Guide
How to take wholesale orders on WhatsApp
Your customers already send you orders on WhatsApp — usually at night, usually half-typed. The question isn't whether to take orders there. It's how to do it without a person retyping every message, and without losing your number.
Why WhatsApp, and why it goes wrong
In most wholesale businesses the order arrives as "need 5 cases of the blue razz and 2 of the mango" at eleven at night, or a photo of an empty shelf, or a voice note from a car. Someone in the office reads it in the morning, guesses the prices, types it into whatever the system is, and hopes they matched the right customer. Every step of that is a place errors live.
What a workable flow has to do
- Know who is messaging. The same message from two customers is two different orders, because their prices differ. Matching the number to the customer — and their price tier — has to happen before anything is priced.
- Read what people actually send. Typed lists, photos, voice notes. If the system only handles neat text, the office is still retyping.
- Read the order back, priced. The customer should see exactly what they're getting and at what price, before anything is placed.
- Place nothing without confirmation. An order goes live when the customer says so — in RepBuddy, when they reply DONE — and lands ready to pick. Guessing is how you ship the wrong thing politely.
- Stay silent with strangers. A number that chats with everyone is a spam bot. If the sender isn't a customer, the right answer is nothing at all.
Keeping your number safe
This is the part most businesses learn the hard way. WhatsApp restricts numbers that behave like broadcasters: hundreds of identical messages in a burst is exactly that pattern, and restrictions on a number your customers order through are a real business problem.
- Send promotions one at a time, spaced out, with a daily cap — slower is the point.
- Honour STOP permanently. A customer who opted out and gets another message is a report waiting to happen — and reports are what restrictions are made of.
- Prefer posting to groups your customers are in over bulk direct messages: one post reaches everyone without the broadcast pattern.
- Consider a second number for promotions, kept separate from the number that takes orders.
What this isn't
Connecting your own number by scanning a code — the way RepBuddy does it — is not the official WhatsApp Business API. There are no message templates to get approved, and no per-conversation fees; it behaves like a person using WhatsApp, which is exactly why the pacing above matters. And it is not a chatbot: it doesn't greet strangers, upsell, or chat. It takes orders from your customers and stays out of the way.
The mechanics of how this works in RepBuddy are on the WhatsApp ordering page.