Sell food via WhatsApp
By: Software That Solves
Tags: Food, Restaurant Marketing, Restaurant, WhatsApp, Restaurant Business

Ecommerce during 2020 went crazy. Almost 44.0% up from last year and Shopify stock prices almost 3x. But this article is not about statistics and boring stuff. I get practical and I aim to offer software that enables you to sell via WhatsApp with an online catalog. Easy to set up and efficient to receive orders.

Check out to create your catalog: https://wcatalog.webflow.io/

Start selling online now

There is this opportunity, which will allow you to have a marketing agent doing sales 24/7 for 7 days a week. Imagine, your food getting ordered and viewed by a bunch of people just every single day. How my service works:

Send us an Excel with a list of your products

Turn an Excel sheet into an online catalog that will allow you to start selling food via WhatsApp. What we offer is a simplistic way for you to save you a ton of time, that normally would go to set up an online store, an app for ordering, talking with a bunch of developers, and organizing stuff. With us (well, currently It’s only me, the founder of this software), you will need to set up a list of your food and products you sell in your restaurant. This can be from extras, pricing of drinks, and your main dishes. Take into account that this almost the same as Uber eats, but instead, you will have your own selling channel. You will be able to sell what you have and receive the orders to your WhatsApp, with no commission and free maintenance cost, just pay a monthly fee.

Upload and update products based on your current plan (Pricing)

Here I’m in charge of updating your products and what you display on your catalog. For the $20/Month plan, you will have 1 upload & update submissions. Then you have a $66/Month plan where you will have 5 uploads & update submissions and free-no cost assistance and weekly reports based on Google Analytics on how your catalog is going (remember that this is just like any other online store, Shopify, or website). And, last but not least, this plan will have an integration to a live chat widget so that you can assist customers, and know where they are from (all in real-time). Finally, you will have a business plan with no set cost yet, which includes all feaatures mentioned before. Plus allowing you to have weekly calls with me (the founder), suggest new changes to the online catalogs, customized features, and much more.

No commission and secure payments

This is more of a choice that I may change later. But what I assure you is that wCatalog is secure what regards to payment. Because it doesn’t manage in-app payments and lets the owner, seller, and person in charge of receive orders and make out the checkout process rather than the store automatically doing it. This can be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on what are the needs of your restaurant. If you are looking for a faster, and light-speed way to checkout, then you should use Uber eats and marketplaces apps to sell food (or both, Uber Eats and wCatalog). But this will come at the cost of high no-sense percentage commissions going from %10 to %25 per order. If you think, this is quite a lot, if you do some maths it ends in a bill of $16.500 approx annually. So that's why I came with wCatalog, the new way of selling online with no commissions.

Use Uber Eats + wCatalog

Why can’t you use both? Think of Uber Eats as a medium for you to get traffic and orders that come with a high price per sale, but with a high volume of traffic, of the people who use the app. And then you could wCatalog to use it on your Instagram page, and your alternative to charging for food cheaply, and outside the Uber Eats app. Also such as you won't have to calculate some high commission per sale, this enables you to sell food at a lower price.

Let’s talk about the catalog and its features (How it works)

Maybe you are a developer, it's based on Vanilla JavaScript with no frameworks. Currently, the code is not what I can be the proudest of, but hey it works just fine and offers and you don’t even need to download any app, so the client can order from the browser. You can have various sections and insides each one you can have: Extras, Main dishes, Most sold, etc.

How wCatalog works

The process of ordering consists of 6 steps:

Enter to the catalog (once website charges) Scroll and navigate through all the catalog of foods selling Click on the product you want to order Click on “Add Item” Click on the button“Your order” (here it will show the amount of your order) And select the type of shipping and payment method (this can be changed as the restaurant wishes)

After the order is completed, you receive a message from the client’s number to your WhatsApp with the following details:

Product Name, Quantity + Price

Total of the order

Type Of Payment & Shipping.

Is this catalog useful for you and your restaurant?

If you want to use WhatsApp as your main selling medium, then you should try this product. On the other hand, think about other alternatives such as Shopify or WooCommerce, those are really good options and also are pretty simple to set up. I can also talk with you and If your restaurant doesn’t have a website, we can plan on doing a landing page, hyper-target with SEO local visitors on your city, and redirect the search traffics to your catalog. Again, think of this catalog as a website for your restaurant.

Please go to https://wcatalog.webflow.io/