Catalogs

Ricardo Updated by Ricardo

Catalogs

How to set it up

First, you need to setup your catalog in the WhatsApp Business App or through Meta's Commerce Manager. You can see how you can do that here.

Turn.io supports WhatsApp Catalog Messages, enabling you to showcase your entire product catalog directly within your customer conversations, no external links or apps required.

Retail conversations typically follow a frustrating pattern: customers ask about products or services, you send links, they leave WhatsApp to browse, and many never return. Every redirect is a conversion leak.

Catalog Messages eliminate this friction entirely. Customers can browse your products, view details, compare options, and express purchase intent—all without leaving the conversation. It's your storefront, embedded directly in WhatsApp, delivered at the exact moment customers are engaged and ready to buy.

Setup your catalog

To use catalogs, you first need to set them up in your Meta Commerce Manager. Here's how you can do it:

Create a Catalog

1. First, visit your Meta Commerce Manager: https://business.facebook.com/commerce/

2. If there are no catalogs for that Meta Business Portfolio, the page may look different. In that case, click on “Add Products”

3. Then, follow the on-screen instructions to configure your catalog.

If you already sell online, Meta integrates with a few e-commerce platforms, simplifying the process of managing your catalog. Here's a list of partner platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce, ChannelAdvisor, GoDataFeed, Productsup, Feedonomics, CedCommerce, adMixt, DataCaciques, Quipt, Zentail and Magento.

4. Optionally, you can also connect your catalog to event tracking, giving you richer conversion analytics.

5. Then, you can choose to add products manually or for a spreadsheet/file (which is what we recommend if you're doing this in bulk, you can read more about it here)

Now, you need to link this catalog to a particular number. Here's how you can do it:

1. Navigate to the Meta WhatsApp Manager: https://business.facebook.com/latest/whatsapp_manager/

Make sure you select the WABA your number lives under on the top-right.

2. Click on Catalog on the left bar, and click on Choose a Catalog

3. Select the catalog you created earlier

4. Finally select the number you intend to enable this on (note: you can only connect 1 catalog per WABA)

You have 2 options here:

1. Show catalog icon in chat header: this shows a special "Catalog" icon on your number's conversation header (see image below). If you're doing this, you need to do some extra steps in your journeys, which you can find later in this article.

2. Show "Add to cart" button: this enables users to add items from your catalog into a cart, which you can then use in Journeys later (for example, to prompt people to pay for that cart).

And you're done! Note that once you’ve created your catalog and enabled it on a number, Meta may take sometime to revise it and approve it. You'll know it's approved when the catalog icon appears on your number's header (if you've enabled the Show catalog icon in chat header option earlier).

How to use it

First, simply add a catalog message to any of your journeys:

Then, you have branch the journey depending on if the user interacts with the catalog or not, allowing you to elegantly deal with both scenarios:

If you have enabled the Add to cart setting on your catalog, we'll return whatever users have added to their cart in the card's reference. For example, if your catalog card is called Catalog, you can reference it by typing @ref_Catalog.product_items. Here's an example of its contents:

%{
  "catalog_id" => "123456789",
  "product_items" => [
    %{
      "product_retailer_id" => "product_001",
      "quantity" => 2,
      "item_price" => 29.99,
      "currency" => "USD"
    }
  ]

This makes it super easy for you to then use the user's selection in whatever way you need, for example for processing a payment or making an API call.

Enabling the catalog icon in the chat header

If you've enabled the catalog icon in the chat header and want to handle users interacting with this, you need to create a new journey with a special kind of trigger. Here's how you can do it:

1. Select the Catch all trigger

2. Click on Add a rule

3. Toggle on "Advanced filtering"

4. Paste the following code in the advanced filtering input: has_only_text(event.message.type, "order")

5. To access the contents of the user's cart, if you've enabled that open, you can access the contents via a Code block. Here's some example code:

card CodeBlock_1 do 
	order = event.message.order
	
	text("Order received!")
    text("Products ordered: @order.product_items")
end

Developer docs

If you want to use Catalogs via Code blocks, you can find the developer docs here.

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