Yes, and most people should — it is the number already printed on the board and saved in your customers' phones.

Moving it takes about ten minutes and the conversation history on the phone stays where it is. What changes is that the number now also works here, for your whole team, at the same time.

A brand-new number is fine too, and is the better choice if you want to keep a personal number personal.

Meta checks that your business is real. You need a GST certificate or a shop licence, and a website or a listing that shows the same name.

Without it you can still send, but only to 250 unique people a day. That is enough to start and not enough for a broadcast, so it is worth beginning the day you sign up rather than the week you need it.

It usually takes two to five days. The commonest rejection is a name that does not match exactly between the documents and the Facebook page.

Almost always one of three things.

It begins or ends with a variable. {{1}}, your order shipped is refused; Hi {{1}}, your order shipped is fine.

Two variables touch. {{1}} {{2}} is refused — something has to sit between them.

The example values are not real. Submitting xxx or test gets it rejected. Put a real name and a real amount in.

The fourth, less common one: a message filed as utility that is actually selling something. Meta reads it, and a discount in a utility template is refused.

WhatsApp only lets a business send ordinary messages for 24 hours after the customer last wrote. After that, only an approved template will reach them.

This is the single most confusing thing about the whole system, because a message sent into a shut window often reports as sent and reaches nobody.

The app shows the window on the composer with the time left, and replaces the box with your templates when it shuts — so you never type something that will not arrive.

The window reopens the moment they write again, and replying within it is free.

Check the window first — that is nine times out of ten.

After that: the number may not be on WhatsApp at all (a landline, or a number that never installed it), or the template may have been paused by Meta for poor quality, which shows on the Templates page.

Every message has its status and, if it failed, the reason Meta gave. That reason is worth reading before anything else — it is usually specific.

It is Meta's, not ours, and it is given rather than bought. Business verification first, then a quality rating that has stayed high, then an application — and Meta looks for the business being covered somewhere it did not write itself.

Worth being honest: it matters less than people expect. Customers notice the business name and the profile picture; very few look for the tick. A verified name showing instead of a bare number does most of the work.

We will help with the application, and will say if it is too early rather than submitting something that gets refused.

It dropped because people blocked or reported the number, and that almost always follows a marketing send to a list that did not ask.

Stop marketing sends entirely for a week. Keep the utility messages going — order updates and reminders are what people wanted, and they pull the rating back up.

Then look at where the list came from. A list bought or scraped will do this again, and there is no way to send to it safely.

Ratings recover in about a week of clean sending. Ignoring it and sending harder is what turns a medium rating into a restricted number.

Meta charges per conversation, not per message, and a conversation is 24 hours long. Roughly ₹0.11 for a utility one and ₹0.78 for marketing.

So three hundred order updates a month is about ₹35. A marketing broadcast to two thousand people is about ₹1,560 — which is the number worth checking before you send rather than after.

Replies to a customer inside the 24 hours cost nothing extra. That money goes to Meta rather than to us, which is why it is listed separately instead of buried in the plan.