How to Start Selling in Chat With No Website

Many sellers are told to build a website when they do not need one. They sell inside WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook chats. Their catalogue is a photo album or a broadcast list. Their order book is the chat history, and their accounts are a notebook or a bank app.

This works while volume is low. At thirty orders a month the chat history is manageable. At three hundred it is not, and the failure is always the same: an order agreed in a conversation that nobody acted on.

The usual advice is to build a store. Often that is the wrong first move. A store is a second place to maintain, it needs traffic you do not have, and it sends your existing customers somewhere they did not ask to go. A better first move is to make the chat you already sell in able to finish the sale.

Why starting in chat makes sense

Customers say they prefer to message a business, and in some regions buying in a chat has been ordinary behaviour for years.

Figure	Scope
Between 23% and 40% of online shoppers in each of five Southeast Asian countries had bought through a chat conversation	Facebook and Boston Consulting Group, 2019. 5,391 respondents in Southeast Asia.
73.3% of consumers prefer messaging when communicating with a business	Kantar for Meta. 11,056 online adults aged 18 to 64 in 22 markets, fieldwork April to September 2025.
74.6% trust a business more when they can message it	Same survey

Sources: Facebook and BCG, 2019, via Marketing-Interactive, November 2019. Meta, State of Business Messaging, 2026. Meta, which also owned Facebook in 2019, sells business messaging.

The 2019 study is old and should always be dated, but it describes a habit that predates every current tool. If your customers already message you, you are in the right channel. What is missing is the setup behind it.

The four things to set up

1. A catalogue in a Google Sheet

AeroChat gives you a template Sheet with three tabs: Products, Orders and Settings. You copy it into your own Google Drive, then connect your Google account in AeroChat and approve the access.

The Products tab needs one row per item, or one row per variant if an item comes in sizes or colours. Only three columns are required: an id (your SKU code), a title and a price. You can add a description, stock, availability and photo links. The columns use the same names as a Meta catalogue, so the same Sheet can also feed your Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp catalogue.

A Google Sheet store needs no store subscription. It is not an order management system, and it will stop being enough as you grow. Sellers move on from it to a store such as Shopify.

What makes it work is simple discipline: one Sheet, one price, updated when the price changes. If you keep a second price list in your head, the automation will contradict you.

2. Payments in the chat

A payment link is sent into the conversation. The customer taps it, pays and stays in the chat. There is no checkout page to find and no account to create.

You connect your own Airwallex Business Account to AeroChat. AeroChat never sees card numbers and never holds your funds. Money settles directly into your Airwallex balance. Every payment gets confirmed twice: once the moment Airwallex’s webhook fires, and again when the customer lands on the confirmation page. You no longer depend on the customer sending a screenshot.

If you take payment today by bank transfer and screenshot, this one change usually helps most. It removes the manual check, the mismatched amounts and the “sorry, which order was this for?” message.

3. Delivery booked from the same place

AeroChat books delivery with your courier through its API, on your own courier account. Depending on the courier, it can create a shipment and label, book, reschedule or cancel a pickup, track a parcel and quote a rate. Delivery updates go to the shopper on the channel they used.

So “where is my parcel?”, the most repetitive message you get, is answered without you. The payment provider and the courier are separate connections. Neither goes through the other.

4. The workflow that ties them together

You describe what should happen in your own words, and AeroChat builds the workflow from your description. There is no flow builder to learn and no code. New workflows start as drafts, with a checklist of what is left for you to connect, and nothing goes live until you switch it on. Here is a first version for a small seller. Change the example values to your own.

Copy this into AeroChat

When a customer asks about a product on WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook, look it up in my Google Sheet and reply with the price, the options and whether it is available. Send the photo if there is one. When they want to buy, confirm the item, the quantity and their delivery address, then tell them the total including delivery. Delivery is US$8 (example, change to yours). Send an Airwallex payment link for the total. When the payment is confirmed, record the order in my Sheet and book a pickup with my courier for the next working day. Send the customer the tracking number in the same chat. When a customer asks where their order is, check the tracking and reply with the latest status. Never give a discount above 10% (example). Do not promise a delivery date. Pass these to me with the conversation attached: complaints, refund requests, damaged items, and any order above US$1,000 (example).

What you connect, and what you will be asked for:

WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. Connected from inside AeroChat. WhatsApp uses Meta’s sign-up flow, which needs a Meta Business account. Sellers often describe Meta’s onboarding as the hardest part, so leave time for it. See WhatsApp Business API.
Google Sheet. No key. Connect your Google account and approve the access.
Airwallex. No key to paste. You sign in to your Airwallex Business Account from AeroChat and approve the connection.
Your courier. The API key or client ID and secret from your courier account, which you enter in the dashboard. They are never passed through the AI.

Using a different system? If it has a public API, it connects to AeroChat the same way: describe what you want, paste in its key, and it runs.

Can’t find your tool? Message us in the chat on this page and we’ll tell you how it connects.

The limits in the last part of the recipe matter more than the rules: the largest discount it may give, whether it may promise a date, and what it must pass to you. AeroChat applies those limits itself. They are not left to the AI’s judgment.

What the Orders tab holds

The Products tab gets the attention. The Orders tab is the one that protects you, because it replaces the job your chat history is doing badly today.

AeroChat writes one row for every order it takes, with these columns: Order ID, Created At, Channel, Customer Name, Phone, Email, Address, Items, Amount, Currency, Payment Status, Transaction ID, Payment Link, Delivery Status, Tracking Reference, Notes and Updated At.

You can type into Payment Status, Transaction ID, Delivery Status, Tracking Reference and Notes yourself, for example after packing an order. AeroChat reads those cells back when a customer asks about their order, and it never overwrites a cell it did not change itself.

The two status columns are the useful ones. Sort by them and you can see what you owe customers today without opening a single chat.

One habit keeps the tab reliable. Never edit an amount after the fact. Record the change in Notes or as a new order, so the tab still matches your bank and Airwallex statements in six months.

Three things that will catch you out

Replies now cost money on WhatsApp. Since 1 October 2026 Meta charges per message for service messages, the free-form replies inside the 24-hour window a customer’s message opens. Each business phone number gets 1,000 free service messages a month, and unused ones do not roll over. Order and delivery updates sent as templates inside that window are also charged now. At small volumes you will stay inside the free tier. Know where the line is before you grow past it.

Source: Meta, WhatsApp Business Platform pricing documentation, checked 24 October 2026

No payment method on your WhatsApp account. Meta stops delivering service messages once they become chargeable if the account has no payment method. Add one before you pass 1,000 replies in a month.

Automating the wrong pile. Automate price questions, availability, payment and tracking. Keep complaints, refunds above your limit and any decision about a specific customer with a person, with the conversation attached. See live chat handover.

What it costs to run

AeroChat plans are priced on AI responses. A seller starting out with a few dozen orders a month, at around five replies per conversation from first question to tracking update, uses a few hundred AI responses a month. Payment links come with Growth, which includes 2,000 AI responses a month, and above.

What good looks like after a month

You should be able to answer three questions you probably cannot answer today. How many enquiries did I get? How many became orders? How many went quiet after a question I answered late?

Watch the third number. It shows what the old setup was costing you, and it is usually larger than sellers expect.

Start with the Sheet you already have

If your prices already sit in a spreadsheet or a photo album, you are most of the way to a catalogue. Copy the template, paste the recipe above, and test it on your own customers’ messages before you switch it on.

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How to Start Selling in Chat When You Have No Website

Why starting in chat makes sense