solution for sales, marketing, and customer support efforts.
These collective metrics display WhatsApp’s usefulness as a marketing tool, with its global reach and high engagement rates establishing it a preferred choice for businesses wishing to expand their reach and improve customer interaction.
Interesting Statistics for WhatsApp Business
As per the Statista report, WhatsApp is not only for personal chatting purposes nowadays. It’s a strong resource for businesses, especially with its tools like WhatsApp Business. This WhatsApp version, mostly free, improves business to customer communications.
Charges apply for someone using WhatsApp Business API.
WhatsApp Business is a well acclaimed sales booster, attracting billions of users very soon after its launch. Its user base is rising steadily.
As per the current report, it has 2 billion global users. In 2020, Facebook remarked that 40 million users browse business catalogues on WhatsApp every month.
Regarding APP downloads, most WhatsApp Business downloads as of February 2024 came from Indian users with over 481 million downloads on Android and iOS devices.
Indonesia is ranking second out of the 60 countries analyzed, with almost 128.4 million downloads.
Improve your WhatsApp Selling Potential
We hope you have been familiar with steps required for successful sales on WhatsApp. From easy steps for selling on WhatsApp Business to professional tips for WhatsApp sales success and offering outstanding customer service. You must have gained valuable insights into upscaling your sales potential.
Well, this is not enough! Scale your WhatsApp sales up with WebMaxy. It’s a comprehensive tool that works nicely with WhatsApp Business. You will handle chats, you can save time with task automation, and understand more about your customers, all in one place with a common inbox, where you can manage all your messages.
Selling on WhatsApp Business Vs. WhatsApp API Platform
The choice of a more suitable option relies on your business needs, size, with technical capabilities.
No doubt. WhatsApp Business app is identical for startups and small, medium businesses. It’s very easy to use and requires no technical excellence to set up. The application is free and offers dynamic features like quick replies, labels, and product catalogs.
With the broadcast capabilities, you can reach a maximum of up to 256 contacts briefly. Anyhow, it’s advised to reach out to less contacts at a time to avoid banning of the WhatsApp account.
Earlier, WhatsApp Business was not connected with the other business applications. However, WhatsApp Business integrates with Salesforce and HubSpot CRM, making it good interoperable.
On the other end, the WhatsApp API solution is suitable for medium to large businesses. It provides multi-user support, where many agents can use the same number. The platform offers the latest features like personalized notifications and 2-way customer communication.
Yes. WhatsApp API solutions need technical expertise or third-party service providers to set up and integrate the tools with business apps. This incurs higher costs, as a third-party provider’s service fee is there.
WhatsApp API option is restricted for messaging, even after a much-awaited WhatsApp approval comes.
4 Steps to Build a WhatsApp Shop
Ready to get started on developing a self-sufficient sales channel for your business? Refer to these essential steps to follow for selling on WhatsApp:
Step 1: Download WhatsApp Business and make a business profile
The first step to creating a WhatsApp Shop is to download the WhatsApp Business app. WhatsApp Business app is different from the WhatsApp Messenger app. It has its business-specific tools and functionalities.
The WhatsApp Business app can be downloaded from the App Store or the Plays Store, depending on which device you are using.
Once this is complete, you can make your unique business profile by following these steps:
- Open the WhatsApp Business app > Go to Menu > Settings > Company Settings >
- Choose the edit option from the Profile section.
- Edit or add information like business name, profile picture, business description, email, business website, business contact number, etc.
- Click save and exit.
Your WhatsApp Business profile is ready now, which can be verified for better brand credibility. Verified business accounts will show a green verified badge displayed at the end of the business name.
Also, gaining access to WhatsApp API allows collaboration among multiple users, allowing them to collectively respond to your WhatsApp Business messages on a unified platform accessible across various devices. This is where signing up on a platform like WebMaxy comes into the picture. WebMaxy offers a good range of facilities in this.
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Step 2: Set up timings and craft welcome messages
After setting up your WhatsApp Business profile, focus on more details vital to your business, like:
- The opening time of your business, i.e., the fixed service hours when customers may message you on WhatsApp. This permits customers to know when it is best to reach out to you.
- A message of absence to send to customers when they reach out to you outside of your opening hours.
- Welcome messages to share with customers on first contact. This helps to develop your brand persona and gives a positive impression.
- Quick answer templates for handling customer queries that are commonly received.
Step 3: Apply WhatsApp automation
Among the several advantages of employing a WhatsApp Shop is the ability to upgrade/modify and streamline workflows with a WhatsApp Business API solution like WebMaxy. Utilizing WhatsApp automation to answer and address all the queries.
Activating or implementing WhatsApp automation to sell on WhatsApp Shop parallelly takes a big load off your customer service team.
WhatsApp automation makes the entire process easy. This process includes complete guiding to the customer for the whole shopping experience and answering automated answers for generic queries. They can also cover tasks like providing menus, sending info and product images to request, guiding customers to product pages to receive more orders, or joining customers in live chats with various agents for query resolution.
Step 4: Configure and implement rules
The next vital step to build an efficient, high performing workflow for your WhatsApp Shop is to set up or implement rules for it.
Your team, which normally gets highly attentive towards customer tasks and queries with more time commitment, will be free to do other important tasks due to the perfect planning of automated tasks depending upon priorities and time savings.
