WhatsApp marketing and conversational commerce platforms

Selling over WhatsApp, where customers across India and much of the world can be reached

Market Segment 13.1 followed a pair of running shoes left in a shopping app's basket. The app chased the shopper with a push notification and an email. But in India, and across much of Asia, Latin America and Africa, the customer is not on email. The customer is on WhatsApp, and a brand that wants to reach them has to be there too.

Take a small brand in Bengaluru that makes running shoes and sells them only online, straight to its customers. A brand like this is called a direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand. (More on them in Market Segment 26.3, Direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands, in Industry Vertical 26, E-commerce and D2C brands.) No one at the brand can message thousands of customers by hand. It needs software.

Meta, which owns WhatsApp, opened the WhatsApp Business API to companies. (More on it in Meta, in the big-tech collection.) Through it, a company's own software can send and receive WhatsApp messages automatically. Within a few years, a new industry grew up around it. Its platforms let a brand:

A WhatsApp marketing platform lets a brand broadcast offers to opted-in customers, run a chatbot that takes orders, win back an abandoned basket and keep every conversation in one shared inbox.

Broadcast offers

to customers who have opted in, meaning they agreed to hear from the brand.

Run a chatbot

that answers questions and takes orders.

Win back an abandoned basket

with a WhatsApp message rather than an email.

Put every conversation into one shared inbox

where the sales team can see and answer it.

This industry is an Indian one. Five of the six companies here were founded in India. Most of them started by selling to India's D2C brands and small businesses, and then sold to the rest of the world.

These platforms sit on top of the messaging companies that connect a business to WhatsApp and SMS at the operator level. (More on those in Market Segment 2.1, CPaaS and business messaging, in Industry Vertical 2, Business communications.) Chatbots built for customer service, rather than for selling, are covered elsewhere. (More on them in Market Segment 15.2, Conversational AI for customer service, in Industry Vertical 15, Customer service and CX.)

The shoe brand's messages pass through a platform in this Market Segment, then a messaging company, then the WhatsApp Business API that Meta opened, before reaching the customer.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

This Market Segment covers six companies.

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The platforms that sell inside the chat

The platforms that sell inside the chat

Back to the Bengaluru shoe brand from the start of this Market Segment. Which platform suits it depends on its size and on how it wants to sell.

Five of the companies here were founded in India:

AiSensy

was founded in Gurugram, and hires in Delhi NCR. It sells a WhatsApp Business platform to small and mid-sized Indian businesses. The platform broadcasts one message to thousands of opted-in customers. It has a no-code chatbot, which a business can set up without writing any code. It sends the notification that an order has shipped, with a live chat behind it for questions. And it is priced for a business that has never bought marketing software before.

Wati

from Bengaluru, sells the same kind of platform across Asia and the Middle East. It adds a shared inbox for the team. It also adds a catalogue, through which a customer can browse and buy inside the chat.

LimeChat

is the version built for D2C brands. It sells WhatsApp commerce, meaning buying and selling inside WhatsApp. Its chatbot is run by an AI model. It answers the shopper, recommends a product and takes the order. LimeChat also sells an e-commerce CRM built around the conversation. A CRM (customer relationship management system) keeps the list of customers and every contact with them. LimeChat hires in Bengaluru.

Bik

sells marketing automation across WhatsApp and Instagram, to the same kind of brands. It runs the campaigns, and sends automatic replies to comments on the brand's posts. It also turns the people who messaged the brand into an audience for its advertisements, so the brand can show its ads to them. Bik hires in Bengaluru.

Quickreply Ai

presents itself as a WhatsApp marketing platform. It hires in Delhi NCR.

One company here works in a market where WhatsApp never took hold:

Beetexting

is the American exception. In the United States, businesses text their customers by SMS. Beetexting sells business texting over SMS to American companies, including payment requests sent by text. It shows the same idea running on an older technology. Selling through a conversation, on any messaging channel, is called conversational commerce. Beetexting hires in Hyderabad.

The shop inside the chat.

The idea behind this Market Segment is that the conversation is the shop, and AI models are making that real. LimeChat's and Wati's chatbots now answer the question, recommend the product and complete the order, with no person involved. So a brand's WhatsApp number becomes its highest-converting sales channel: the one where the largest share of shoppers end up buying. The same kind of AI agent is arriving on Instagram through Bik.

That is how the Bengaluru shoe brand sells over WhatsApp. A platform sends the offer, a chatbot answers and takes the order, and every conversation lands in one shared inbox.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What martech companies hire for.

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