WhatsApp catalog explained: product messages, carousels, orders and what each costs in India

Rizwan Shaikh runs Shaikh Crockery House in Bhopal, two floors of dinner sets, pressure cookers and gift boxes, with eight staff on one WhatsApp number (an invented example). A typical message reads “36 piece dinner set ka photo aur price bhejo”. Whoever is free forwards a photo from their gallery. The price in the photo is from last Diwali, the set in the photo sold out in March, and the customer finds both out when she comes to the shop.

A WhatsApp catalog moves the photo, the price and the stock under Meta’s control, and a product message puts them in the chat under yours. This guide covers what Meta’s developer pages say about catalogs on the WhatsApp Business Platform: each message type, what the customer can do, what comes back when they order, and the cost. The free Business app has its own catalog screen, which those pages don’t cover.

What is a WhatsApp catalog?

A catalog is, in Meta’s words, “a structured inventory of products or services that you upload to Meta and connect to your WhatsApp Business account”. It lives in Meta Commerce Manager, the same catalog system that feeds Facebook and Instagram shops, or is created through the Commerce API. Each item has a name, description, price, images and availability. Items can be products, “physical or digital goods with attributes like price, SKU, and images”, or services such as appointments, consultations or subscriptions.

Two rules shape everything else. You can connect only one catalog per WhatsApp Business account, but the same catalog can belong to several phone numbers. And the catalog is the source of truth: change a price or mark an item unavailable and every message showing that item updates once the customer’s phone learns of it.

Meta describes the work in four stages: upload the inventory, set commerce settings per number, share products, receive responses as webhooks. This guide follows that order. (Terms such as “customer service window” and “marketing template” are defined in our glossary.)

Which product messages can you send?

Five interactive types inside the 24-hour window, which need no template or approval, and four template types for messaging outside it. Meta’s own argument for the interactive ones is that they “are generated in real-time and always reflect the latest item details, pricing, and stock levels from your inventory”.

Inside the window (no template)	What the customer sees	Limits Meta lists
Catalog message	A product thumbnail, your body text, a fixed header and sub-header, and a View catalog button that opens the whole catalog in WhatsApp	Body 1,024 characters, footer 60. The thumbnail is the item whose retailer ID you name, else the first item in the catalog
Catalog link	A text message containing your wa.me/c/ link followed by your number; with link preview on, product thumbnails show	If the catalog is switched off, the link shows “Invalid catalog link” when tapped
Single-product message	One product with its image, title and price, and a View button	Needs the catalog ID and the product’s retailer ID. Body and footer optional
Multi-product message	Up to 30 products in named sections behind a Start shopping button	Text header required. Each section has a title and a list of retailer IDs
Product carousel	2 to 10 horizontally scrollable product cards	Body text required; no header, footer or extra buttons. Every card must use the same catalog

Outside the window (marketing template, approved first)	What it adds	Limits Meta lists
Catalog template	Same as a catalog message, sendable to anyone who opted in	Body 1,024 with variables, footer 60, a fixed View catalog button
Single-product template	One product with a View button	Body 160 characters. Can’t be forwarded. Needs WhatsApp 2.22.24 or later
Multi-product template	Up to 30 products in up to 10 sections behind View items	Header text 60 (one variable), body 1,024, footer 60, section titles 24. Can’t be forwarded. Needs 2.22.24 or later
Product card carousel template	Up to 10 product cards, each with a View button or a URL button	Create it with two cards; an approved template can be sent with up to 10. Body 1,024

Meta’s share-products page also lists, for India-based businesses only, a template with a pay button; our WhatsApp payment API guide covers it.

A multi-product message with some unmatched retailer IDs is sent without them, with an error asking for a catalog update; if none match, nothing is sent.

What can the customer do with a product message?

View the item, add it to a cart, and send the cart to you as an order. Those are the three actions Meta lists for single- and multi-product messages.

Tapping an item opens a product detail page with the item’s current information, images only: “any videos or GIFs added to the product won’t be displayed”. If something changed since the message was sent, the customer sees “One or more items in your cart have been updated”. Each item can be added up to 99 times; there is no limit on different items.

The cart has habits worth knowing. It belongs to one chat thread on one device, so a customer who browses on the phone and again on WhatsApp Web has two carts. It never expires, is cleared once sent, and can’t be edited after that, so a change of mind means a new cart. “You cannot send carts to customers.” Interactive single- and multi-product messages can be forwarded; the template versions can’t. And unlike product messages from the Business app, “messages sent via the Cloud API currently do not display a shopping cart icon in the chat thread header”.

A customer on an outdated WhatsApp gets a note instead of the message, and you get a webhook saying so.

What comes back when a customer orders?

An order webhook, listing what they want, and nothing about where to send it or how they will pay.

The webhook arrives on the messages feed with "type": "order". It carries the catalog ID, any text the customer typed with the order, and a product_items array in which each entry has the product’s retailer ID, the quantity, the item price and the currency code. That is the whole order. A customer who taps Message business on a product sends you an ordinary text message with a context block naming the product they were looking at, which is how “is this microwave-safe?” arrives with the product attached.

