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 between Shopify and WhatsApp covers the entire order lifecycle and also lets you intercept lost sales.

• Order confirmation, shipping and delivery notifications
• Abandoned cart recovery with automatic sequences
• After-sales support and returns handling in the same chat
• Review requests after delivery

Before you start: what you need

To connect WhatsApp to Shopify with SendApp you need an active SendApp account, a WhatsApp number and the choice of track: the official Meta API (with approved templates and the green tick, recommended for a store's volume) or WhatsApp Web via QR code, with no per-message cost and useful to get started. You also need admin access to your Shopify store to configure the events.

Step 1: activate WhatsApp on SendApp

After creating the account, you connect your WhatsApp number. With the official API you follow the guided procedure to link the Meta number; with WhatsApp Web you scan the QR code from your phone. Once connected, the WhatsApp channel is ready to send and receive messages from your SendApp inbox.

Step 2: prepare the templates

Create the templates for the various events: order confirmation, shipping, delivery and cart recovery. Use the Utility category for transactional notifications and the Marketing category for promotional cart recovery. Insert variables like {name} and the placeholders for order number and link, so each message personalizes itself 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 the Shopify events

At this point you connect your store's events (order created, shipping, abandoned cart) to sending the SendApp templates. Every time the event occurs on Shopify, the corresponding WhatsApp message goes out automatically to the customer, with the order data already filled into the variables. Contacts are synced and organized with tags in SendApp's CRM.

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 according to its per-conversation model, with no markup from SendApp. With WhatsApp Web via QR code there are no per-message costs, an ideal option for low volumes.

How to do it with SendApp

SendApp brings together in a single platform the WhatsApp number connection, the approved templates, the CRM with tags, the broadcast campaigns, the trainable AI agent and the multichannel inbox. You activate WhatsApp, connect Shopify, set the templates and the flows run by themselves. The interface is available in 6 languages and over 30,000 companies already use SendApp.