You already sell through Instagram posts and WhatsApp chats. Two paths look similar from the outside: WhatsApp's own catalogue feature, or a proper store front that sends buyers to "Order on WhatsApp". They solve the same problem — people asking "price?" in comments — in different ways, and the right one depends on how far you plan to grow.
What a WhatsApp catalogue does well
- Free, built into WhatsApp Business, no separate link to manage.
- Fast to set up for a small, fairly fixed set of products.
- Buyers stay inside the app they already have open.
Where it runs out
- No real search or filter once you have more than a handful of products — a buyer scrolls.
- No sizes, variants or stock shown cleanly; that conversation still happens in chat.
- Nothing to send a buyer who found you on Instagram or Google, except the same catalogue list.
- No order history or repeat-customer view for you, beyond your own chat memory.
What a store front adds
A proper store, built from the photos you already post, gives buyers prices, sizes and stock up front, and still ends at an "Order on WhatsApp" button so the conversation and payment collection stay where your buyers are comfortable. It also gives you something to put in your Instagram bio and share as a link, which a catalogue does not do on its own. It also reads better on a slow connection, since a buyer sees a proper page rather than waiting for a long scroll of images to load inside WhatsApp itself.
What it costs you
A catalogue costs nothing but your time to enter products. A store front is worth the extra step once you have enough products that scrolling stops working, or enough sales that you need order history and repeat-customer patterns instead of scrolling old chats. For a handful of products, a catalogue alone may be all you need for now. Many sellers run both together — the store front for discovery, the catalogue as a quick fallback inside a chat that is already underway.
How we can help
Shoppyti turns your Instagram posts into a real store — prices, sizes, an Order on WhatsApp button — and shows it to you before you pay anything. See it at /products/shoppyti, and send us your Instagram handle at talk to us.
