WhatsApp automations · 6 live triggers

Stop typing "it's shipped, sir."

Six automations wired to real order events. Every confirmation, tracking link and cart nudge goes out on its own — in the one app your buyer already has open, on the number they already answer.

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The problem

The most expensive message in Indian commerce

"Bhaiya, order kahan hai?"

It is 11:14pm. You have shipped fourteen orders today and you are answering the fifteenth version of the same question, by hand, on your own phone. You open the courier site, copy an AWB number, paste it into WhatsApp, type "out for delivery tomorrow", and move to the next chat.

None of that work made you a rupee. It is pure overhead — and it scales linearly with your success. Twenty orders a day is twenty status conversations. A hundred orders a day is a full-time job you did not hire for.

Then there is the cost you cannot see. A buyer who does not hear from you for three days assumes the order is lost. They open a dispute, or they charge back, or they simply never come back. Silence after checkout is the single cheapest way to lose a repeat customer, and almost every small store in India is doing it by default.

Email does not fix this. Indian buyers do not read commerce email — it lands in Promotions and dies there. SMS costs money per message, gets filtered by DLT rules, and cannot carry a clickable tracking link reliably.

WhatsApp is where the conversation already is. The buyer gave you their number at checkout. They have the app open. They will read the message within minutes. The only reason every store is not already automated on it is that wiring the Business API up yourself means a Meta business verification, a BSP contract, template approvals and a webhook server.

That is the part Dukaan already did. You get the switches.

The six automations

Exactly what your buyer receives

Not a description of a message — the message. This is the rendered output of each default template, with the variables Dukaan fills in highlighted. Every one of them ships off by default; you turn on the ones you want.

01 / ORDER PLACED fires instantly

The receipt they'll actually keep

Sent the moment checkout completes. Line items, amount, payment method and a permanent order link — so the next "where is it?" gets answered by the buyer themselves. You get a parallel ping on your own number.

02 / SHIPMENT UPDATES 4 events

Four messages you never send

Shipped and delivered. Each one fires off the order's own status change, carries the live tracking link, and lands without you opening a single chat. This automation alone kills most of the 11pm workload.

03 / STATUS CHANGES with reason

Bad news, delivered well

Cancelled or returned. The buyer hears it from you before they notice it themselves — with the reason attached. This is the difference between a cancelled order and a one-star review.

04 / CART RECOVERY +30 min

One nudge. Not two.

Any cart with a phone number and no order after 30 minutes gets exactly one message with a one-tap link straight back to a pre-filled checkout. Typical recovery lands between 12% and 18% of abandoned carts.

05 / STORE LEADS instant

A lead that answers back

Somebody drops their number on your storefront and the welcome goes out before they close the tab — while they still remember who you are. The lead lands in Audience at the same time, tagged with the page it came from.

06 / OTP LOGIN < 3 sec

No passwords, no SMS bill

Buyers and sellers sign in with a one-time code on WhatsApp instead of a password. Dukaan sends it from its own number, so it arrives whether or not the buyer has ever messaged you — and you never pay an SMS gateway again.

Anatomy of a recovered order

Ninety minutes, one message

Abandoned carts are not lost customers — they are interrupted ones. Somebody's bus arrived, the baby woke up, the UPI PIN screen timed out. Here is the exact sequence Dukaan runs, and why every step is timed the way it is.

T + 0:00

Cart created

A buyer adds to cart and enters their phone number at the first checkout step. That number is the only thing that makes recovery possible — which is why the phone field comes before the address field, not after.

T + 0:30

The nudge fires

Thirty minutes with no matching order and the cart is marked abandoned. Sooner feels like surveillance; a day later and they have already bought it elsewhere. Thirty minutes is late enough to be real and early enough to still matter.

T + 0:31

One tap back in

The link restores the exact cart — same items, same quantities, same applied coupon — on the same device or a different one. No re-adding, no re-typing an address. The shorter the path back, the higher the recovery.

T + 1:30

And then it stops

There is no second message. Sellers who add one see recovery fall, not rise — the second nudge reads as spam, buyers block the number, and a blocked number costs you every future order confirmation too. One message is the whole strategy.

Templates

Your words. Our triggers.

Every automation ships with a default template that already works. You are not obliged to touch it — but the stores that sound like themselves get replies, and the ones that sound like a courier's status page get ignored.

The editor is plain text with variables. Type your message, drop in the placeholders you need, and Dukaan renders a live preview against a real order from your store before you save — so you see the actual message, with real values in it, not a mockup.

Each store keeps its own set. If you run three stores, the candle brand can be warm and chatty while the electronics store stays terse and factual. Nothing is shared between them unless you copy it across.

{{buyer_name}}

First name as entered at checkout

{{order_id}}

Your store's human order number

{{order_total}}

Final amount, formatted in your currency

{{items}}

Line items with quantity and price

{{tracking_url}}

Live courier tracking page

{{store_name}}

Your store, as buyers know it

{{cart_url}}

One-tap restore link for recovery

{{cancel_reason}}

Reason you selected on the order

Automations → Shipment update → Template
# what you type Hi {{buyer_name}}, your order {{order_id}} just left our studio 🕯 Courier: {{courier_name}} Track it: {{tracking_url}} Reply here if anything looks off. # live preview, real order Hi Ananya, your order #DK4821 just left our studio 🕯 Courier: Delhivery Track it: mydukaan.io/t/DK4821 Reply here if anything looks off.

