01Click-to-chat is a starting point, not a system
A prefilled wa.me link is the right first move — it removes friction and it is measurable. But it puts every conversation inside one phone, with no history, no routing and no way to hand over.
The step up is the Business Cloud API: conversations become data, several people can serve the same number, and automation can take the first turn.
02Understand the session window
Outside a 24-hour window from the customer's last message, you can only send approved template messages. Every notification flow you design — order updates, reminders, recovery — has to be built around that constraint, with templates submitted and approved in advance.
03Routing and ownership
Decide up front who owns a conversation, what happens when they are offline, and how a thread is reassigned. Most WhatsApp deployments fail on operational ownership rather than technology.
04Measure it properly
Fire a conversion event on click, and track resolution rate and time-to-first-response once the API is live. WhatsApp is usually the highest-intent channel a business has, and it is routinely the least instrumented.