WhatsApp Business, Set Up Properly

WhatsApp Business is the same app you already know with five things on top: a business profile, a catalog, automated messages, quick replies and labels. It’s free, it’s in both app stores, and the full setup takes an afternoon.

First: which number

This is the only hard decision, and it’s hard because it’s expensive to undo. A WhatsApp number works like an address: customers save it, forward it and look it up months later. Changing it means starting from zero with your whole customer base.

• If your business already runs on your personal number, convert it. The app migrates the account to a business account and keeps your chats. That number already carries your history.
• If you want to keep your personal life separate, get a new line before you start and use it from day one everywhere: the website, your Google profile, social media, your business card.
• The same number can’t live in both apps. If you need both, you need two numbers.

The business profile

It’s what somebody sees the first time they message you, and it’s almost always half empty:

• Name, exactly as it appears on Google and on your site. If one place says «Motor Repair» and another says «Motor Repair Panama Inc.», the customer hesitates for half a second, and that half second is expensive.
• Category, a short description and your real opening hours.
• Address, or your service area if you go to the customer.
• Email and a link to your website. That link is one of the few places where WhatsApp lets you send traffic to your own page.

The automations that actually help

Greeting message. It fires on the first message from a new contact. Use it to ask for what you always end up asking anyway: «Tell me what you need, where you are and when you need it». That saves you three back-and-forths in every conversation.

Away message. Only with hours you can actually keep. If it says «we reply within 24 hours», reply within 24 hours.

Quick replies. Save the five answers you type every day —prices, location, payment methods, delivery times, warranty— and send them with a couple of keystrokes. Of everything here, this is what gives you back the most time.

Labels. New, quoted, paid, delivered. It isn’t a CRM, but at thirty customers a month it keeps a conversation from getting lost among the others.

What WhatsApp Business doesn’t do

• It doesn’t show up on Google. It’s a channel for conversations, not for being discovered. People who don’t know you yet won’t find you there.
• It doesn’t organize a team for free. With the free app up to four linked devices can reply, but there’s no assignment and no record of who answered what. That takes a Meta subscription, where it’s available; connecting WhatsApp to your own system is the API.
• It doesn’t guarantee conversations. We learned this on our own site: people clicked the WhatsApp button and never wrote. The button is neither the problem nor the fix — what decides it is whether the page answered something before asking the visitor to start a chat.

The order we recommend

1. Choose the number, then convert your account or install the app.
2. Fill in the whole profile with the same details as your Google Business Profile.
3. Write the greeting message and your five quick replies.
4. Build the catalog if you sell products.
5. Put your WhatsApp link on your site, your Google profile and your social accounts. The link takes two minutes to build and almost everybody gets it wrong: it’s explained in the WhatsApp link guide.

With that, the channel is ready. What’s missing afterwards isn’t WhatsApp: it’s somebody reaching it in the first place, and that’s the job of your Google profile and your website.