Two product formats don’t produce an order webhook. A product card carousel template whose cards use URL buttons sends the customer to your website, so “WhatsApp does not trigger order webhooks for URL-button flows”. A media card carousel (pictures and links rather than catalog items) behaves the same way; our marketing template formats guide covers it.

After the order webhook, the work is yours: the delivery address (Meta’s address message for Indian businesses is covered in our buttons and lists guide), the payment, and the confirmation. Rizwan’s team does the first two in one message: “Address bhejiye, aur payment link neeche hai.”

Commerce settings: cart and catalog visibility

Both are switches per phone number, and the defaults are not what most shops expect.

The cart is on by default. Switch it off and customers still see products and details, but no cart buttons appear, which turns product messages into a brochure. Some shops do this when every order needs a conversation about sizes or delivery.

The catalog is hidden by default: is_catalog_visible is false until you set it. Switching it on shows the storefront icon and catalog buttons in the chat and on the business profile, with a thumbnail preview. Switching it off also breaks your wa.me/c/ links and the View catalog button on any catalog link you already sent, which then display “Invalid catalog link”.

How does inventory get into the catalog?

Through Commerce Manager, through the Commerce API, or by connecting a Meta catalog you already have. Meta’s page is short: if a business “already has a Meta catalog set up, use that catalog for WhatsApp commerce use cases”, connect it to the WhatsApp Business account, and start sharing products. A shop that already runs an Instagram shop has done most of this work.

For businesses onboarded by a provider, Meta lists two options: the business keeps its own catalog and gives the provider permission to manage it, or, if there is no catalog, one is created under the provider’s business ID.

Meta’s catalog pages say nothing about Shopify, and that silence matters for a D2C store. A Shopify store gets product messages in one of two ways, and they are different mechanisms. One is a Meta catalog kept in step with the store, which gives you the cart and the order webhook; Meta’s WhatsApp pages don’t describe the sync, so that is a Commerce Manager question. The other is a WhatsApp tool that reads products from Shopify and sends its own product cards or a carousel, with the order placed through a link rather than a WhatsApp cart. Our Shopify WhatsApp integration guide explains what such a connection reads, and the comparison of WhatsApp tools for Shopify lists what each tool says it does.

Rules, reviews and updates

Three policy points from Meta’s overview apply to every Indian seller. Businesses based in India “must comply with all online selling laws”, with a Business Compliance API to hold those details against a number. Every item added to a connected catalog is reviewed automatically, with appeals through Commerce Manager. And customers can report a product they received in a message.

Product updates propagate without a resend. Change a price, title, description or image and the screens showing that product update “as soon as the customer client learns about the change from the server”. Mark an item unavailable and it is removed from any cart that holds it and shown as unavailable in the message.

Meta’s WhatsApp pages don’t give image sizes or formats for catalog items. Those rules live in Commerce Manager’s own help pages, so we haven’t stated any here.

What do product messages cost?

Interactive product messages are service messages, the template versions are marketing templates, and incoming orders are free.

• Catalog, single-product, multi-product and product carousel messages sent inside the 24-hour window are non-template messages. From 1 October 2026 Meta charges service messages after 1,000 per business phone number per month, at ₹0.1150 per delivered message to an Indian number, before GST, on the 1 October 2026 rate card. Meta’s catalog pages, captured in September, don’t mention price; the pricing page governs.
• Catalog, single-product, multi-product and product card carousel templates are marketing templates: ₹0.8631 per delivered message to an Indian number, before GST. They also count toward WhatsApp’s per-user marketing cap, so a held-back send fails with error 131049.
• The order webhook, the “Message business” text and any reply the customer sends are incoming messages and cost nothing.

Rizwan’s month, worked out: about 600 multi-product messages sent as replies, plus 350 other replies, is 950 service messages, inside the 1,000 free. His Diwali product carousel to 2,000 opted-in customers is 2,000 × ₹0.8631 = ₹1,726 before GST, for those delivered. Meta’s multi-product page mentions “an average 7% conversion of multi-product messages sent to carts received” during its testing. That is Meta’s figure on Meta’s feature; use it as a direction, not a forecast.

Catalog, or cards from your store?

Use a Meta catalog when you already sell on Facebook or Instagram, or when you want the in-chat cart and the order webhook. Use product cards from your store’s own data when Shopify is your source of truth and the order should go through your site anyway, with its stock, discount codes and payment in one place.

The trade-off is cart against control. A Meta catalog gives the customer a cart inside WhatsApp and you a structured order, at the price of keeping a second product list in step. Cards from your store show today’s price and stock from the system you already maintain, but the purchase happens on a page. A jeweller who sends a photo of the actual piece on the shelf, as the jewellery and boutique playbook recommends, is doing something neither format does.

Whichever you choose, start with the multi-product message as a reply, not the carousel template as a campaign. Rizwan’s “dinner set ka photo bhejo” is a customer message, so the reply with six dinner sets in two sections (36-piece and 24-piece) is a service message, costs nothing inside his free 1,000, and ends with a cart you can actually fulfil.