WhatsApp automation that answers, qualifies and sells

Automation on WhatsApp is not a single feature. In practice it is four different jobs that merchants tend to lump together: answering repeat questions, reacting to things that happen in your store, following up with people who went quiet, and getting the right conversation to the right person. ConvoFly does all four from one visual builder, and this page explains exactly how — including the parts WhatsApp does not let anyone do.

What you can actually automate

Every flow starts with a trigger — the event that wakes it up. ConvoFly's builder supports five kinds:

• A customer message — any inbound message, or one matching keywords you choose ("price", "delivery", "refund").
• A Shopify store event — order placed, order shipped, order delivered, order cancelled, payment failed, or an abandoned checkout.
• An agent action — a chat being assigned, tagged, or marked resolved.
• Your own API event — anything your systems can send a webhook for, so a flow can fire from an ERP, a courier, or a booking tool.
• A schedule — recurring campaigns and date-based reminders.

From there the flow branches. Conditions can test business hours, the customer's tags and saved attributes, whether a chat is inside a cooldown you set, or whether the customer failed to reply within a timeout. That last one matters more than it sounds: an if-no-reply branch is what turns a single question into a follow-up sequence rather than a dead end.

Actions do the work: send a message or template, ask a question and store the answer, tag or assign the chat, write a row to Google Sheets, call any external API, tag an order in Shopify, or hand the conversation to a named team.

Where AI fits — and where it doesn't

Keyword matching breaks the moment a customer phrases something the way humans actually do. ConvoFly adds AI at three specific points rather than everywhere:

• AI blocks inside a flow read a message, work out the intent, extract details like an order number or a date, translate, and choose a branch — no keyword list to maintain.
• The knowledge-base bot answers FAQs from your own website, PDFs and approved Q&A pairs, and hands off to a human when it is not confident.
• AI Copilot drafts a reply for an agent, grounded in your knowledge base. The agent approves and sends — it never sends on its own.

You can also describe a flow in plain English and have AI draft the canvas for you, then edit it by hand. AI features unlock from the Growth plan; the Starter plan is keyword and rule based.

Do you need the WhatsApp Business API?

Yes, and this is the single most common point of confusion. The free WhatsApp Business app on your phone has no automation beyond a greeting and an away message, and it cannot be shared properly across a team. Real automation requires the WhatsApp Business API, which is a Meta product that platforms like ConvoFly connect you to.

The good news is that connecting is no longer a developer project. ConvoFly uses Meta's embedded signup, so you link a number from inside the app in a few minutes. The number you connect moves to the API and stops working in the consumer WhatsApp Business app — that is Meta's rule, not ours, and it is worth knowing before you start.

The rules WhatsApp enforces on everyone

No platform can sell you around these. Any vendor implying otherwise is worth avoiding:

• The 24-hour window. Once a customer messages you, you can reply freely for 24 hours. After that you can only re-open the conversation with an approved template. See Meta's messaging guide.
• Templates need approval. Any message that starts a conversation must use a pre-approved template. Review is typically minutes to a few hours. See Meta's template documentation.
• Messaging limits are tiered. New numbers start limited and step up — 1,000, then 10,000, then 100,000 unique customers in a rolling 24 hours, then unlimited — based on quality and volume. See Meta's messaging limits.
• Meta bills you separately. Conversation charges go to Meta directly and vary by country and message category. See Meta's pricing documentation. No platform subscription includes them.

ConvoFly builds the first three into the product: templates are managed in-app, opt-outs and sending caps are handled for you, and the inbox locks the composer when a conversation's 24-hour window has closed so an agent cannot send a message that would silently fail.

How to build your first flow

1. Connect your number. Sign up, open Onboarding and link your WhatsApp number through Meta's embedded signup. Have your Facebook Business account details to hand.
2. Open the flow builder. Go to Automations and create a new flow. You get a blank canvas, not a wizard.
3. Drop a trigger. Drag a trigger block on and pick what starts the flow — start with "customer sends a message containing" and a keyword like "price".
4. Add a condition. Wire a business-hours block after it, so the flow answers differently at midnight than at midday.
5. Add your actions. Send a message on the open branch; on the closed branch send a "we're back at 9am" reply and assign the chat to your sales team for the morning.
6. Test it. Use the simulator to run the flow without messaging a real customer, then publish it.

