WhatsApp Business Messaging Integration

The problem

In the Gulf, South Asia, Southeast Asia and much of Latin America, customers do not read transactional email. They read WhatsApp. The order confirmation NetSuite sent sits unopened; the customer messages a salesperson's personal number to ask where their goods are, and that conversation never touches the ERP.

The cost is measurable in the places you least want it. Collections chase invoices by phone because the emailed statement went nowhere. Delivery teams field the same "has it shipped" question repeatedly. Account history is fragmented across staff phones, so when someone leaves, the conversation leaves with them. And nothing that happens on WhatsApp is visible in the customer record, which means nothing is reportable.

WhatsApp is already the channel. The job is to connect it to the system of record.

What ECOSIRE builds

ECOSIRE builds a SuiteScript 2.1 integration between your NetSuite account and the WhatsApp Business Platform account you own, so outbound notifications originate from NetSuite events and inbound replies land on the customer record.

Event-driven outbound notifications

User Event scripts on Sales Order, Item Fulfillment, Invoice, Customer Payment, Return Authorization and Cash Sale detect the state changes you care about — order approved, order shipped with tracking, invoice issued, payment received, invoice overdue by a defined number of days — and queue an outbound message. A Map/Reduce script drains the queue, applies your template mapping, and calls the WhatsApp Business API through N/https with retries and exponential backoff so a provider outage does not lose messages.

Because WhatsApp requires pre-approved templates for business-initiated messages outside the customer service window, ECOSIRE builds a template registry as a custom record: your approved template names, their language variants, and the mapping from NetSuite fields to template parameters. Changing what an order confirmation says means editing the template on your WhatsApp account and updating the mapping record — no code change.

Inbound replies on the record

A RESTlet receives the inbound webhook from your WhatsApp Business account, verifies the signature, resolves the sender's phone number to a Customer or Contact record using a normalised phone index, and writes the message to a custom message record linked to that entity, with the related transaction attached where the reply is in a thread about a specific order or invoice. Unmatched numbers land in a triage queue so nothing is silently dropped, and a user can attach them to the right customer in one click.

Sending from the transaction

A button on Sales Order, Invoice and Customer records opens a Suitelet that shows the conversation thread and lets a user send a templated or free-form message inside the open service window, with attachments — a PDF invoice generated from the standard Advanced PDF/HTML template, a packing list, a proof of delivery. Everything sent from the Suitelet is logged against the record and stamped with the sending user.

Consent, opt-out and quiet hours

A custom field on Customer and Contact records holds messaging consent and opt-out state. Inbound stop keywords in the languages you operate in set opt-out automatically and every outbound path checks it before sending. Quiet-hour windows and per-day send caps are held in script parameters. If consent is missing or opt-out is set, the send does not happen — the check fails closed rather than open.

Multi-number and multi-subsidiary operation

In OneWorld, sender numbers are mapped per subsidiary or per sales channel, so a customer of one subsidiary receives messages from that entity's business number with that entity's branding and language default. Message language is resolved from the customer record rather than a global default.

Reporting

Delivery status callbacks — sent, delivered, read, failed — are written back onto the message record, so a saved search can show you the failure rate per template, per number and per subsidiary. Collections and customer service can report on WhatsApp activity the same way they report on anything else in NetSuite.

Who this is for

Distributors, wholesalers, retailers, service businesses and any NetSuite account whose customers are in a WhatsApp-first market. It is most valuable where order volume is high enough that the "where is my order" traffic is a real support load, and where collections currently depends on staff phoning customers.

What you need to supply

A WhatsApp Business Platform account with a verified business, at least one registered sender number, and approved message templates for the notifications you want. ECOSIRE will tell you exactly which templates to submit and what parameters they need during scoping, and can advise on wording — but the account, the number and the template approvals are yours, held by you, and remain yours.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We map the NetSuite events you want to trigger messages, the templates and languages behind them, your subsidiary and number topology, and your consent policy. We check what already exists on your WhatsApp Business account.

2. Fixed quote. A written scope with a fixed price, a delivery window and explicit exclusions. Work starts only after you approve it.

3. Build. Development runs against your sandbox and a test sender number, version-controlled as an SDF project.

4. Install in test. Deployed to your sandbox as an unmanaged bundle or SDF deployment. You send real messages to your own phones from real sandbox transactions, check inbound routing and reply threading, and confirm every template renders correctly in every language.

5. Install in production. After written sign-off we deploy to production, switch to your live sender number, enable the scripts in a controlled order, and monitor the first day of live traffic with you.

6. Support. A defect-fix support window from go-live. New templates, new triggering events and new channels are quoted separately.

What you own

Unobfuscated SuiteScript source, the SDF project, the custom records, the Suitelet and the deployment configuration — installed in your account, owned by you. Your WhatsApp Business account, number and message history stay entirely under your control.