- What is a WhatsApp message template?
- It is a message Meta has approved in advance, so a business can send it to a customer outside the 24-hour reply window. You submit it from your own WhatsApp Business account, Meta reviews it, and only then can automation send it. Until it is approved, a journey cannot use it.
- Why does the template category matter so much?
- Because Meta prices the category, not the message. In India a utility template costs ₹0.1150 per delivered message and a marketing one ₹0.8631, roughly seven times more. The same sentence with an offer added becomes a marketing template, so category is the single biggest lever on your WhatsApp bill.
- Can I edit the wording of these templates?
- Yes, and you will have to. The previews here are examples of the shape each template takes. You write your own wording, submit it to Meta from your own account, and edit it later as your store changes. What stays fixed is the trigger it fires on and the fields it can pull from the order.
- How long does Meta take to approve a template?
- Usually hours rather than days once your business is verified, though it varies and Meta does not publish a guarantee. Most rejections come from missing sample values or vague variables rather than the copy itself, so fill the samples in properly the first time.
- Do you have Diwali and festival templates?
- Festive copy is a seasonal rewrite of a template you already have, submitted as its own template. There are three worked examples on this page. A festive greeting added to an order update turns a ₹0.1150 utility message into a ₹0.8631 marketing one, which is worth knowing before you write it.
- How many templates do I need to start?
- Two. Cart recovery if you are mostly prepaid, COD confirmation if return-to-origin is what costs you money, plus the order updates that go with them. Submitting eleven templates in week one means eleven things in review and nothing you can attribute.