WhatsApp Catalog: How to Set One Up and What It Does

The catalog is a browsing surface that sits inside the conversation. The product data is the same data; what changes is where the customer is standing. Someone who has just asked whether you have an item in blue can be shown three options without leaving the thread — no tab switch, no second login, no search box that returns the wrong thing. What it does not do is replace your shop. Stock, pricing and refunds still live in Shopify, and so does the order.

That makes a catalog a conversation asset first and a storefront second. It earns its keep where a conversation was already happening: a reply to an ad, an answer to a sizing question, a reactivation message with two products attached. What Keaz runs on WhatsApp is that messaging side — flows, campaigns and a shared inbox — with the catalog underneath as the thing those messages can point at.

Connect the shop before you build the feed. Connecting Shopify to Keaz is what gives messages their triggers — an order, an abandoned checkout — and a trigger is the difference between a product message that arrives at the right moment and one that arrives at random.

The work splits into four stages. Two of them are obvious and get planned for; the other two are where stores lose the result.

1. Upload the inventory. Build the catalog in Meta Commerce Manager or through the Commerce API. Keep the first pass small — a catalog nobody has seen yet does not need to be complete, and a short feed is far easier to keep accurate.
2. Set the commerce settings. Two switches, and they do not default the same way: the storefront is off, the cart is on. This is the stage that gets skipped, and it is the whole difference between a catalog that works and one that is silently invisible.
3. Share the products. Decide per message whether you send a single product, a set of up to 30, a carousel of up to 10 cards, or a catalog message that opens the whole thing. That is a merchandising decision, not a technical one — three relevant products beat thirty.
4. Handle the replies. A product message produces questions, which is the point. Your WhatsApp profile settings decide what a customer sees about you on arrival, and a shared inbox decides whether the question gets an answer the same day.

Whether the whole thing is worth it comes down to range. A shop with twenty products and steady inbound questions gets value in an afternoon. A shop with four thousand SKUs across sizes gets much less: nobody browses four thousand products in a chat window, and keeping that feed correct becomes somebody's job. If you are already running click-to-WhatsApp ads, the catalog gives that first automated reply something to show. If you are not messaging customers at all yet, the catalog is not the missing piece — the opted-in list is, and how the channel looks in your industry is the better place to start. Where Meta's own limits and rules sit, with dates and sources, is kept on our WhatsApp Business Platform facts page.

• Announcing a catalog without checking the storefront switch. It is off by default, per phone number. Stores tell their list the catalog is live, nobody can open it, and the conclusion drawn is that the feature does not work.
• Treating it as a checkout. Outside India a submitted cart reaches you as a notification, not as a payment. Any process that assumes money has already changed hands will find that out on the first order.
• Uploading the entire shop. Thirty products is the ceiling for a single multi-product message and ten cards for a carousel. A feed of thousands mostly exists to go out of date.
• Forgetting that a product message is still an outbound message. The same opt-in discipline applies to it as to any campaign. A catalog changes what you can show, not whom you may write to.
• Nobody staffed on the replies. The entire advantage is that the customer can ask the next question immediately. If that question waits two days, you have built a slower version of your website. Campaigns that actually convert all have someone behind them.