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Where to find it: Settings → Customer Notifs → Whatsapp — Open in OTO ↗
In much of the Middle East, WhatsApp is not a messaging app people also have — it is where they are. A delivery message that arrives there is read in the same thread as everything else that matters to them.

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Three things, in order

WhatsApp Business is stricter than SMS by design: you cannot send arbitrary text to a customer who has not written to you first. Messages have to be pre-approved templates. That shapes the setup into three steps.

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The connection

The WhatsApp Business connection wizard

Fig. 1 — Three steps, and the first is a seven-step walkthrough of the Meta side — because that is where this usually goes wrong.

Add Connection runs as Instructions → Credentials → Settings. The instructions step states the prerequisite plainly: “user must have a meta business account, a whatsapp app linked to that business account and developer account linked to the business account with needed permissions”, then walks through seven numbered steps on Meta’s developer site. Credentials are a Whatsapp Business ID and a Whatsapp User Access Token, and there is a Verify Connection button — credentials must verify before the wizard will continue.
The setup guide is in the product for a reasonConnecting WhatsApp Business means creating a Meta business account, linking an app, linking a developer account and granting permissions — four things on someone else’s platform, none of which OTO can do for you.Putting the walkthrough inside the wizard, and refusing to continue until the credentials verify, is what stops the usual failure: a connection that looks configured, saves happily, and silently sends nothing.

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The templates

The Whatsapp Templates list

Fig. 2 — Language, category and approval status per template — and a Created by OTO column separating the ready-made ones from your own.

Utility or marketing is not a labelMeta treats the two categories differently: utility messages are the ones tied to a transaction the customer is already in, marketing messages are promotional and carry stricter consent rules and a different price.Classifying a delivery notification as marketing is a common way to make a straightforward message harder to send and more expensive than it needed to be.

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The setting

Adding a WhatsApp setting

Fig. 3 — Language is read-only — it comes from the template, not from a choice made here.

The settings list then carries one row per configuration — Message Type · Setting Name · Connection Name · Brand Name · Language · Status — so which brand says what, in which language, on which account, is a single table.
The Whatsapp Settings list

Fig. 4 — Every column filters, which matters once several brands each have their own set.

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Message types

Templates need approval, and approval takes timeWhatsApp reviews every template before it can be sent, and a rejected one cannot be used at all. That makes the template library something to set up ahead of a launch rather than during it — and it means a last-minute wording change is not a five-minute job.It is also why a WhatsApp setting cannot be activated without a valid template behind it: there is nothing to fall back on.
Why it is worth the extra setupThe template approval is a real cost. What you get for it is a message in the app your customer actually lives in, with your verified business name on it, in a thread they can reply to — rather than a text from a short code they do not recognize.For the region OTO serves, that difference in how a message is received is usually larger than the difference in how it is sent.

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Sending one by hand

Notify on the Shipments screen sends a WhatsApp message for a specific order, using the configured template. Unlike SMS, this is one order at a time.

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Drivers have their own

Separately from customer notifications, OTO FLEX drivers send WhatsApp messages to customers from the driver app, using their own predefined templates. Same channel, different sender and different purpose — see Delivery.
  • SMS — the fallback when WhatsApp is not available.
  • Branded pages — what the message links to.
  • Delivery — driver-to-customer messaging.