A plain-English WhatsApp Business glossary

This is every term you will meet setting up and running WhatsApp for a business, explained in plain words. Most of them are acronyms that vendors use without defining, and several describe things that cost you money — so knowing which is which is worth ten minutes.

The setup terms

The terms that decide what you may send

The window is the single most important concept on this page — the 24-hour window explains why.

The terms that decide how much you can send

• Messaging limit tier — how many unique customers you may start a conversation with in a rolling 24 hours. Runs 250 → 2,000 → 10,000 → 100,000 → unlimited per Meta's messaging limits documentation. Replies inside an open window do not count.
• Quality rating — green, yellow or red, driven by blocks and reports. It gates tier increases.
• Per-user marketing limit — an adaptive cap on how many marketing templates one person receives from all businesses combined. Meta publishes no number for it.
• Business verification — Meta confirming your business is real. Lifts the template ceiling from 250 to 6,000 and is the fastest route from a 250-recipient tier to 2,000.

The ecommerce terms

The automation terms

• Trigger — what starts a flow. A customer message, a store event, your own system, or one of your team replying.
• Flow / automation / rule — the chain of steps you draw. All three words mean the same thing.
• Branch — a point where the flow takes one of several paths, usually after a question.
• Contact field / attribute — a named value stored against a customer. It must be created before a flow can write to it.
• Tag — a yes/no label on a contact or an order.
• Draft — an automation that exists but does not run. Nothing reaches a customer until it is published.
• Knowledge base — your own crawled pages and Q&A pairs, used to answer questions without inventing anything.

Terms you will see that mean less than they suggest

1. "Green tick guaranteed." Nobody can guarantee it.
2. "Unlimited messages." Your tier is Meta's, not your provider's.
3. "98% open rate." Repeated everywhere with no traceable source.
4. "Official partner." Says nothing about the software quality; check that setup does not involve a QR code, which is the real test.

The five that cost you money if you misunderstand them

If you remember nothing else here:

1. Customer service window — everything inside it is free.
2. Utility versus marketing — one discount code moves a template between them, permanently.
3. Messaging tier — caps unique recipients, and campaigns can consume the allowance your order confirmations need.
4. Quality rating — over-messaging caps how many people you can reach at all.
5. Two bills — a subscription from your provider, and Meta's per-message charge for templates.

Each of those has its own guide in WhatsApp Rules & Costs, and the pricing mechanics are on Meta's pricing page.

Terms specific to running flows

Error codes you will meet

• 131047 — free text sent more than 24 hours after the customer's last message. Send a template instead.
• 131049 — Meta declined a marketing template, either the per-user limit or the US restriction. Wait at least 24 hours before retrying.
• 132000 — the template expects a different number of variables than were supplied. The customer receives nothing.
• 131026 — the number is not reachable on WhatsApp.

Each is explained from the customer's side in WhatsApp error codes, translated for shop owners.

Where each term costs or saves you money

A quick orientation for anyone skimming: the terms in the second table decide whether a message is free, the terms in the third decide whether it is delivered, and the ecommerce terms describe what it is worth. Almost every expensive mistake in this channel comes from confusing one group for another — most commonly assuming a cart reminder is utility when it is marketing.

The words vendors use loosely

• "Chatbot." Usually means a flow you drew, not an AI. Worth clarifying which is meant, because they behave very differently.
• "Campaign." Sometimes a one-off broadcast, sometimes a multi-step sequence. Ask which.
• "Integration." Can mean a real store connection or simply that a link can be pasted somewhere.
• "Conversation." Meta once billed per 24-hour conversation; since 1 July 2025 pricing is per message, so older content using the word describes a system that no longer exists.
• "Official partner." Says nothing about software quality — the test is whether templates need approval and whether your phone must stay connected.

How the pieces fit together

Read as one sentence: you connect a number to a WABA through a BSP, and Meta gives you a messaging tier capping how many people you can start conversations with. Reaching someone outside the customer service window needs an approved template, whose category decides what it costs and who can receive it. How customers react sets your quality rating, which gates your tier.

That loop — send, react, rating, tier — is the whole system, and understanding it is what separates merchants who scale on this channel from those who get capped and never work out why.

Terms for the team side

Those are covered in running one WhatsApp number across a team.

Bookmark this one. Most of these terms turn up in the first fortnight, usually in a vendor's message that assumes you already know them, and having a single page to check against saves a surprising amount of confusion.

If a term you met is missing here, it is worth checking whether it describes Meta or your provider. Nearly everything in the first three tables is Meta's and therefore identical wherever you buy — which is often the fastest way to work out whether a claim you have been made is real.