Sell on WhatsApp with a catalog, a cart and a payment link

There is no separate storefront to design. A WhatsApp shop is a product catalog attached to your business number, and the customer sees it inside the chat: products with photos, prices and descriptions, laid out the way Meta lays out every catalog. You can't restyle it, and you don't need to.

Products reach the customer in three ways. They open the catalog from your profile; a bot or an agent sends a single product or a short list of products into the chat; or a template carries products to people who have agreed to hear from you. The customer adds items to a cart and sends it, and what lands in your inbox is an order message with the items and quantities, ready for the next step.

Gallabox's bots can drop the catalog into a conversation at the right moment — after the customer picks a category, for example — and take the order from there: confirm the items, ask for delivery details, send the total and the payment link, then the updates.

Be realistic about first orders. For restaurants, groceries and a lot of retail, delivery apps such as Talabat, Deliveroo and Keeta own the first order, and Gallabox has no integration with any of them. WhatsApp earns its place after that: the regular who reorders every week, the family placing a big basket, the customer who wants something off the menu or in bulk.

A direct order on WhatsApp carries no app commission, and it gives you the customer's number, with their permission, for the next order. A message to past customers featuring a product, or a 'reorder your usual' button, is where the channel tends to earn its keep.

Instagram is often the shop window. Someone sees a product in a post, taps through to WhatsApp, and asks whether it comes in another size or colour. The catalog lets the agent answer with the product itself rather than a screenshot.

WhatsApp's in-chat payments aren't available in Kuwait, so a WhatsApp order is paid by link. Once the order is confirmed, the chat sends a payment link from your gateway, and the customer pays on the gateway's page, by KNET or card if your gateway offers them. KNET, MyFatoorah and Tap Payments have no built-in Gallabox integration, so we connect them by link, and a custom build that receives the gateway's webhook confirms the payment in the chat.

Cash on delivery isn't going anywhere, and WhatsApp handles it well. Before the order goes out, the customer gets a confirmation with the items, the total and the delivery slot, and taps to confirm or change it. Orders nobody confirms can be held back, and a payment link can be offered to anyone who would rather pay now. Gallabox's Shopify integration includes cash-on-delivery confirmations and nudges to switch to prepaid.

Keep the order and the payment in the same chat. A customer who has to call a number or visit a website to pay is a customer who might not.

Kuwait delivery runs on areas and blocks. Before taking an order, the bot asks for the area from a list of the ones you cover, so a customer outside your zone finds out at the start rather than after filling a cart. Delivery fees and minimum orders by area belong in the same step. Then it asks for block, street, avenue and building, and a location pin.

After the order, updates go out as utility templates: order received, out for delivery, delivered. From 1 October 2026 those are charged in Kuwait even inside the 24-hour window, at $0.044 each before markup, so send the updates customers actually want and skip the rest. Keep them free of promotions as well; Meta can reclassify a utility template that sells as marketing, which costs more.

A short feedback request after delivery, and a reorder prompt a sensible time later, close the loop.

If your store runs on Shopify, Gallabox's integration is a $5-a-month add-on on any plan. It syncs your products into the WhatsApp catalog, turns a WhatsApp cart into a Shopify cart, sends order, cash-on-delivery and shipping updates, and runs abandoned-cart reminders. WooCommerce has its own Gallabox integration for order notifications and cart recovery.

Stores on Salla or Zid have no built-in Gallabox integration. For those we load the products into the catalog ourselves and write a custom build that picks up new orders from the platform, through its webhooks or API where it offers them, and sends updates through Gallabox's API. It works, but it is a project rather than a switch, and we scope it before we commit to a date.

No store platform at all? A catalog can be filled from a Google Sheet, which is plenty for a small range, and grown into a full online store later.