E-commerce

WhatsApp Commerce for D2C Beauty Brand

Built a WhatsApp-first commerce layer that cut response time from 18 minutes to under 3 and recovered 18% of abandoned carts.

Client

A 200-store D2C beauty brand

Industry

E-commerce

Engagement

Fixed scope

Timeline

12 weeks

Team

1 PM, 2 backend engineers, 1 frontend engineer

The problem

The brand had 200+ retail stores and a growing D2C channel, but customer queries on WhatsApp were handled manually by a team of 12. Average reply time was 18 minutes during peak hours. Cart abandonment on the website sat at 72% with no recovery mechanism.

The approach

We scoped a WhatsApp-first commerce layer using the official WhatsApp Business API, not a third-party wrapper. We chose to automate the top 20 query types that covered 80% of volume, and kept human handoff for everything else. We explicitly chose not to build a full chatbot — rule-based routing with smart templates outperformed LLM-based chat in our testing for this use case.

What we built

Automated WhatsApp catalogue browsing with product cards and quick-reply buttons
Abandoned cart recovery flows triggered 30 minutes and 24 hours after drop-off
Live agent handoff with full conversation context preserved
Analytics dashboard showing reply times, recovery rates, and agent performance

Outcomes

Reduced

WhatsApp reply time

Reduced from 18 minutes to under 3 minutes

Cart abandonment recovery

Up 18% in the first 60 days

Down

Manual agent workload

Down 65%, team reduced from 12 to 4

“We went from drowning in WhatsApp messages to running a system that sells while we sleep. The cart recovery alone paid for the project in month two.”

Priya S.

Head of D2C, Confidential