Ecommerce sales is challenging due to the number of touchpoints a customer has which can cause drop offs at any of the stages. Usually there are a lot of steps involved in finding a product and placing an order for it.
The solution to this is to reduce the friction and improve the customer experience. Thus you’ll be able to increase your sales and other metrics that matter to your ecommerce business.
With WhatsApp for Commerce, you can bring all these steps together within the WhatsApp chat itself.
Customers can find out about your products, check out features and buying conveniently. You can optimize important ecommerce metrics like engagement, abandoned cart etc.
How It Works
There are 2 different types of product messages –
- Single Product Message: Only one product per message, without any variant.
- Multi Product Message: Up to 30 products of the catalog.
You can make your product catalog available to customers and automate the interaction for when you customer contacts you on WhatsApp.
Or, you can start the interaction from your end by sending a WhatsApp product message.
Here’s a brief overview of the process.
- Customers message you on your WhatsApp Business Account number to know more about your products.
- Factoreal sends a Multi Product Message in response.
- They add the product(s) to the cart and sends the message.
- A payment link goes out from your side where they can complete the purchase.
Set Up WhatsApp for Commerce on Factoreal
There are 5 steps in the process –
- Create Facebook product catalog
- Connect the catalog to Factoreal
- Create Product Message templates
- Build automated Chatbots for interacting with customers over WhatsApp
- Monitor and optimize campaigns based on sales data on FactCubes
Create Facebook Product Catalog
To configure the product catalog on Facebook you need to have a Facebook Business Manager account. For creating your Facebook Business Manager account, please refer to [Facebook’s Official Documentation]. You can then create a product catalog in [Commerce Manager].
Adding Products to the Catalog
There are 2 ways to add products to the catalog.
Adding Products Manually
In Commerce Manager, you would have the option to upload a .csv file that holds the necessary information of products in your catalog in tabular format.
If you prefer to manually update product catalogs and that is convenient to your workflow you can opt for this. Please refer to the [Official Guide] for the step-by-step instructions.
Connecting to a 3rd Party Platform
Facebook Business Manager allows you to link ecommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce etc.
You can connect your ecommerce store on Shopify. This will allow you to import your product catalogs from your Shopify store directly onto Facebook Business Manager.
Shopify requires you to [install the Facebook channel] before you can proceed.
After that you can set up Shopify to provide product catalogs into your Facebook business account. Please refer to the [instructions here].
NOTE: For automatic stock-keeping of your product inventory, you’ll have to link your Shopify store with your Facebook business account. Otherwise, if you opt for manual updates, you’ll have to update the product inventory on your own every time.
Connect Product Catalog with Factoreal
To connect the product catalog with Factoreal. Perform the following steps.
- Click Settings.
- Click Integrations.
- Click Online Store.
- Enter Facebook Business Account credentials to log in.
- Select the business page.
- Select the one of the business catalogs.
- Click Save.
You have now connected your Facebook product catalog with Factoreal.
Create Product Message Templates
To create a product message template, follow these steps.
- Click Templates.
- Click the WhatsApp Templates tab.
- Click Create Template.
- Select the WhatsApp sender number for this template.
- Enter the Template Name.
- Select the Interactive template type.
- Select Multi Product Message template category. (Alternatively you can select Single Product Message if you want to send out one product without any variants.)
- Select Message language.
- Enter Header text (optional).
- Enter the Message body to describe your offering.
- If you want to track clicks from the message (optional) you can click the toggle switch.
- Enter Footer (optional).
- Select the products from your catalog from the Select Product field.
- Click Save.
Now, you’ve created the multi product message template. For Single Product Message you’ll only be able to select one product for the template which doesn’t have any variants.
Build an Automated Chatbot
You can design a custom chatbot flow on Factoreal. With this you can serve automated product message sequence to customers.
Factoreal Chatbot gives you get a lot of control on the flows that you create. This can help you provide a more immersive purchase experience to your customers. Overtime, you can create better and more engaging experiences a lot more efficiently.
Click Conversations on the Factoreal dashboard.
Here’s how a bot flow would look like.
You can setup free text replies where you’ll have to use a template syntax as you can see below.
To connect one action block to another, you can add Nodes. Between action blocks, you can have conditional operators to make the flow interactive.
For a detailed demonstration on how to create automated chatbot for varying use cases, we recommend you schedule a demo with our product experts. You can get in touch with us [on this link].
Monitor and Optimize Campaigns based on Sales Data from FactCubes
All data from WhatsApp for Commerce will be available to you on FactCubes. To view that, click FactCubes on the home dashboard.
Click Merchandise Store in the Dashboards selector to the left.
You’ll get access to important metrics on sales and customer behavior throughout the purchase journey. First you can see primary ecommerce sales metrics – Total Sales, ARPU, Average Order Value, Total Orders, Cart Creation, Orders to Carts Created and Payments Failed.
Monitor your Total Sales over Time on this graph.
Monitor purchase data in this section.
Find out about the Top Selling Products and Least Selling Products from your catalog.
Track Payment Link Clicks over a certain period of time.
The Merchandise Store dashboard will thus give you all the data on your campaigns to guide your decisions on campaign budget allocation.
