Why you still need a website when all your customers are on WhatsApp
WhatsApp is where your customers talk to you. It is a terrible place to be found, to be compared, or to be trusted by somebody who has never met you.
Almost every small business we talk to in India already has a working sales channel: a WhatsApp number, a status update at 9am, a broadcast list. It works. So the reasonable question is why bother with a website at all.
The honest answer is that WhatsApp is excellent at the conversation and bad at the three things that happen before it.
Being found
Nobody discovers your bakery by searching WhatsApp. They search the name a friend mentioned, or "cake shop near Mahanagar", and whatever answers that search gets the customer. If nothing of yours answers it, the answer is somebody else.
Being compared
A customer deciding between you and two others wants the price list, the timings and photographs, and they want them without talking to a person. Asking them to message you for the price is asking them to spend social effort before they know if you are in their budget. Plenty will not.
Being believed
A stranger about to pay you 12,000 rupees for a wedding cake is looking for evidence that you are a real business. An address, a phone number, photographs of work you actually did, the name of the person responsible. A WhatsApp profile photo does not carry that.
What actually to build
Not a brochure with a mission statement. For a local business the whole thing is usually five things:
- What you sell and what it costs.
- Photographs of the real thing, taken recently.
- Where you are, with a link that opens navigation.
- When you are open, including the exception on Sundays.
- One obvious way to start the conversation — and yes, that should usually be WhatsApp.
The website is not a replacement for the conversation. It is what makes the conversation start more often, with people who already know your prices.
The part that usually goes wrong
Somebody builds this, and then the prices change and the site does not. Within a year it is actively costing money, because customers arrive quoting last year’s rate.
That is the actual problem worth solving: not building the site, but making it so cheap to change that it stays true. If changing a price takes an email to a developer and a week, it will not happen. If it takes a sentence and three rupees, it happens at 6am from your phone.
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