Save is blocked if a variable does not exist for that trigger — you cannot ship a message that renders as {{tracking_url}} to a customer.

The honest part

What this will not do

WhatsApp is Meta's platform, not ours, and it has rules that no amount of product design gets around. Every one of these will affect you eventually. Better you read it here than discover it on a Saturday.

It is not a bulk marketing blaster

These six automations are transactional — they fire off an event that the buyer caused. Uploading a list of 5,000 numbers and sending a Diwali sale broadcast is a different product with different rules, different costs, and a much faster route to getting your number restricted. Dukaan will not do it from here.

WhatsApp's own rules still apply

Automations send from your own linked number, so WhatsApp treats them like messages from you. Numbers that send unsolicited bulk messages, or get reported by buyers, can be restricted by WhatsApp. Keep automations transactional and that never comes up.

Your phone stays the source

Dukaan sends as a linked device on your store's number, the same way WhatsApp Web does. If you log that device out from your phone, automations pause until you link it again from the dashboard — which takes a QR scan.

A wrong number is a dead end

Automations send to the phone number captured at checkout. If a buyer typed it wrong, or gave a landline, or has no WhatsApp on that number, the message fails and there is no fallback SMS. The order timeline shows the failure so you can call them instead.

Buyers can opt out, and that is final

A buyer who blocks your number or replies STOP is out of every automation permanently, including order confirmations. WhatsApp enforces this, not us. It is one more reason not to over-send: the cost of one extra marketing nudge is every future transactional message to that customer.

A second cart nudge lowers recovery

We get asked for this constantly and the answer stays no by default. Stores that have run both patterns see the second message depress total recovery and raise block rates. If you want it, it is a manual campaign — not something we will quietly turn on for you.

Delivery is fast, but not instant or guaranteed

Typical delivery is a few seconds. It is not a hard guarantee — Meta's platform has outages, and a phone that is off receives on reconnect. Messages queue and retry rather than being dropped, and every attempt is written to the order timeline with its final state.

It does not replace answering people

Automations handle the questions that have a mechanical answer. "Is this candle safe around a cat?" still needs you. What you get back is the hour a day you were spending on tracking numbers, to spend on the conversations that actually sell something.

Under the hood

Your number. Linked, not rented.

Messages go out from your store's own WhatsApp number, linked from the dashboard by scanning a QR code or entering a pairing code — the same way you link WhatsApp Web. Buyers see your name and number, and their replies land in your WhatsApp like any other chat.

Order events are emitted by the platform's own event sink, so an order status set from the dashboard, from a courier webhook, or from a script hitting the API all produce the same message. There is no separate path to keep in sync.

Delivery, read and failure states are written back onto the order itself. When a buyer says they never got a tracking link, you open the order and see whether it was delivered at 2:41pm and read at 2:44pm.

order #DK4821 — timeline
14:38:02 order.created → wa.order_placed queued 14:38:04 wa.order_placed → +91 98••• •••21 sent 14:38:06 wa.order_placed delivered 14:41:19 wa.order_placed read 09:12:44 order.packed → wa.shipment_update sent 14:40:07 courier.webhook → awb 28471039221 in_transit 14:40:08 wa.shipment_update delivered 08:05:31 courier.webhook → out_for_delivery delivered 16:31:55 courier.webhook → delivered delivered
QR

Link your number the way you link WhatsApp Web

6

Order events with a webhook you can subscribe to

0

Meta Business or BSP accounts to set up

What it costs

No per-message charges

Automations go out from your own linked number, so there are no Meta conversation fees and Dukaan adds no per-message charge on top.

MessageWhich automationsPer-message cost
Order updatesOrder placed, shipment updates, status changesNone — sent from your linked number
Login codesOTP loginNone — sent by Dukaan
Recovery & leadsCart recovery, store lead welcomeNone — and still exactly one nudge, because a second one reads as spam
Your repliesAnything you type yourself in WhatsAppFree

Nothing to buy

There is no messaging add-on and no per-message fee. Link your number, turn the automations on, and they run.

The maths that matters

One recovered cart on a ₹1,600 order pays for a great many utility conversations. If your average order value is above about ₹400 and your recovery rate is anywhere in the normal band, the cart automation is the cheapest customer acquisition on the platform — because these are people who already chose you once.

Setup

Two minutes, once

01

Open Automations

Dashboard → Automations. Six switches, all off. Enable all turns on the set in one click; most stores start there and edit copy later.

02

Make it sound like you

Edit any template, preview against a real order, save. If you sell in Hindi or Tamil, write them in Hindi or Tamil — Messages are plain text from your own number, so there is no approval step.

03

Then forget about it

Nothing else to maintain. Watch the order timeline for a week to see delivery states landing, and check the Abandoned tab at the end of the month to see what came back.

Still deciding? The Help Center covers every screen, the platform page shows what else is wired to these same order events, and merchant stories has the numbers from sellers who turned this on first.

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