Indian Small Businesses and WhatsApp

We hear a lot about how WhatsApp is used by small shop owners to run/increase their business. Dharmesh BA explores the limitations of this.

 

He starts with the tale of a guy running a beauty parlour. Ten years back, he could recommend Lakme sunscreen to a customer. No more. Women come to parlours with screenshots of Korean skincare brands seen on Instagram. If the parlour didn’t have it, they left. How could he possibly have every such brand? The solution? He joined a WhatsApp vendor group – wholesalers posting pics of various products. Our parlour owner would post some of those pics to his customer group – and order the ones in which his customers showed interest.

“He wasn’t using WhatsApp for communication and marketing alone but turned it into a just-in-time inventory system.”

~~

 

Did you know there are 3 variants of WhatsApp? The one which you and I use. There’s WhatsApp Business which small businesses use with catalogs and auto-replies to customer chats. And last is WhatsApp Business API that is meant for programmers, not humans (i.e., very little UI). To really scale up, a business needs the last of the three. But here’s the problem:

“(API) is powerful but not really designed for typical SME needs.”

(SME stands for small and medium sized enterprises, the kirana shops).

 

Further, any phone number can be linked only to one of the three variants. Most small businesses, of course, have a single phone number. You see the problem.

 

Worst of all, automated updates (e.g. shop closed on Sunday, or list of today’s specials) are only possible on the API variant, not the others. Which means updating such details is a manual chore for small business owners.

 

Plus, since usage for business is not a big spinner for WhatsApp, they often change prices and policies abruptly. Which can and does impact small businesses reliant on it badly.

 

To sum it up, WhatsApp is not designed for small businesses. Nor is it getting updated to cater to their needs. Not because WhatsApp is evil but because there isn’t much money to be made by WhatsApp in any of this.

~~

 

To overcome these (and other) limitations of WhatsApp, unofficial modified versions (called “mods”) have been created, the most famous one being GBWhatsApp with features like auto-reply, sending messages at scheduled times, broadcasting to multiple groups, bypassing other limits.

 

Problem solved? Not really. Since such mods are unauthorized, they cannot be put on the app stores to download onto your phone. Because WhatsApp would (rightly) escalate them to Google or Apple who would remove them. So these mods are only available as websites accessible via browsers, not as standalone mobile apps. Most Indians, esp. small business owners, have only accessed the Net via mobile apps (they don’t own desktops or laptops); they often don’t even know that there are parts of the Net outside mobile apps!

“The small business owners live on their mobile devices.”

~~

 

What then is the way out? Well, China’s superapp, WeChat solved this by successfully finding a way to juggle contradictory needs – allow businesses to send too many messages (ads) and users get put off; allow too few and businesses find it unattractive. WeChat segregates your personal contacts and groups from the business ones, allowing you to demarcate and skip. This forced discipline on the businesses sending messages. Send too much and it is ignored as spam:

“Every message must justify its existence. The result: businesses target better, users feel less harassed, and the platform maintains trust.”

 

WeChat also addressed another problem of small businesses. Each employee was interacting with customers on his own account/phone. When he left, all the data and list of customers left with him. So WeChat created WeCom, a parallel app for businesses. These accounts were used by employees but owned by the (small) business, so even when employees left, the info remained with the shop.

 

Search for a person on WeChat and you will be shown two accounts clearly – the personal one and the WeCom one. You pick the one of relevance.

~~

 

All of which is why Dharmesh says:

“The solution exists. WeCom (WeChat) proves separating contexts without fragmenting networks is possible.”

 

India cannot expect WhatsApp to do something similar since they don’t make much money in this. But it is necessary for Indian small businesses to do better. Like we did with DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure), he says, we need to enhance and popularize ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce), the Indian government initiative to create an open and interoperable e-commerce network. It connects buyers and sellers across different platforms, aiming to break the monopoly of large e-commerce giants and foster competition.

“This isn’t about nationalism or rejecting foreign technology. It’s about infrastructure resilience. No nation should have its business communication layer entirely controlled by a single foreign corporation with different incentives.”

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