WhatsApp Shared Inbox: How Small Teams Share One Number

A shared inbox is a single view of every conversation on one WhatsApp business number, worked by more than one person. In Keaz that view has two tabs, Open and Done, so active conversations are visibly separate from finished ones, and both are searchable. The mechanics are covered in Inbox: Overview.

It is worth being precise about what it is not, because the phrase gets used for two different things. A shared inbox in this sense means several people on one WhatsApp number. It does not mean one window for every channel you own. Keaz is a WhatsApp product built on Shopify — WhatsApp conversations from your customers land in the Keaz Inbox, and that is the scope. If what you need is email, SMS and Instagram unified in one screen, that is a different category of tool and this post will not get you there.

Which account type you need underneath — the WhatsApp Business app or the WhatsApp Business Platform — is a separate question with a real answer, and we worked through it in WhatsApp Business with multiple users. This post assumes that decision is already made and asks the next one: how does a small team actually work the queue?

Four things go wrong, and they go wrong in a predictable order.

1. Two people answer the same customer. Without one shared view, the second reply lands minutes after the first, often saying something slightly different. The customer reads both.
2. Nobody knows what was already promised. A goodwill refund agreed on Monday gets declined on Thursday by a colleague who never saw the thread. This is the failure that costs the most trust per incident.
3. The clock runs out unnoticed. WhatsApp opens a 24-hour customer service window when a contact messages you, and the timer resets each time they message again (Meta WhatsApp Business Platform documentation, retrieved 2026-08-24). Miss it and a free, ordinary reply becomes an approved template message.
4. Ownership lives in one person's head. It works until that person is on holiday, and then it does not work at all.

None of these are volume problems. A store doing 40 conversations a week hits all four. They are coordination problems, which is why the answer is a convention plus a few tools, not a bigger team.

Four, and only the first is a screen. The other three are decisions you make once.

1. One queue with two states. Every incoming WhatsApp message arrives in the same place and you reply from the same screen. Open and Done is deliberately a binary: a conversation is either someone's problem right now or it is closed. See Inbox: Overview.
2. Labels as the ownership convention. Labels are colour-coded tags you assign to contacts, and you decide what they mean — that is the point. Use them to mark who is carrying a conversation and what it is about. There is no separate label admin page in Keaz: you create a label wherever labels are offered, and manage it on the contact. Labels also do double duty, because in a flow's Starting point Contact labels restrict who is allowed to enter. Full behaviour in How labels work.
3. Filters as the work queue. Filter the conversation list by chat state — read, unread, or still inside the reply window — and by label, and combine the two. One click on Reset filters brings the full list back. This is how each person gets a short list instead of everyone scrolling the same long one. See Inbox: Filters.
4. The reply-window clock, made visible. Keaz shows the time remaining directly in the composer and switches the composer over once the window closes, so the deadline is not something a person has to remember. See Inbox: 24h Reply Window.

Notice what is absent from that list: per-agent assignment as a permission boundary. Filters narrow what you choose to look at; they are a working agreement, not a lock. For a team of two to ten that is usually the right trade, because a convention you can change in a day beats a permission model you have to administer.

The technical part is short. The part that decides whether this holds up in month three is the convention.

1. Connect Shopify. This is required, and it is what puts order and customer context next to the conversation instead of in another tab.
2. Connect your WhatsApp account. One business number, one queue.
3. Agree the label vocabulary before you invite anyone. Three to five labels. Resist the urge to model everything.
4. Decide the default filter each person starts their day from. Unread plus their own label is the usual answer.
5. Write down the Done rule in one sentence. "Done means the customer has what they asked for or a date when they will." Undefined Done is the single most common reason a shared inbox degrades back into a group chat.

The full toolset — ten flows and nine growth tools, live in fifteen minutes — is on the Keaz features page, and the per-vertical picture is on Industries. If the conversations you are coordinating are mostly support rather than marketing, WhatsApp customer support for Shopify stores covers that side in more detail.

Every one of these is recoverable, and all of them are cheaper to avoid.

• Making labels carry two meanings at once. "Awaiting stock" and "Marc is handling this" are different axes. Mixing status and ownership into one label set is how you end up with fourteen labels and nobody filtering by any of them.
• Building the convention for a team you do not have yet. Three labels that three people actually use beat a taxonomy designed for a support department of nine.
• Leaving Done undefined. If Done means "I replied", the tab fills with conversations that are not finished, and people stop trusting it.
• Treating the reply window as a nice-to-know. Watch it while the conversation is live. Realising it closed and then reaching for a template is the expensive version of the same message.
• Expecting the shared inbox to unify other channels. It will not, and building a process that assumes it does means rebuilding that process later.
• Answering from a private number when things get busy. It works once. Then the customer replies to that number, and the conversation is invisible to everyone else.

Can several people answer one WhatsApp number at the same time?

Yes — that is what the shared inbox is for. Everyone works the same queue, sees the same history, and replies from the same screen, so there is no handing a phone around and no private numbers in the loop.

What happens when the 24-hour reply window closes?

Inside the window you can reply with any ordinary message. Once it closes, an approved template message is what reaches the contact. WhatsApp restarts the 24-hour timer whenever the contact messages you again (Meta WhatsApp Business Platform documentation, retrieved 2026-08-24; pricing documentation covers which message types are free inside an open window). Keaz shows the remaining time in the composer, and Inbox: 24h Reply Window explains what changes when it runs out.

Can I restrict which team member sees which conversations?

Filters narrow the list you choose to work from — by chat state, by label, or both. That is a working agreement rather than a permission boundary, so treat it as "my queue" and not as "only I can see this".

Does this work for a store with several locations?

It works as one number and one queue that a team spread across locations shares, with a label per location so each person can filter to theirs. There is no location-aware routing doing that for you — the label is the mechanism, and for a handful of locations it is enough.

Do I need a bigger plan to add a second person?

That is a pricing question rather than an inbox one, and prices move — check the pricing block on the Keaz home page rather than a blog post.