In short, WhatsApp Business API helps businesses to create a personalized communication flow that works best for their customers.

WhatsApp Business App

WhatsApp Business App & its WhatsApp Business Web extension are free-to-use apps aimed to help small business owners. It helps small businesses connect with customers and offer their products and services and support them through their journey. But it has limited capabilities and is not built for scale.

• Cannot send bulk messages to customers/leads.
• Cannot automatically trigger messages via APIs.
• Does not support multiple logins & dashboards to measure agent performance.

All these limitations can be overcome by using the “WhatsApp Business API“.

Pre-Onboarding:

• If onboarded with WhatsApp Business API solution provider (like Svytel), the previous chats cannot be seen.
• If onboarded with a WhatsApp Business API solution provider (like Svytel), the number cannot be used on any other WhatsApp apps – including the WhatsApp & WhatsApp Business mobile app.

Post Onboarding:

• Businesses can send messages to customers only after a customer initiates a message. These messages are called session messages and can be sent by businesses to customers only till 24 hours of the customer sending a message.
• After 24 hours, the session expires and businesses can only send ‘template messages’ to their users. Template messages must be pre-approved by WhatsApp and can be done from the Svytel dashboard.
• All template messages must adhere to WhatsApp Commerce Policies.
• WhatsApp Group Feature is not supported
• WhatsApp Voice or Video Calls are not supported. Voice notes are supported.
• WhatsApp Message Forwarding Feature is not supported
• WhatsApp apps cannot be used with the same number if using WhatsApp Business APIs
• Sent messages cannot be deleted as WhatsApp’s API currently does not support deleting a sent message.