Connect your WhatsApp number

Buyers love WhatsApp. With the WhatsApp concierge, your store gets its own WhatsApp number, and when a buyer messages it an AI concierge answers them — finding events, checking live availability, building a cart, sending a checkout link, and looking up orders. When a purchase completes, the e-ticket is delivered back into the same chat. You can step into any conversation from the inbox whenever you'd rather reply yourself.

It's not a shared platform number — the number is yours inside your own WhatsApp Business account, and it carries your store's name and logo. Think of it as "Stripe Connect for WhatsApp": Zunaro holds the connection, but the number stays yours.

What the concierge can do

When a buyer messages your number, the concierge replies as one consolidated message per turn, in the buyer's language (it mirrors the language of their latest message). It's scoped strictly to your store's events and that buyer's orders — it politely declines anything off-topic.

The concierge can:

• Search and detail events — find what's on, share dates and prices (which exclude fees), and show live availability.
• Build a cart — add tickets, which are held for the duration of your store's transaction timeout (10 minutes by default), and quote the true total (fees and tax included).
• Send a checkout link — payment always completes on your store's secure web checkout, never in chat. The concierge never asks for or accepts card details.
• Look up orders — by order number (the one in the confirmation email), verified against the buyer's phone number.
• Deliver e-tickets automatically — when the purchase uses the same phone number and the buyer's 24-hour WhatsApp reply window is still open, the tickets land in that conversation as a link. Email delivery still happens when WhatsApp delivery is unavailable.

Before you start

• You need the Admin role to connect or manage the WhatsApp number.
• A number you control — a business SIM, office landline (voice OTP is fine), or a spare mobile. The number must not already be in use on the consumer WhatsApp app. If it is, migrate or delete it from the app first, or use a separate SIM.
• The Embedded Signup must be available. If Zunaro's Meta app review is still in progress, the connect button shows that connecting your own number becomes available once the review completes. Until then you may see a test number banner.

Connect your number

Go to Settings → WhatsApp. The empty-state card lays out the three benefits (concierge, your own number, takeover) and has one primary button: Connect WhatsApp.

The connected channel card

Once connected, Settings → WhatsApp shows your number with an Active badge and two metric tiles. A metric may show Unknown or a verification hint when Meta has not supplied a value:

• Quality rating — Meta's health signal for your number. Blocks and reports degrade it; keep your messaging clean.
• Business-initiated limit — how many unique customers you can message proactively per day. The hint reads: verify your business with Meta to unlock higher limits.

Below the metrics you'll find the AI concierge toggle, an Open inbox link, and a Disconnect button.

The inbox

Open Inbox from the dashboard (or Open inbox on the WhatsApp settings page). It's a two-pane WhatsApp Web–style layout that shows every conversation on your number.

• Left pane — the conversation list. Each row shows the buyer, a snippet, and a small bot or person icon indicating who answered. Use the All / AI / Mine chips to filter, and search to find a contact. Hover a row to Archive it; archived chats live behind the Archived banner and resurface when a new message arrives.
• Right pane — the thread. Outbound bubbles are labelled AI (orange tint), You, or Auto (system messages like the e-ticket delivery), with delivery ticks that turn blue when read.

Take over and hand back

By default, the concierge answers. When you want to reply yourself, choose Take over in the thread header. A banner confirms the AI concierge is answering this chat beforehand; once you take over, the AI goes silent for that conversation and a line records that you took over. The header label switches to You are handling this chat, and the composer unlocks so you can type — you can also attach images or PDFs, or send a location.

When you're done, choose Hand back to AI and the concierge resumes.

The 24-hour reply window

WhatsApp lets you send free-form messages only within 24 hours of the buyer's last message. The inbox shows a countdown pill — "Free-form window closes in N hours" — and when it closes, an amber notice explains that WhatsApp only allows approved template messages until the buyer writes again. Inbound messages from the buyer reopen the window.

You'll also find per-chat Mute notifications (it silences the browser alert for that chat) and browser notifications for new inbound messages when the tab is in the background.

Turn the concierge off (kill-switch)

If you'd rather answer everything yourself, open Settings → WhatsApp and switch off the AI concierge toggle ("Answer buyer messages automatically. When off, messages only reach your inbox."). Every conversation then routes only to the inbox — nothing is auto-answered or recorded as an AI reply. Flip it back on any time.

Disconnect

To stop using the number entirely, choose Disconnect and confirm. Nothing will be answered or recorded until you reconnect, but your conversation history stays. Reconnecting with the same (or a new) number picks back up from Settings → WhatsApp.

From here, learn how the checkout the concierge links to works in How your storefront works, or how to handle the orders the concierge looks up in Manage orders.