Taking orders on WhatsApp without paying marketplace commission
How small shops, home bakers and D2C brands in Delhi NCR run an online store that sends every order to WhatsApp, with no Swiggy, Zomato or Amazon fees.
If you sell food, clothes, gifts, or anything else from a shop or from home in NCR, you probably already take orders on WhatsApp. The problem is that it does not scale: customers ask "what do you have", you send photos one by one, they ask the price, you type it, they change their mind. Marketplaces fix this but take 20 to 30 percent of every sale.
There is a middle path: a simple online catalogue that ends in WhatsApp.
How it works
- Your products live on a web page with photos, prices and variants. You share the link on Instagram, in your WhatsApp status, and on a QR code at the counter.
- The customer adds items to a cart like any store.
- Instead of a payment gateway, the "Place order" button opens WhatsApp with the full order already typed: items, quantities, total, delivery address.
- You confirm, collect payment by UPI, and deliver. No commission.
When to add payments
Once you are doing more than 20 or 30 orders a day, confirming each one by hand gets tiring. At that point, add Razorpay or PhonePe to the cart, and let the system send the order confirmation on WhatsApp automatically. That is still your store and your margin.
What you need
- Product photos (phone photos on a plain background are fine)
- A list of items with prices
- A WhatsApp number
- An afternoon to set it up
What it costs
Our StoreFront product does exactly this and starts at a monthly fee less than the commission on a single day's orders for most shops. A custom e-commerce build with payments and shipping is quoted per project.