Turn on all six WhatsApp automations in two minutes
They ship off by default. Here is the order to enable them in, the one template edit that matters, and the variable most sellers forget until a customer points it out.
Every WhatsApp automation on Dukaan arrives switched off. That is deliberate — messages sent from your business number in your name should be a decision, not a default. But it means a lot of stores run for months without them, hand-typing tracking numbers at eleven at night, because nobody told them the switches were there.
This takes about two minutes. Here is the order to do it in and why the order matters.
Do this first: enable all six, then edit
Dashboard → Automations. There is an Enable all button. Press it.
The instinct is to read each template carefully and perfect the copy before turning anything on. Resist it. The defaults are already approved by Meta and already work — every day you spend perfecting them is a day of answering "where is my order?" by hand. Turn them on, live with them for a week, then edit the two that bother you.
The six, in the order they will fire for a typical order: order placed, shipment updates (four separate events — packed, shipped, out for delivery, delivered), order status changes, abandoned cart recovery, store leads, and OTP login.
The one template worth editing on day one
The order confirmation. It is the first message a new customer ever receives from you, and the default is correct but anonymous — it reads like a courier notification rather than like a person.
Two changes take thirty seconds and are worth more than everything else on this page:
Say who you are. "Hi {{buyer_name}} 👋 Your order #{{order_id}} is confirmed" becomes noticeably warmer as "Hi {{buyer_name}}, thanks for ordering from {{store_name}}! Your order #{{order_id}} is confirmed." Same information, different relationship.
Say what happens next. Most buyer anxiety after checkout is not about whether the order exists — it is about when it moves. One line — "We pack on Mondays and Thursdays, so this ships within two days" — removes an entire category of follow-up message.
The variable everyone forgets
It is {{tracking_url}}, and it gets forgotten in the shipment update template specifically, because the default already has it and people rewrite the message from scratch to sound more like themselves.
A shipping message without the tracking link is worse than no shipping message. You have told the buyer their parcel moved and given them nothing to do about it, which generates precisely the question you were trying to avoid.
Dukaan will block the save if you reference a variable that does not exist for that trigger — but it cannot stop you from omitting one. Preview against a real order before saving and read the message as though you were the customer. If you cannot find out where your parcel is from that message alone, it is not finished.
Do not add a second cart-recovery message
This is the most common request and the answer stays no.
Recovery fires once, thirty minutes after a cart with a phone number goes quiet. Sellers who add a manual second nudge consistently see total recovery fall. The second message reads as pestering, buyers block the number, and a blocked number costs you every future order confirmation to that customer as well — including the ones for orders they do place.
One message, timed well, converts between 12% and 18% of carts that had a phone attached. Two messages converts less than that and burns customers. This is one of the few places where doing less is straightforwardly better.
Write them in the language you sell in
Messages go out as plain text from your own number, so Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi work exactly like English — there is no approval step. If your buyers message you in Hindi, an English order confirmation is a small, daily act of friction.
Non-English templates take the same few minutes to approve and get read more carefully. There is no reason to default to English other than habit.
What to check after a week
Open any three orders and read their timelines. You want to see each message with a delivered and ideally a read state against it. If you see failures, they are almost always a mistyped phone number at checkout, a number with no WhatsApp on it, or a buyer who blocked you previously.
Then open the Abandoned tab at the end of the month and count how many carts came back. That number, more than anything else on the dashboard, tells you whether the two minutes were worth it.
