Your own number, the message people arrive with, and the replies you can automate.
Two different things. The button is on every card for free: somebody presses it and their own WhatsApp opens with a message to you already typed. The add-on connects your number to us, so replies can be read and answered automatically. You can use the button for ever without ever touching the add-on.
WhatsApp in the sidebar. Type the number people should reach you on under Target WhatsApp Phone Number - it is the same number the card builder holds - and the message they will arrive with under Default Pre-filled Inquiry Message. There are three ready wordings to start from and a preview of the chat beside them, plus a scan code so somebody can start the chat from their camera.
Something the person only has to press send on. Your name and what they are writing about is usually enough, and up to three hundred characters is the room you have. It is the first thing you will see in your own WhatsApp, so make it tell you which card they came from.
It needs the country code. A number typed the way you dial it at home has nothing in it that says which country it belongs to, so the box asks for the full international form. The screen says so as you type and will not save a number a phone could not ring.
It connects your own WhatsApp number to us the way WhatsApp Web does. Once it is connected, a person who writes to you can be answered automatically: a welcome, a short sequence over a few days, a reminder on a lead, a follow-up after an event, or a greeting on a holiday.
On the WhatsApp screen, read the notice, tick the box that says you accept the risk, press Connect, then Show the code, and scan it with the phone that holds the number. The screen then shows the connected state and the number that paired. There is a Disconnect button in the same place whenever you want out.
This is not an official WhatsApp or Meta product and they have not approved it. Connecting a number this way may break WhatsApp's own rules, and WhatsApp can block or ban any number at any time without saying why. If your number is banned that is your risk: we cannot get it back, and the quarter's money is not returned for it. You are told all of this on the screen before you can press Connect.
No, and it is not a setting. A person can be messaged only after they have written to you on WhatsApp first. Until then every message to them waits, and if they never write it is dropped after thirty days as unreachable rather than sent.
Deliberately slowly. At most a hundred a day on a connected number, thirty a day for the first week after it is connected, and twenty seconds between two messages on the same number. A broadcast goes in batches of ten, twenty minutes apart. A number that suddenly blasts a few hundred messages is a number WhatsApp bans.
Between nine in the morning and nine at night, in the recipient's own time zone when we know it and yours otherwise. A reply to somebody who has just written to you is exempt from the window, because answering a person at once is not marketing.
A few messages spaced over days, set up under Automations. Every step has at least three wordings that rotate, and the whole sequence stops the moment that person replies. Nobody should receive step three of a sequence after they have already answered step one.
To everybody who has written to you, yes, under Broadcasts. You accept the notice again for each broadcast, it goes out in small batches with gaps, and it pauses itself if too many are failing. Somebody who is not reachable is dropped from the run rather than retried.
WhatsApp can hide a person behind a privacy alias instead of their number. We match it when the first line names the card, and when we cannot we park the message for you to pair by hand rather than guessing at whose it is.
The Log tab on the WhatsApp screen lists both directions with their state. The words of a message are cleared after 120 days; the fact that it went is kept.
A connection made this way drops from time to time - the phone went offline, or WhatsApp was signed in again somewhere else. We check connected numbers on a schedule and email you once when yours has dropped. Reconnect with Show the code and scan again.
The WhatsApp card on Billing has its own Add and Remove buttons and shows the real price from our catalogue. It sits on the same subscription as your plan, so it is one charge and one invoice, and removing it is one press. On a team, a member's own WhatsApp is turned on by the company per member, on that member's seat page: it is added to the team's plan, the member accepts the terms for their own number and connects it, and the company's own WhatsApp neither turns it on nor is needed for it.
The forum is where questions get answered in public, so the next person finds the answer too.