What you cannot sell or promote on WhatsApp

Meta's Commerce Policy defines what may be bought, sold or promoted across its platforms, including WhatsApp, and it applies to your catalog, your message templates, your business profile and your ordinary conversations alike. A restricted category is not a wording problem you can solve with a better template.

This page exists because merchants in these categories often discover the restriction after building an entire automation strategy. Ten minutes now saves that.

The prohibited categories

From Meta's Commerce Policy, the categories that block a WhatsApp commerce setup include:

• Weapons, ammunition and explosives
• Tobacco products and vaping products
• Alcohol
• Drugs, including recreational and unsafe supplements
• Adult products and services
• Real money gambling
• Counterfeit goods
• Multi-level marketing schemes
• Body parts and fluids

Meta's policy enforcement documentation separately names high-risk categories — adult content, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, gambling and unsafe supplements — among the triggers for account-level enforcement, which runs from a warning through 1 to 3 day message-type blocks, 5, 7 or 30-day full blocks, an appealable indefinite lock, and permanent removal.

Where the policy applies

Surface	Covered?
Your WhatsApp catalog	Yes
Message templates	Yes
Your business profile and description	Yes
Ordinary chat messages with a customer	Yes
Your website, linked from a message	Judged in context

That fourth row is the one merchants miss. A compliant catalog does not license a non-compliant conversation.

The grey areas that catch people

• Supplements. Ordinary vitamins are generally fine; anything positioned as a weight-loss, muscle-building or health-outcome product moves toward the "unsafe supplements" line, especially with before-and-after claims.
• CBD and hemp. Treated as sensitive and heavily jurisdiction-dependent. Do not assume local legality settles it.
• Alcohol as a gift item. A hamper containing wine is still alcohol.
• Vape hardware without liquid. Still vaping products.
• Replica and "inspired by" fashion. Counterfeit, in Meta's reading, whatever your product page calls it.
• Anything financial that resembles gambling. Prediction games and paid contests need care.

If you are adjacent rather than prohibited

Plenty of stores sell one restricted line among many. Three things help:

1. Keep restricted items out of the catalog even if they are on your website.
2. Do not reference them in templates. Order confirmations can give an order number and total without itemising.
3. Do not promote them in chat. Answering a direct question factually is different from marketing.

What happens if you get it wrong

The enforcement ladder above is graduated, so a first problem is usually a warning or a short block rather than a ban. That is worth knowing, because the panic response — creating a second WhatsApp Business Account to keep trading — is far more likely to end in permanent removal than working through an appeal.

Appeals go through Business Support Home and are typically decided in 24 to 48 hours. Our guide to what to do when your account is restricted covers the process.

Check before you build

If any part of your range appears above, read the Commerce Policy itself before you invest in templates, flows or a number. It is the shortest document in this entire subject and the one with the largest consequences.

"Prohibited" and "restricted" are not the same thing

The policy separates categories that may never be sold from categories that may be sold under conditions, and merchants conflate them constantly.

	Prohibited	Restricted
Meaning	Never permitted	Permitted with conditions, often by country
Examples	Weapons, drugs, counterfeit goods, body parts, MLM schemes	Alcohol, some health products, some financial services
Can I use WhatsApp at all?	Not for that product line	Often yes, with care
Varies by country?	No	Yes

That last row matters if you sell across borders. A product that is unremarkable in one market can be restricted in another, and the rule that applies is the one for the customer's location, not yours. If you ship internationally in a sensitive category, this is worth checking market by market rather than once.

Selling, promoting and mentioning

Three different activities, and the policy treats them differently — which is what makes the grey areas navigable.

1. Selling — listing it in your catalog, taking an order for it, sending a payment link. The strictest case.
2. Promoting — a template or broadcast pushing the product. Also covered.
3. Mentioning — answering a direct customer question factually, in a conversation they started. Materially safer.

So a store with one restricted line among many can usually operate: keep it out of the catalog, out of templates and out of broadcasts, and answer questions about it plainly when a customer raises it. What you cannot do is build automation that pushes it.

