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Online ordering — WhatsApp

When a customer adds items to the cart on your public site and taps Send order, the order leaves your site and lands in your WhatsApp chat — the same place you already talk to customers. No new app to download, no extra inbox to watch. The order arrives as a regular message, pre-typed for the customer, ready for you to acknowledge and start cooking.

The rule

WhatsApp is the only chat channel. Connect a working business number — or hide the cart entirely. A cart with a broken handoff is worse than no cart at all.

Why WhatsApp

WhatsApp is where your customers already are. Most diners — local regulars, tourists, returning customers — have it on their phone, know how to use it, and check it constantly. Pushing them through a sign-up or a separate ordering app is friction that costs orders. The cart skips all of it: the customer fills the order, taps Send order on WhatsApp, their phone opens WhatsApp with the message pre-typed, they tap send. You get a notification like any other chat. From their tap to your phone vibrating is two seconds.

The chat thread also stays — so a week later when the same customer wants to order again, they can scroll back, find the last order, and just re-send it. You get loyalty without building a loyalty app.

Connecting WhatsApp

  1. Open Settings → Address, contact & social.
  2. In the WhatsApp field, type your business WhatsApp number with country code, like +66 81 234 5678 or +39 348 765 4321.
  3. Save. The cart on your public site starts showing a Send order on WhatsApp button within seconds.

You can use a separate WhatsApp number from your main phone. Many venues do — keeps customer orders out of the same chat as suppliers and family. A second SIM in a kitchen-only phone, or WhatsApp Business on a tablet at the pass, are common setups.

What the customer sees

The cart on your public site shows a single green Send order on WhatsApp button below the order summary. If you haven’t connected a WhatsApp number yet, the cart hides itself entirely and Settings → Online ordering shows a yellow note telling you to add one — better to hide the cart than show a button that goes nowhere.

When the customer taps the button, a new tab opens with WhatsApp Web or the WhatsApp app, the chat is pre-addressed to your number, and the message body is filled in: order number, items, modifiers, total, customer name, phone, delivery address (if entered), and a link back to the order page on your site. The customer just taps Send.

What you get in the chat

A normal WhatsApp message arrives with the full order pre-formatted. You can copy-paste lines into your kitchen ticket system, forward it to a delivery driver, or just reply directly with a confirmation time. The order page link in the message lets the customer check back to see whether you’ve acknowledged it, marked it ready, or completed it — so they don’t have to message you “is my order coming?” twenty minutes in. They just refresh the link.

If you’ve connected this venue to the rest of the system (the recipe link to inventory, the menu item to the till), the message in WhatsApp is only the customer-facing side. Behind the scenes the same order can land in your order list, deduct stock through the recipe chain, and show up in tomorrow’s food-cost report — the WhatsApp message is the diner’s view; the till and the kitchen pick up their own copies.

Worked example

A small trattoria in Bangkok wires up online ordering for the first time. The owner already runs a personal WhatsApp on her phone (+66 89 444 1122) but she doesn’t want orders mixed with family chat. She buys a second SIM, installs WhatsApp Business on a kitchen tablet, picks +66 80 555 7788 as the new number. Opens Settings → Address, contact & social on the admin, types +66 80 555 7788 into WhatsApp, saves.

Five seconds later the public site cart shows the green Send order on WhatsApp button. She opens the site on her phone (a different one from the tablet), drops a margherita and a Caprese into the cart, total €23, taps the button. WhatsApp opens with the message pre-typed to the kitchen tablet — order number, items, total, her name, her phone. She taps Send. The tablet at the pass vibrates; the line cook glances at the screen and starts the pizza. From the cart button tap to the kitchen seeing the order, eight seconds.

Two weeks later she swaps the kitchen tablet for an iPad with a bigger screen. WhatsApp Business migrates the number to the new device. Settings need no change — the venue’s saved number is still +66 80 555 7788, the cart still routes there. Orders just keep arriving on the new device.

Switching the number later

You can change the WhatsApp number any time. The change is live within seconds — no deploy needed, no app reload. Same for removing it: clear the field, save, and the cart on your public site disappears. Orders already submitted under the old number keep working — they remember which number they were sent to, so a customer who placed an order yesterday can still tap the order page link and find the right chat to follow up in.

Common questions

Does WhatsApp charge me for receiving customer orders? No. The cart opens a normal WhatsApp chat from the customer to you — same as any other personal or business message. There’s no API fee, no per-message cost. WhatsApp Business has paid features (broadcast messages, templates, automated replies) but none of them are required for this; the cart works on a free personal WhatsApp number just as well.

Can I use a landline? No — WhatsApp only works on mobile numbers. If you want orders to land on a phone the kitchen actually answers, the right move is a dedicated mobile SIM in a kitchen tablet. WhatsApp Web on a laptop at the till works too, as a second screen.

What if I type the wrong number? The customer’s tap will open WhatsApp but they’ll see a “number not on WhatsApp” message. Test the link yourself once after saving — open your venue’s public site on a different phone, drop an item in the cart, tap Send order on WhatsApp, and check the chat opens to the right number. Two-minute sanity check, saves a lost order.

What about LINE / Telegram / Messenger? Not supported today. We tried LINE during early development and ran into platform limits — the auto-message link only worked reliably for a narrow set of account types, and the desktop fallback opened the LINE home page instead of the chat, which was worse than nothing. WhatsApp gives consistent behaviour across phones, tablets, and desktop, so we standardised on it. If your customer base is heavily on a different platform and you’d like us to look at it again, tell us — we keep a tally.

Can the customer reply with edits after sending? Yes — once the message is in WhatsApp, it’s just a chat. The customer can correct the address, ask for no onions, swap a wine. You read the order, reply with the corrections, and the chat thread becomes the record. The order page link doesn’t auto-update with chat edits — for now, the truth is whatever you and the customer agree to in the chat.