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WhatsApp is the channel most Indian businesses actually want, and it has rules that are not ours. This page is mostly about those rules, because they shape everything you can do.

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Connecting

Connect WABA, at the top of the WhatsApp section in the sidebar. Both buttons there open Meta’s own signup — one if you are applying for a WhatsApp Business Account, one if you already have it. You sign in with your Facebook account and choose the number. We never see your login, and the account stays yours: you can move it to another provider whenever you want.
Connecting is open to selected workspaces while Meta reviews our app. Both buttons are switched off until that clears, and we will turn yours on as soon as it does. Nothing you set up in the meantime is lost.

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The account is your workspace’s; the number belongs to an agent

Your WhatsApp Business Account belongs to your business, not to any one agent — so it is connected once, for the whole workspace, and every agent works against it. A number is different. It answers for exactly one agent, because a message arrives at a number and something has to decide which agent replies. So connecting and assigning are two steps, and the second one is yours to make:
  1. Connect your account on Connect WABA. The number arrives with no agent.
  2. Give it one — from that same page, or from the agent’s own Channels page.
A number with no agent still receives. Messages arrive in your inbox and wait for a person; nothing answers on its own until you have said who should. That is deliberate — an agent replying from a number nobody chose it for is worse than a message waiting a few minutes.Give the number an agent and the messages that were waiting become theirs, so nothing from your first day is stranded.
Moving a number from one agent to another works the other way round: the agent that had it loses it, but conversations already open stay with the agent handling them — nobody mid-conversation is suddenly answered by a different agent. New conversations go to the agent that took it.
You can also answer from an unassigned number before you have chosen one: send a template from Send and pick a handler, and that agent answers that conversation when the customer writes back.
Several numbers on one account is fine. Connect each one and give each its own agent. Every connected number has one, on the Connect WABA page. It opens a WhatsApp chat with you, and it needs no integration — put it in an Instagram bio, behind a button on your site, in an email footer, on a printed sign. You can set what their message already says. That matters more than it sounds: an empty chat asks somebody to think of an opening line, which is where most of them stop. And if you word it differently per place you put the link, the first thing they send tells you where they came from. Underneath the link is a QR code for it, and Download PNG saves a print-quality copy. Point a phone camera at it and it opens the same chat, with the same message already typed. It is for the places a link cannot go: a counter card, a menu, a packing slip, a poster in the window, the back of a business card. The code changes as you edit the message above it, so download it after you have worded it, not before.
Give each place its own code with its own opening message — “Table 4”, “Ordered from the catalogue”, “Saw the window poster”. The message people send you is then also the answer to where they were standing, and you never have to ask.

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Disconnecting

Disconnect on the Connect WABA page stops a number sending and receiving. Your WhatsApp Business Account is untouched — it is yours, and disconnecting here does not close it.
Your conversations are kept. Everything that number sent and received stays in your inbox and stays searchable. Disconnecting ends the connection, not the history.

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Before a number is connected

Templates, Forms and Send are read-only until one is. You can read what is there, and the pre-built template and form libraries, but nothing can be written, submitted or sent — all three end at Meta, and until an account is connected there is nothing to send them to.

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The 24-hour window

This is the single rule to understand. Meta’s rules covers it and the rest in depth.
  • When a customer messages you, a 24-hour window opens. Inside it, the agent can reply freely, in its own words.
  • Outside it, nothing but an approved template reaches that customer.
So the agent handles conversations; templates handle anything you start.

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What the agent does here

The same knowledge, instructions and tools as your website widget. Cards and buttons render as native WhatsApp messages rather than degrading to text. Delivery and read receipts arrive afterwards and show in the inbox — sent, delivered, read and failed are four different facts, each with Meta’s own reason where one applies.

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Free entry point

When a customer arrives from a click-to-WhatsApp ad and you reply within 24 hours, Meta does not charge for that conversation for 72 hours. The platform tracks this and it shows in your usage.

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Opting out

A customer can turn off “Offers and announcements” in WhatsApp itself, or simply tell your agent to stop. Either way they are recorded as withdrawn and marketing templates to them are refused. Utility and authentication messages still reach them, and must — an order confirmation is not something anybody opted out of.

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Calls

A customer’s WhatsApp call appears in the thread with its outcome and duration.
No AI answers the call. Calls are recorded as events in the conversation, nothing more. Anyone telling you this platform answers your phone is describing something that does not exist.

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Not built

  • Catalogues. Inbound order messages parse, but there is no catalogue browsing.
  • Publishing a form before Meta has verified your business. Forms build, store and preview now; Meta will not publish a flow for an unverified business, and an unpublished form reaches nobody.
  • One-time password templates, which are behind the same verification gate.