For restaurants
Your regulars check WhatsApp between every course of their day; they stopped reading SMS years ago. Here is how restaurants use approved WhatsApp templates to fill slow days and speed up the counter — with the actual message texts and what a month of it costs.
The classic restaurant problem is a full Saturday and an empty Tuesday. A short offer sent Thursday evening to diners who opted in reaches them while the weekend is still being planned — not buried in an SMS folder nobody opens.
Hi {{1}}! This weekend at {{2}}: flat {{3}}% off dine-in bills above ₹{{4}}, Friday to Sunday. Show this message at billing. Valid this weekend only. Reply STOP to opt out of offers.
For takeaway and counter orders, a ready alert empties the waiting area and stops the “is it done yet?” calls. It is a utility message — the customer asked for the order — so it costs a fraction of a promotional send.
Hi {{1}}, your order #{{2}} at {{3}} is packed and ready. Please collect it from the pickup counter within the next {{4}} minutes so it reaches you fresh.
A confirmation the moment a booking is taken over the phone cuts no-shows sharply — the reservation stops being a verbal promise and becomes a message the guest can check.
Namaste {{1}}, your table for {{2}} guests at {{3}} is confirmed for {{4}} on {{5}}. If your plan changes, please call us on {{6}} so we can release the table.
The numbered placeholders — {{1}}, {{2}} — are template variables. You map them to columns in your recipient list at send time, so one approved template personalises itself for every diner.
Take a single-outlet restaurant sending 600 order and booking alerts a month, plus two weekend offers to a list of 1,000 opted-in diners:
| 600 utility messages × ₹0.25 | ₹150 |
|---|---|
| 2,000 marketing messages × ₹1.25 | ₹2,500 |
| Total for the month | ₹2,650 |
No monthly platform fee sits on top of that, credits stay valid 12 months, and anything WhatsApp fails to deliver is credited straight back. If one extra table per offer covers the marketing line, the campaign has paid for itself.
Two rules keep a restaurant's number healthy. First, opt-in is required: send offers only to diners who agreed to receive them, and honour every opt-out. Second, every campaign message uses a template Meta has reviewed — promotional wording goes in a marketing template, operational updates in a utility one, and mislabelling gets caught at review or repriced later. Follow both and there is no ban risk; this is the sanctioned way to message at scale.
Only if they agreed to receive offers. Consent can be as simple as a tick box on your ordering page or a sign-up at the counter, but it has to exist — WhatsApp recipients who never opted in tap Report, and enough reports lower your number's quality rating until Meta caps your sending. A smaller list of people who said yes outperforms a big scraped one every time.
Yes, by design. Meta classes messages about something the customer already arranged — an order, a booking — as utility, and promotional content as marketing, which costs more. On WABAPI that is ₹0.25 for an order-ready alert against ₹1.25 for a weekend offer, so it pays to keep operational and promotional templates separate.
No. Messages sent through the WhatsApp Business API arrive whether or not the recipient has saved your number, and they show your restaurant's name and profile rather than a bare number. That is a real difference from broadcast lists in the free WhatsApp Business app, which only reach people who saved you first.
WhatsApp reports the failure back per recipient, you see it in the campaign's delivery report, and WABAPI credits the message cost back automatically. You are never silently charged for messages that did not reach a diner.
Replies land on your WhatsApp Business number like any incoming message — WABAPI does not run chatbots or automatic replies, so a person on your side answers them. Many restaurants simply put a phone number or ordering link in the template so the next step is one tap.
Sign up with your WhatsApp number, connect through Meta's official flow, and check every rate on the pricing page before you spend a rupee.