Blog / API & technical

Integrate WhatsApp with Shopify: step-by-step guide

Integrating WhatsApp with Shopify is one of the most effective ways to increase your store's conversions and reduce the support load. Shopify manages orders, but email notifications have low open rates and abandoned carts via email often don't come back. By moving these flows to WhatsApp, where messages are almost always read, you recover sales and improve the customer experience. In this guide we look step by step at how to connect the two tools with SendApp.

What you can automate

The integration brings your store's customers into SendApp and catches missed sales. Order notifications are something you add, with a template and one extra step.

• Contacts created or updated with the "shopify" tag on every order, checkout or new customer
• Abandoned cart recovery with a "Cart abandoned" automation (buyers are excluded)
• Order confirmation and shipping updates with Utility templates, sent from the SendApp API, Zapier or Make
• After-sales support and returns in the inbox, with AI handling frequent questions

Before you start: what you need

To connect WhatsApp to Shopify with SendApp you need an active SendApp account, a WhatsApp number and Meta's official API (with Meta-approved templates, recommended for a store's volume). You also need admin access to your Shopify store to create the webhooks.

Step 1: activate WhatsApp on SendApp

After creating the account, you connect your WhatsApp number: you follow the guided procedure to link the Meta number on the official API. Once connected, the WhatsApp channel is ready to send and receive messages from your SendApp inbox.

Step 2: prepare the templates

Create the templates you need: the abandoned cart reminder (you can include the link to complete the purchase and the total) and, if you want, order confirmation and shipping. Use the Utility category for transactional notifications and the Marketing category for promotional cart recovery. Add variables like {name} and placeholders for order number and links, so every message is personalised automatically.

Create the Utility templates for order notifications first: they're the easiest to get approved by Meta because they respond to a customer action. Keep promotional tones out of these templates.

Step 3: connect Shopify with webhooks

In SendApp you copy your account's webhook URL and paste it into Shopify, under Settings > Notifications > Webhooks, with JSON format. Enable the events that contain customer data: order creation and update, checkout creation and update, customer creation. On every event SendApp creates or updates the contact (name, phone, email) and tags it "shopify": without a phone or email no contact is created. To check, place a test order and see that the contact appears in SendApp.

For cart recovery you also connect the second URL shown in the guide, with the checkout and order events, and in Automations you create a rule with the "Cart abandoned" trigger and a WhatsApp template. The order events tell SendApp who bought: anyone who completes the purchase is excluded from the reminder, even if they pay while the sequence is waiting.

The integration does not send order notifications on its own: it creates contacts and handles abandoned carts. Confirmations and shipping updates go out when you send them, with a Utility template: from the SendApp API (for example from your management system) or with Zapier or Make, which link the Shopify event to sending the message.

Step 4: handle support in a single inbox

When a customer replies to a notification or writes about a return, the conversation arrives in SendApp's multichannel inbox, where your team handles it alongside Instagram, Messenger, email and SMS. The AI agent, trained on your shipping and returns policies, can answer frequently asked questions 24/7 and pass the chat to an operator when human intervention is needed.

How much it costs

The SendApp plan starts at 19 euros a month. With the official Cloud API messages are billed directly by Meta per delivered message, with no markup on Meta's rates.

How to do it with SendApp

SendApp brings together in one platform the WhatsApp number connection, approved templates, a CRM with tags, broadcast campaigns, a trainable AI agent and a multichannel inbox. You activate WhatsApp, connect Shopify with webhooks and set up the abandoned cart automation; for order notifications you add the API or Zapier and Make. The interface is available in 6 languages and over 1,000 businesses already use SendApp.