Ask a D2C founder to pull up their website on their phone and they’ll do it without thinking. Ask them to pull up their own WhatsApp Business catalog - the one a real share of customers in smaller towns are actually buying from - and there’s a decent chance they haven’t opened it since the day someone on the team first set it up.
For a large and growing part of India, a browser-based website assumes a kind of comfort and bandwidth that doesn’t match how people actually shop. WhatsApp is already open, already trusted, and already the place where a customer asks a question and expects a reply from a person, not a chatbot buried three menus deep. The catalog attached to that chat - product photos, prices, a way to order without leaving the app - is, for that customer, the entire storefront.
The gap between where attention goes and where the budget goes
Most founders have a content calendar, a design system, and a review process for the website. Few have any of that for the catalog: product photos are often reused thumbnails never cropped for a square tile, prices go stale after a sale ends, and out-of-stock items sit live for weeks because updating the catalog isn’t anyone’s job description. The website gets the design review. The catalog, which a real share of customers see first, gets whatever was uploaded once and forgotten.
What treating it as a real channel looks like
Assign catalog upkeep to a specific person on a specific cadence, the same way social posting already has one. Photograph products for the square catalog format deliberately, rather than cropping website images as an afterthought. Write product descriptions for someone scrolling a chat thread on a small screen, not someone reading a styled product page. None of this requires new tooling. It requires treating the catalog as a storefront instead of a formality completed once during setup and never revisited.
The real cost of ignoring it
A website with a typo gets noticed and fixed within a day because someone is watching it. A WhatsApp catalog with the same typo can sit there for a year, quietly telling every customer who opens it that nobody is paying attention - in the one channel where, for a lot of India, that impression is the whole brand.