Do You Still Need a Website If You Sell on WhatsApp?
Every sale goes through the same steps, whether it starts in a chat or on a web page. What's changed is who does the work. Here's what moves off your plate when a website takes some of it.
Kanyi Mwangi
Picture a baker in Nairobi who makes custom cakes.
Her work is good, and her Instagram shows it. Her phone starts buzzing around seven every evening and doesn’t stop until she sleeps.
How much is a 2kg cake? Do you deliver to Rongai? Can you do it by Saturday? Do you have eggless?
She answers every one of them. Some of those chats become orders. Most don’t.
She knows how many orders she got this month. What she can’t know is how many people looked at her cakes, wondered about the price, didn’t feel like asking, and moved on.
The steps every sale goes through
Strip any sale down and the same steps appear, whether it happens across a counter, in a chat or on a website.
Someone notices you. They see what you offer. They ask their questions. They order. You confirm. They pay. You deliver. Ideally, they come back.
That sequence is old. What changes is who does each step: a person, or a page.
A story from a faraway land
In a faraway land, California in 1994, a pizza chain put one of the earliest online order forms on the web.
You typed in your pizza, your address and your phone number. Then a staff member phoned you to check the order was real, and you paid the driver when the pizza arrived.
Few of us here were ordering anything online in 1994, and that isn’t the point. The steps are. A request, a confirmation, payment on delivery. That’s exactly how a chat order works in Kenya today, where one study found 92% of micro-entrepreneurs use social or messaging apps to run their business.
The tools are different. The steps are the same.
Who does the work
| Step | Selling only on WhatsApp | The pizza chain’s website, 1994 | A website today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Get noticed | A post, a status, a referral | The brand was already known | Search, a link, an ad. The site doesn’t do this alone |
| Show what’s on offer | Photos and a catalogue | A menu page | Product and service pages |
| Answer questions | You, one chat at a time | Not needed; everyone knew pizza | Prices, FAQs, reviews and past work, answered before anyone asks |
| Take the order | Typed into the chat | A form | A form, a booking calendar or a checkout |
| Confirm | You reply | A staff member phoned | Automatic, or a quick call |
| Pay | M-Pesa or on delivery | On delivery | M-Pesa, card or on delivery |
| Bring them back | Broadcasts and status | Nothing | An email list and reminders |
Read down the WhatsApp column and you’re in almost every row. That’s what selling through chat is: the owner is the catalogue, the FAQ, the order desk and the confirmation.
A website takes rows off your plate. The biggest one is the third: the questions everyone asks get answered once, in writing, for everyone at the same time.
The customers who never message you
This is the part chat can’t fix.
On WhatsApp, the only customers you can see are the ones who started a conversation. Everyone who looked at your work, had a question and left without asking is invisible. They aren’t in your numbers, because you have no numbers for them.
On a website, you can see them. You can tell which page they landed on, how far they read and where they left. If most people leave on your pricing page, that tells you something. If they never reach it, that tells you something else.
You can’t fix a leak you can’t see.
Written down once
Answering the same question forty times a day is tiring. It’s also the clearest sign that the answer belongs somewhere permanent.
Writing your answers down once does more than save your evenings. Those same written answers are what a chat assistant learns from, on your website or on WhatsApp. They’re what Google reads when deciding whether to show you. Without them, every new tool you add still depends on you typing.
This isn’t a choice between them
People like chatting, and they’re getting used to chatting with businesses, including automated ones. WhatsApp stays.
The difference is which conversations reach it. When the common questions are answered on a page, the chats you do get are from people who already know your price, your area and your timeline. They’re closer to buying, and they’re asking the questions only they would ask.
What a website won’t do
A website won’t get you noticed on its own. The baker still needs Instagram, word of mouth or someone searching for cakes. What the website changes is what happens after they notice her, and whether she’s the one doing all of it.
The steps of a sale haven’t changed. The real question is how many of them you still do by hand.