The grey areas, decided

Case	Realistic position
Multivitamins, protein powder	Generally fine as ordinary consumer goods
The same, sold on weight-loss or muscle claims	Moves toward "unsafe supplements" — a named enforcement trigger
Before-and-after photographs	Avoid entirely; they attract scrutiny in any health-adjacent category
A gift hamper containing wine	Still alcohol
Vape hardware with no liquid	Still a vaping product
"Inspired by" or replica fashion	Counterfeit, whatever your product page calls it
CBD and hemp	Sensitive and jurisdiction-dependent; local legality does not settle it
Prediction games, paid contests	Can read as real-money gambling
Second-hand goods	Fine, unless the underlying category is restricted

What enforcement looks like here

Meta's policy enforcement documentation describes a graduated ladder: a warning, then 1 to 3 day blocks on a message type, then 5, 7 or 30-day blocks on all messaging, then an appealable indefinite account lock, then permanent removal. High-risk categories — adult content, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, gambling and unsafe supplements — are named among the triggers, alongside spam and template misclassification.

Appeals go through Business Support Home and are typically decided in 24 to 48 hours. The graduated structure is genuinely useful news: a first problem is usually a warning or a short block, not a ban, which means there is time to correct course if you take the warning seriously.

If your category is prohibited

Be straightforward with yourself about this rather than looking for a wording trick. If you sell weapons, vapes, alcohol or any of the other prohibited categories as your core business, WhatsApp is not your channel, and no amount of careful template language changes that. The realistic options are the ones outside Meta's platforms entirely — SMS, email, your own app, or a channel whose policies permit your category.

Losing an established WhatsApp number costs more than most merchants expect, because it is the number printed on your packaging, saved in your customers' phones, and answering your ads. That asset is the thing at risk, and it is not worth a category the policy plainly excludes.

What to do before you commit

1. Read the Commerce Policy in full — it is short.
2. List every product line you sell and mark each prohibited, restricted or clear.
3. For anything restricted, check the rules for each market you ship to, not just your own.
4. Decide what stays out of the catalog and out of templates.
5. Brief whoever writes your campaigns, since a single promotional message about a restricted line is enough to start the ladder.

Where the policy applies inside your own automations

It is easy to keep a restricted product out of the catalog and then reintroduce it through the side door. Four places worth auditing in your flows:

• Knowledge base answers. If you crawled your whole website into an AI answering step, it can now describe products you deliberately excluded — and it will, confidently, because that is what you asked it to do. Crawl the pages that answer questions, not the entire shop.
• Broadcast audiences. A segment built on "everyone who bought in the last 90 days" includes buyers of the restricted line, and your next campaign reaches them. That is fine if the campaign is about something else; it is a problem if the campaign references what they bought.
• Order confirmation templates. A template that itemises the order names the restricted product in a message Meta reviews. An order number and a total do the same job without doing that.
• Internal notes and tags. These are not customer-facing and are not the issue, but they are useful for the opposite reason — tagging restricted orders lets you exclude them from campaigns deliberately rather than by luck. See tagging steps.

Categories this channel is genuinely good for

The prohibited list is short, and the impression it leaves is more restrictive than reality. The overwhelming majority of retail is unaffected: clothing and footwear, electronics and accessories, home and furniture, beauty and cosmetics, groceries and prepared food, books and stationery, toys, pet supplies, sports equipment, jewellery, plants, and every kind of service business.

Several of those are among the strongest fits, because they combine cash-on-delivery exposure with high question volume before purchase — sizing, availability, delivery timing. That is exactly the shape of problem automation handles well, and it is why the order confirmation flow pays for itself fastest in apparel and footwear.

One thing that is not a Commerce Policy question

Merchants sometimes read a template rejection as a category problem when it is a formatting one. If your product is clearly outside the restricted list and a template is still refused, the cause is almost always content or category mismatch rather than what you sell — why your template was rejected covers the actual reasons, most of which are fixable in a minute.