A WhatsApp catalog is a reviewed asset, not a product list.

Where it lives, and why that matters

The catalog is not part of your website and it is not stored inside WhatsApp. It is an asset in Meta Commerce Manager that you connect to your WhatsApp Business Account, after which you enable commerce settings on the specific phone number that will use it.

Three consequences follow from that indirection, and each one explains a common confusion. A product being live on your site does not make it visible in a WhatsApp conversation. Changing a price on your store does not change it in WhatsApp unless something syncs it. And a catalog can be connected to the account while the phone number still cannot show products, because commerce settings are per number.

Meta also reviews every item you add against its commerce policies before it can be shown. The catalog is a moderated surface, not a database you control outright.

Three ways to load products — pick by where truth lives

The choice is not really technical. It is about where your stock levels already live. Feeding WhatsApp from a copy you maintain separately is the single most reliable way to end up quoting products you no longer have — which is the failure the last section of this page is about.

Per product, expect to supply a name, description, price, images and availability. Get the images right: they are the entire experience on a phone, and a badly cropped product photo does more damage to a WhatsApp sale than a clumsy description does.

Thirty products, not three hundred

WhatsApp shows catalogue products in two message shapes, and the limit on the larger one is the constraint worth designing around.

If you sell three hundred SKUs, that ceiling is not a limitation to work around — it is a hint about how the channel works. Nobody scrolls a catalogue in a chat window. The businesses that sell well on WhatsApp answer a question and send the three things that match it, not the thirty that technically fit.

Which is also the argument for something intelligent choosing the selection. A static set of sections has to be curated by a person in advance; an agent picks per conversation, from what the customer just said.

India has an extra layer — Meta says so itself

This is not a detail we are adding for a local audience. Meta’s own commerce documentation singles India out, noting that businesses based here must satisfy applicable Indian requirements for online selling before the commerce features are available to them.

We are deliberately not going to summarise Indian e-commerce law on a marketing page. What is worth saying plainly is that the obligation exists, that it sits on top of Meta’s own commerce policy rather than replacing it, and that it is a question for whoever handles your compliance rather than for a vendor blog — including this one. If your business already sells online lawfully, this is usually a paperwork confirmation rather than a barrier.

What you simply cannot sell

Meta’s commerce policy prohibits some categories outright and restricts others by geography or licence. Alcohol, tobacco, weapons, drugs and supplements are among the commonly prohibited ones, and there is a longer restricted list underneath.

Two practical points. First, a policy rejection is not a paperwork problem you can resubmit your way out of — if the category is prohibited, the item is not sellable on the platform and no amount of rewording changes that. Second, the list is Meta’s and it changes, so read the current commerce policy rather than any summary. If your range sits near a boundary, find out before you build a catalogue and onboard customers around it.

The failure nobody warns you about: drift

Setting up a catalogue is a day’s work. Keeping it true is a permanent one, and this is where most WhatsApp commerce setups quietly fail.

The pattern is always the same. The catalogue is loaded carefully in week one. Prices change in the shop. A line sells out. A festival discount goes live. Nobody updates Commerce Manager, because updating Commerce Manager is nobody’s actual job. By month three the catalogue is a snapshot of what you sold in week one, and it is confidently showing customers a price you no longer honour and an item you cannot ship.

That is worse than having no catalogue, because a wrong price quoted by your own business is a conversation about trust rather than a missing feature. The defences, in order of how well they work:

1. 1. Sync from the system that already changes. A partner integration or an API feed off your store or ERP means the update happens because someone did their normal job, not because they remembered a second one.
2. 2. Keep one source of truth. If stock lives in the ERP, the catalogue is downstream of the ERP. A maintained-by-hand copy is a second truth, and second truths always lose.
3. 3. Answer from live data, not the snapshot. The catalogue can drive browsing while the actual availability answer comes from the system that knows. This is what an agent on your number does — it reads live stock at the moment of asking, so “is this available?” is answered by your inventory rather than by a card uploaded in March.

Where this fits in selling

A catalogue is one step of a sale, not the whole thing. How to sell on WhatsApp covers the full journey from first message to paid order, including where shops actually lose the sale — which is rarely the catalogue and usually the twenty minutes after it.

On the operational side, the messages that carry order updates go through template approval, how many people you can reach is governed by messaging tiers, and what all of it costs is in the billing guide. None of those are affected by how large your catalogue is.