Automated tasks can be streamlined with rules. These tasks such as sending customer satisfaction surveys, allocating queries to team members with round-robin logic, labeling conversations as spam, and other familiar actions. This way, your WhatsApp Shop can be made to run in a more seamless and well-structured manner, leading to raised customer engagement.
List of Tips and Tricks for Effective WhatsApp Sales
To gain mastery in WhatsApp selling, please find below the list of tips and tricks to implement for the best results:
Here are some tips, tricks, and hacks to help you master selling on WhatsApp:
- Create Your Product Catalogue on WhatsApp
- Start Selling to Your Known Contacts
- Use WhatsApp Status Updates
- Join WhatsApp Seller Groups
- Capitalize Your Social Media Accounts
- Add a WhatsApp Chat Widget to Your Website
- Leveraging Psychological Triggers in Content
- Capitalize CTWA (Click to WhatsApp)
- Run WhatsApp-Based Contests and Giveaways
- Use Chat Automation to Automatically Qualify and Route Leads
- Manage and Automate Repeat Customer Enquiries
- Create Template Messages for Quick Replies
- Send Automated Confirmations and Updates
- Develop a WhatsApp broadcast List/Groups
- Reach out to More People with Bulk WhatsApp Broadcasts
- Send Messages with a Personal Touch
- Leverage Multimedia Content
- Lower down Work with Automated Marketing Campaigns
- Enhance Sales with Direct Conversations
- Use Labels to Organize Your Chats
- Create a Messaging Schedule
- Use Link Shorteners with Tracking
- Do follow Up with Leads and Customers
Use of Analytics to Improve Your WhatsApp Sales Strategy
In the above sections, we have seen how to use WhatsApp for business. Now analyzing the performance of your WhatsApp sales efforts is essential for regular improvement. Follow the below tips for using analytics to optimize your strategy:
- Track key metrics: Analyze important data points such as message open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
- Analyze customer behavior: Assess patterns in customer interactions to identify improvement areas and opportunities to upsell or cross-sell.
- Change or divert your strategy based on data: Use insights from your analytics to refine your messaging, content, and targeting, ensuring that you’re always making data-driven decisions.
Companies Interact with Customers on WhatsApp Can Expect a 20% Growth
In the 5G era and time of instant deliveries, customers expect fast answers. By using real-time messaging, you are meeting expectations. You are delivering more.
WhatsApp takes you for the global reach with your brand with one-to-one customer interactions. Giving service to every customer of your business by reaching with personalized approach always.
So, as your competitors are still figuring out how to increase their email opening rates by 2%, you are looking at a 20% boost in your business.
Do not allow for any single day your competitors to watch your customer’s WhatsApp DMs. Rise up. Go for WebMaxy WhatsApp Commerce platform to see how effective selling on WhatsApp can be. It will be beneficiary for your future.
How to Accept Payments on Your WhatsApp Store?
One of the remarkable advantages of having a WhatsApp Shop is its capacity to serve as a platform for every stage of the sales funnel, that also includes smoother transactions up to the payment stage.
With a WhatsApp Business API services providing platforms like WebMaxy, you can integrate with various payment gateways like RazorPay and PayU.
That enables a seamless and comprehensive check experience on your WhatsApp Shop.
Conclusion
Selling through WhatsApp is becoming a trend now. WhatsApp is the most suitable channel that is gaining popularity among businesses. Still, there is an untapped eCommerce potential in WhatsApp Shop, to convert and enhance sales in a more efficient and highly personalized manner.
Combined with a good WhatsApp Business API solution provider like WebMaxy, you can unlock the vast potential of WhatsApp shop, improving personalization, utilizing smart automation, and offering smooth payment processes.
Are you looking to boost your sales with WhatsApp Shop? Then contact the WebMaxy WhatsApp commerce team to guide you for the setup and support. Our team is dedicated and committed to your successful business journey with our WhatsApp Automation services.
To reap the WhatsApp business benefits via our services and support, you can email us on: info@webmaxy.co.
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Frequently Asked Questions
One of the significant advantages of having a WhatsApp Shop is its ability to cater as a platform for all stages of the sales funnel, including smooth transactions up to the payment stage. With a WhatsApp Business API provider like WebMaxy, you can integrate with payment gateways like RazorPay and PayU, activating a smooth and complete checkout experience on your WhatsApp Shop.
Installing a WhatsApp shop is free. But, with WhatsApp Business API, you can avail yourself of features of WhatsApp automation like sending automated messages, building catalogs, and setting up cart abandonment reminder messages.
Get orders on your WhatsApp shop by listing products/services, enabling the ‘shopping’ feature, engaging customers, and facilitating smooth transactions via direct messages or the integrated shopping cart.
To add “Shop Now” on WhatsApp, create a catalog in WhatsApp Business, then share it via chat or status, permitting customers to browse and buy directly from your online WhatsApp shop.
Selling on WhatsApp is the strategic approach with the use of WhatsApp messaging platform to keep engaged prospects, nurturing leads, and closing of deals.
It applies WhatsApp’s high user engagement and strong features for business interaction.
Businesses apply WhatsApp for leads generation, customer support, product demonstrations, order updates, and personalized marketing messages. It’s also useful for internal team communication for sales and collaboration.
Adam Wilson
Adam Wilson comes with an experience of 12+ years in the IT industry. As a Customer Success Manager, he has been researching and trying to understand the customers’ behavior in different scenarios. He has also studied human psychology to relate it to the purchase journey of the customers. His published books on customer psychology and behavior have received many honors and awards from various enterprises.
