Setting up your shop

There are two ways to set the shop up: answer the bot's questions over WhatsApp, or do it from the dashboard. They write the same data. Most owners do the bank details and QR over WhatsApp because they are already there, and the catalogue from the dashboard because it is easier to review.

The conversational setup#

The first time the owner phone messages a shop that has not been set up, the bot walks through three questions. Each one can be skipped, and DONE ends the whole thing early.

Bank details#

Send them however you would tell a customer. The account number is identified by its shape rather than by its position, so this works:

and so does this:

Two number-shaped parts in one message are refused rather than guessed at.

Nothing is saved until you confirm what was read back. That is not politeness: the draft is held separately from the live settings precisely so a wrong parse never becomes the account customers pay into.

Payment QR#

Send it as an image. Non-images are rejected at upload. A PDF would store perfectly well and then fail when it is sent to a customer's phone, which is the worst possible place to discover it.

Products#

One per line, in the order name, price, unit, stock:

Atta 5kg 280 bag 40
Ghee tin 720 tin 12
Chilli powder 500g 140 pkt 60

Suffixes are stripped from the end inwards — stock, then unit, then price — and whatever is left is the name. A name that still contains a digit is refused and named back to you, because flour 4.50 kg 100 genuinely is ambiguous.

Unparseable lines are always reported. An owner who typed twelve lines and got eleven products should not find out from a customer.

From the dashboard#

Everything above, plus the parts that are easier with a screen:

See a tour of the screens.

Getting the catalogue in quickly#

For more than about twenty products, do not type them into WhatsApp. Send us your price list in whatever form it exists — a spreadsheet, a PDF, a photo of a printed sheet — and we will load it during onboarding. The pilot shop's 190 products were loaded this way.

Aliases matter more than you expect#

An alias is another word customers use for a product. maida, atta, flour, maavu might all mean one line in your catalogue.

Add them early. Every word a customer uses that matches nothing becomes a question to them and a missed line for you — and on Pro and Business those misses are collected for you to review. See catalogue intelligence.