Ask any shop owner, distributor or D2C founder in India where their business actually happens, and the answer is the same: WhatsApp. Leads arrive there. Prices are negotiated there. "Payment ho gaya?" is asked there. Yet most of that traffic is handled by one person, one phone, and memory.
That works until the day it doesn't — a lead from IndiaMART sits unanswered for four hours, an order update never goes out, a ₹40,000 invoice is forgotten because the reminder lived in someone's head. This playbook covers what to automate first, what to never automate, and the one rule (the 24-hour window) that separates professional automation from spam.
Automate these three things first
1. The first reply to a new lead. In B2B especially, the first supplier to respond usually wins the enquiry. When a lead arrives — from your website form, Meta lead ad, or IndiaMART — an instant WhatsApp greeting with your catalogue or a "sahi number par aa gaye ho, 10 minute mein call karta hoon" buys you the time to respond properly. We wrote a separate playbook on IndiaMART leads specifically.
2. Order and status updates. "Order confirm ho gaya", "aaj dispatch hoga", "out for delivery" — these messages create trust, and no human should be typing them. If your orders live in Shopify and shipping in Shiprocket, both events can trigger the message automatically.
3. Payment reminders. The single highest-ROI automation for most Indian businesses. A polite ladder — day 3, day 7, day 15 — recovers money that was never refused, only forgotten. Full breakdown in the payment reminder ladder playbook.
Never automate these
- Negotiation. Price talk is a relationship. A bot haggling on your behalf reads as disrespect.
- Complaints. An angry customer who gets an automated reply becomes an angrier customer. Route complaints to a human, instantly — that routing itself is a good automation.
- Anything after "STOP". Opt-outs must be honoured immediately and permanently. This is both a legal requirement and basic decency; in Yantra an opt-out blocks all future sends to that contact automatically.
The 24-hour window, in plain words
The official WhatsApp Business API has one rule that decides everything: when a customer messages you, a 24-hour session window opens in which you can send free-form messages. Once it closes, only pre-approved template messages can be sent.
In practice: a reminder going to a customer who messaged you this morning can say anything; the same reminder going out after three quiet days must use an approved template. Automation that does not track this window per-contact simply fails silently. Yantra tracks the session window for every contact and picks the right message type on its own — it is one of the first things we built.
What this looks like in Yantra
Yantra is an automation platform built for Indian business — WhatsApp, Razorpay/UPI, Tally, GST invoicing and IndiaMART are built in, not bolted on. You describe the flow in English or Hinglish — "naya lead aaye toh WhatsApp bhejo aur sheet me daalo" — and it builds and runs the automation: trigger, WhatsApp send, spreadsheet entry, done. Ready-made templates cover lead replies, order updates, reminder ladders and review requests, and a failed run never costs you a rupee.
See it run on your own flow
The live demo needs no signup at all — describe a workflow and watch it run.
Open the live demo