Fazley RabbiWhen orders live inside chat threads
"Half our orders come on WhatsApp, and every evening someone scrolls back through the chats copying addresses into a khata." For many small sellers in Bangladesh, WhatsApp is where orders really happen. A customer sends a product photo, a voice note with their address, "2ta, ekta red ekta black, M size", and a bKash screenshot. It works until it doesn't: an order is missed, a size is copied wrong, two customers with the same name get mixed up, and nobody can quickly say how many orders came in today.
The fix is to treat every WhatsApp order as one row in one order sheet, filled in while the chat happens, with a clear confirmation going back to the customer.
What a clean order sheet holds
Before any automation, agree what an order is. A typical sheet has one row per order: order number, date and time, customer name, phone, district and full address, product, variant (size, colour), quantity, price, delivery charge, payment method (cash on delivery, bKash, Nagad), payment status, and order status (new, confirmed, packed, with courier, delivered, returned). Keep the columns few and fixed. A sheet that changes shape every week cannot be automated.
How the flow works
- Connect WhatsApp properly. Automation needs WhatsApp's official Business Platform (the API), set up directly with Meta or through an approved provider. Tools that log into your ordinary WhatsApp app and send messages by themselves go against WhatsApp's terms and can put your number at risk.
- Read the message. An AI model reads each order chat, including Banglish and mixed Bangla-English text, and pulls out the fields above. Voice notes can be transcribed first.
- Fill the sheet. A new row appears with an order number. Anything the AI is unsure about, such as a missing district or an unclear size, is highlighted instead of guessed.
- Ask for what is missing. The customer gets a short message asking only for the missing detail.
- Send a confirmation. Once the order is complete, the customer receives a summary: items, total, delivery charge, payment method, expected delivery time and order number. If something is wrong, they can say so before you pack.
- Update the status. When staff mark an order as packed or handed to the courier, the customer can get a short update. WhatsApp has its own rules for business messages sent outside an ongoing conversation, and a proper setup follows them.
A person checks every order the system flags. Special prices, discounts and refunds are decided by a person, never by the AI.
Decisions to make before building
- Where the sheet lives. A Google Sheet is enough for many shops; a small order app makes sense once several people edit at the same time.
- Who owns it. Who looks after the sheet each day, and who handles flagged orders.
- Your wording. The confirmation message in Bangla and English, and whether some orders need advance payment.
- Product names. If the same item is called "kurti", "tops" or "long top" depending on who types, make one product list first.
Mistakes I see often
- Automating before fixing the product list and prices, so the AI copies the confusion faster.
- Letting messages go out late at night. Set sending hours.
- Long, formal confirmations. Short and clear gets read.
- Forgetting the human route. Some customers will want to call; make that easy.
Where to begin this week
Take yesterday's WhatsApp orders and enter them by hand into a sheet with the columns above. You will see which details are usually missing, and that tells you what the confirmation message must ask for. Once the sheet feels right, automating it is a much smaller job, and it is part of my AI and workflow automation service. If cancelled cash-on-delivery orders are your bigger worry, see confirming COD orders before dispatch.