Commerce Messages for WhatsApp

7 October 2022

Commerce messages are messages that contain information about products. Such messages can be sent and received via a WhatsApp channel. Using them, WhatsApp Business app users can easily showcase and share their products and services with customers from a catalog they create. In this article, we will cover the types of commercial messages, as well as how to enable and use this type of messages on the edna platform.

Types of Commerce Messages

There are four types of commerce messages:

  • Outgoing single-product message (SPM)
  • Outgoing multi-product message (MPM)
  • Incoming single-product message (a question about the item in the message)
  • Incoming multi-product message (a cart with the selected items)

How to Enable Commerce Messages

Information about the items for both outgoing and incoming messages is taken from the catalog, that a company needs to create by themselves and connect to Meta. To enable commerce messages:

  1. Create a catalog in Meta Commerce Manager.
  2. Add items to the catalog as required.
  3. Share the created catalog with edna as your business partner. This will allow edna to connect it to your WhatsApp account. To do this:
    1. Go to the business settings of your Meta Business Account.
    2. Open Data Sources > Catalogs and select the required catalog.
    3. Click Assign Partners.

    4. Select Business ID.
    5. Enter edna’s partner business ID: 1802294256518591
    6. Toggle on the Full control > Manage catalog switch and click Next.

  4. Send a request to the edna support team (support@edna.io) to connect the catalog to your WhatsApp account.
  5. Wait for the support team to respond that the catalog has been connected.

Sending and Receiving Commerce Messages

To send and receive commerce messages via WhatsApp, you need to use edna platform API. When sending and receiving messages, you need to use the following parameters:

  • Outgoing SPM: See an example for this kind of message here. In messages, you need to specify the IDs of the catalog and the item found in Meta Commerce Manager.
  • Outgoing MPM: See an example for this kind of message here. In messages, you need to specify the IDs of the catalog and the items found in Meta Commerce Manager.
  • Incoming message with a question about the item: Such a message contains the IDs of the catalog and the item.
  • Incoming message with a cart with the selected items: Such a message contains the IDs of the catalog and the items, quantity of each of the items in the cart, the items’ prices and their currency.

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