Merchants ask two questions before anything else: what does WhatsApp require, and do I lose control of my number. Here are the honest answers.
The Business App Is Not Enough
The free WhatsApp Business app on your phone is built for one person replying by hand. Automated replies at volume need the WhatsApp Business Platform — the API — which runs through a WhatsApp Business Account (WABA) registered to your business.
This is a real step with real requirements: a business that can be verified, a phone number not currently active on the consumer app, and Meta's approval. It usually takes days, not hours, and it is the part of onboarding most likely to be the bottleneck.
The Number Stays Yours
The WABA and the phone number are registered to your business, not to your software vendor. That is the arrangement to insist on, with us or with anyone else.
The reason is simple: if the number sits under a vendor's account, leaving that vendor means leaving the number your customers have saved. That is not a switching cost, it is a hostage situation. Ask any support vendor directly whose name the WABA is under, and treat a vague answer as an answer.
Connecting the Store Is the Easy Half
Salla, Zid, and Shopify all expose orders, products, and fulfilment status through their app platforms. Authorising the connection takes minutes and is the least interesting part of onboarding.
What the connection gives you is the thing that makes replies useful: the agent answers "where is my order" from the actual order record, with the actual carrier status, instead of from a script that guesses at a delivery window.
The Slow Part Is Your Policies
The real work is writing down what your store already does informally. How many days is the return window, and from delivery or from order? Do you do exchanges on sale items? What are your shipping times to Riyadh versus a smaller city? What counts as sensitive enough to stop and call you?
Most merchants have never written this down, because the answer lives in the head of whoever handles support. That conversation is the bulk of onboarding, and it is worth having regardless of what software you end up using — an agent can only answer inside the lines you draw.
Then You Watch It Work
New merchants start in approval mode: the agent writes the reply, you read it, you send it or fix it. Nothing reaches a customer without you seeing it first, and corrections stick.
Give it a few days of real conversations. You will find the gaps quickly — a product detail it did not have, a policy edge case nobody wrote down — and you will get a feel for the dialect quality on your own customers rather than on a demo script.
When you are ready, turn on autonomous replies for the question types you are comfortable with. Order status usually goes first. Refunds never do.
Where Merchants Get Stuck
Number already on the consumer app. Migrating an active number takes an extra step. Plan for it rather than discovering it on day one.
Business verification. Meta wants documents that match your registered business name. Mismatches are the most common delay.
Policies that contradict each other. Two people on the team give customers different return windows. The agent cannot resolve that — you have to pick one, which is arguably the most useful thing onboarding forces you to do.