With the integration of Meta Catalogs in Freshchat's Bot Builder, you can now offer your customers a seamless shopping experience directly within WhatsApp Messenger, driving higher conversions and increased customer satisfaction. You can easily manage and update your product cataloe across both platforms, streamlining your e-commerce operations. Please follow these steps to start using Catalogs with your bots from Freshchat.

  1. You need to have a Catalog linked to the WhatsApp Business Account (WABA) account integrated with Freshchat.
  2. Navigate to the bot builder in your Freshchat account. Create a new bot and map it to the WhatsApp channel.
    • If you're editing an existing WhatsApp bot with a catalog of items, make sure you've created a new draft version that you can edit.
    • In the Knowledge Sources for your bot pop-up, choose the Portal and Category you want the bot to learn from. This is an optional step, as you can toggle off Learn from FAQs and proceed to create the bot. You can enable this later if required by going to Natural Language > Configure > Natural language settings > Enable Learn from your FAQs
  3. Create a new flow for your customers to add items from the Catalog into their cart.
    • If you're using an existing bot / flow, you'll have to navigate to the flow where your customers are expected to add their items from the catalog to the cart.

       
  4. Navigate to Settings > Whatsapp Settings > Select the Catalog ID linked to your WABA > Select the dialog with the action where the customer can add items to their cart. Once you've set up everything, you can click save.


  5. If you're not using a linked catalog, you can use the API payload to pull in the information about the items you want to add to your WhatsApp catalog.

  6. Set the input type to Multi product Message in the Dialog where you want your customers to use your catalog.

    Note: If the customer does not select any response, or there's an error that results in the multi product message not containing any product, the bot error fallback flow would get triggered. Learn more about the bot error fallback flow here.


  7. You can choose between showing one set of products or all the products in your catalog. You can also name this list. After this step, the customer can open the catalog when they reach this dialog.

  8. You can now use the Whatsapp Cart action flow in your BOT to configure what happens once users add items to their cart in the catalog.



If you're using Shopify:

  • If you have a Freshchat account which has already been integrated with your Shopify account:
    • Navigate to your bot which has the Shopify integration > Flows > Configure > Integrations > Shopify > New Action > Add WhatsApp cart payload to new cart.
    • The checkout link can then be displayed to users to complete the payment
  • If you haven't integrated your bots in Freshchat with your Shopify account, you can pass the WhatsApp cart payload via an API to the configured endpoint.



Here are some helpful links:

  • To know more about setting up Whatsapp Catalog with Freshchat, click here.
  • To know more about on publishing products on Facebook and Instagram via Shopify, click here


Note: You can connect only one catalog at a time to your Freshchat account. You can create sets of products within the same catalog. Each set can be called into a different multiproduct message.


Once the Catalog is linked to your WABA please wait for upto sixty minutes to start viewing it in the Whatsapp Settings under Bot Builder.