A first useful flow takes about ten minutes. The flows that make money — abandoned-cart recovery, cash-on-delivery confirmation — take an afternoon and run for years.

How a flow is actually put together

A published flow is a graph, not a script: blocks on a canvas, wired by hand, each one doing a single job. There are four families of block and it is worth knowing which is which before you start, because the difference between a flow that works and one that loops forever is almost always a missing condition rather than a missing message.

• Triggers start the flow. One per flow.
• Conditions split the path — business hours, a tag, an attribute value, a cooldown, an if-no-reply timeout.
• Actions send a message, ask a question, tag, assign, or call something outside ConvoFly.
• Terminators end the flow cleanly, which matters more than people expect: a flow with no defined end is a flow that can re-enter itself.

Our guide to what each automation block does covers the full palette, and building your first automation walks through one end to end with screenshots.

One detail that catches everyone: keyword matching is not search. A trigger looking for "price" will not fire on "pricing" unless you say so, and it will fire on "priceless". If your first flow seems not to run, that is usually why — keyword triggers that actually match covers the matching rules in detail.

Five flows worth building before anything else

Merchants who get value from automation almost always build the same handful first. In rough order of return:

• Cash-on-delivery confirmation. If you ship COD, this is the flow that pays for the subscription several times over — an unconfirmed order that gets refused costs you the shipping both ways.
• Out-of-hours acknowledgement. Not a "we'll get back to you" platitude: your actual opening time, plus an assignment so the chat is waiting for the morning shift.
• The one question you answer forty times a week. Read last month's inbox and find it. It is usually delivery time or price.
• Abandoned checkout recovery, to opted-in contacts only, one message plus at most one follow-up.
• Order shipped with tracking, which removes the "where is my parcel" messages before they are sent.

Notice that four of the five are not chatbots. Most of the money in WhatsApp automation is in reacting to store events, not in conversation.

Test before you publish

Every flow can be run in a simulator that walks the whole graph without messaging a real customer, and it is the difference between finding a broken branch yourself and finding it because a customer complained. Publish only after you have walked each branch, including the silent one — testing a WhatsApp automation safely sets out a repeatable checklist.

Mistakes that cost people money

Automating before reading the inbox. Teams build flows for the questions they imagine rather than the ones they get. An afternoon reading last month's conversations will change your build order.

No if-no-reply branch. A flow that asks a question and has no path for silence strands every customer who gets distracted — which is most of them.

Hiding the human. If a customer cannot reach a person, they leave. Every flow should have an obvious escape to an agent, and someone should actually be watching that queue.

Treating opt-in as a formality. Messaging people who never agreed damages the quality rating that governs your messaging tier, and the damage takes weeks to undo.

Knowing whether it worked

From the Pro plan the analytics dashboard reports first-response and resolution times, SLA attainment, first-contact resolution and busiest-times heatmaps, with saved reports and scheduled email digests. The number to watch in the first month is not messages sent — it is the share of conversations resolved without an agent touching them, against your response time holding steady or improving. Automation that raises deflection while response times get worse is just a queue you cannot see.

What it costs

ConvoFly plans start at $12/month and every plan includes a 14-day free trial with no card required to explore. Automation is on every tier: the Starter plan includes 3 published billable rules and 500 billable automation runs a month, which is enough to run a real store's core flows. AI blocks and the knowledge-base bot unlock from Growth at $50/month.

Compared with the other platforms merchants shortlist, that entry price is unusually low — most start between $45 and $79 a month. The comparison pages lay out the differences honestly, including where a competitor is the better choice.

What automation looks like on each WhatsApp setup

Figures checked August 2026. WhatsApp platform limits and charges are set by Meta and can change — always confirm against Meta's own documentation.

Common questions