Glossary
What is the WhatsApp catalog?
The WhatsApp catalog is the product showcase inside your WhatsApp Business profile: each item carries a photo, name, price, description and link, and customers browse it without leaving the chat. It is free to create from the app or from Meta's Commerce Manager.
Before the catalog, selling on WhatsApp meant sending loose photos and repeating prices twenty times a day. The catalog organizes that showcase: customers open your profile, see what you sell and can send you the product they want inside the conversation.
It is one of the best free pieces of WhatsApp Business, and still it stops halfway to the sale: it shows, but it does not answer. Here is how to build it well, with which tool for your case, and how to close that last stretch.
How to create it and what it carries
From the WhatsApp Business app go to business tools and then catalog, and add items with photo, name, price, description, link and code. That is the manually managed catalog, perfect for a small, stable inventory.
If you carry more products or several channels, build it in Meta's Commerce Manager instead: it accepts richer item data, handles variants and supports synchronization from a data feed or your commerce platform. From there the same catalog can be connected to the Meta commerce surfaces you are eligible for, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram among them, when you configure it: availability and linking depend on your account and your market, they do not happen on their own.
Photos matter more than everything else: clean background, recognizable product and one per variant. Publish the price whenever you can; a catalog without prices generates the exact repeated question the catalog existed to avoid.
Its real limits
The limits everyone quotes belong to the catalog managed by hand from the app: it does not know how many pieces you have left, it struggles with differently priced variants, and it does not sync with your system, you update it. For a stable twenty-product menu it is perfect; for five hundred items with moving stock, it becomes permanent data-entry work. That is where Commerce Manager changes the equation, because the load can come from a data feed or your platform instead of your fingers.
And the limit neither version solves: when the customer asks do you have the red one in size seven and how much with shipping, the catalog by itself neither answers nor decrements stock. That is added with integrations or with an agent on top; the conversation still needs somebody, or something, that knows the inventory and builds the quote.
From the catalog that shows to the one that quotes
The value jump is connecting your catalog to an AI agent: the agent searches your products for what the person describes, even written their own way or sent as a photo, answers with real price and stock and builds the quote in the chat. Your inventory comes in by file or API and stays in sync.
The catalog goes from a showcase the customer browses to the brain their questions are answered with. That is the difference between showing products and selling them.
Related terms and pages
Put Eva to work.
Connect your catalog to Eva and every question gets answered with real price and stock, even when the customer only sends a photo. Write to us and try it with your products.
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