THE PROBLEM

Small Business owners in India need to connect with customers that are important to them

Millions of local shop owners, restaurants, and home service providers want to reach out to a larger number of people to grow their business.

These are small businesses operated either individually or by less than 10 people. A bunch of customers buy products/services from these businesses. So they need a better way to:

1. Engage with their customers
2. Sell and manage product/service deliveries 
3. Target specific customer audience
4. Show products/services availability

Though WhatsApp recently announced that it is coming up for business, it’s still a mystery that how it will be used for the small businesses?

So I decided to design this concept imagining how WhatsApp could be tailored for small businesses.

How will this work for business owners?

Consider the case of Mahesh (a local vegetable vendor) taking orders via WhatsApp. He just needs to promote his WhatsApp number and inform his customers to visit his profile to view available vegetable items and then place an order.

How will this work for customers?

A customer needs to have a WhatsApp number of the business. He will initiate a WhatsApp chat on this number. He gets to explore the available items with the business along with pricing details and other description.

"WhatsApp Message marketing is growing and it has taken an important role in daily lives of these small business owners"

How are the consumers responding to these approaches adopted by small business owners?

Why to chose WhatsApp for digitally empowering small business owners?

WhatsApp is undoubtedly one of the most used products in India.

• 96% smartphone owners are using it (Source)
• It recently reached 200 million Daily Active Users in India
• It is supposed to reach 730 million by 2020 with rural India forming a large chunk

Here’s how a typical day of an Indian user look like

No points for guessing that the day begins and ends with checking WhatsApp messages. (Source)

Create Profile

• A restaurant will register using its contact number
• Add all the required details name, description, location, business category, and offered products/services

Maintain food items you offer

• Add/edit/update all the food items that are available on the menu.
• Include necessary details — the name of the food item, photos, description, price, and availability.

Receive order and send confirmation

Few other features that I explored

Promotion using Stories

Verified Business

Unified Payments Interface

Closing Thoughts

So this was my small attempt towards imagining how WhatsApp could be used by small businesses in India. This design reduces the learnability curve needed to learn the new app since people are already familiar with the usage of WhatsApp. I believe we should think of ways to get into the users’ existing behavior and habits rather than always creating new apps and platforms.

Thanks for reading!

Note: I’m not associated with WhatsApp Business in any way. I did this because I like solving people problems. I strongly feel a concept like this is worth exploring.

Thanks to  Kunal Bodke, Sandeep Jagtap, Pushkar Joshi, and Vedang Narkar for valuable suggestions

Also published at https://medium.com/@kartik.design/whatsapp-for-business-in-india-b6dd7e8cde66

Feedback, suggestions, and collaborations are welcome!

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December 2017

WhatsApp Business

Designed a concept app for Small Businesses in India which enables better customer engagement. 

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