Glossary
WhatsApp’s vocabulary is dense, and most setup confusion is really vocabulary confusion. These are the terms you will meet, in the order they start to matter.
WhatsApp Business Account. The container Meta creates for your business. It holds your phone numbers and your message templates. You have one; you create it during setup.
Not the same thing as your Meta Business account, which is the wider container that owns the WABA along with any other Meta assets.
Phone Number ID
Section titled “Phone Number ID”Meta’s internal identifier for a sending number — not the phone number itself. You will see it in support conversations and error messages. It is stable even if the display formatting of your number changes.
Template
Section titled “Template”A pre-approved message shape with placeholders, for example “Hi {{1}}, your order {{2}} has shipped.”
Every business-initiated message must use one. You cannot send free-form text to a customer who has not messaged you first. Meta reviews each template; approval takes anywhere from minutes to hours, and templates can be rejected.
This is the rule that surprises people most, and it is a WhatsApp platform rule rather than an Alondio one.
Template category
Section titled “Template category”Every template is one of three categories, and the category affects both pricing and what consent is required:
| Category | Used for | In Alondio |
|---|---|---|
MARKETING |
Promotions, reminders, anything persuasive | Abandoned cart recovery, back-in-stock alerts |
UTILITY |
Updates about something the customer already did | Order confirmed, shipped, delivered |
AUTHENTICATION |
One-time passcodes | Not used |
Categorising a marketing message as utility to dodge the consent requirement gets templates rejected and damages your quality rating. Alondio will not do it.
Service window
Section titled “Service window”For 24 hours after a customer messages your business, you may reply with free-form text. Outside that window, you are back to templates only.
The window matters less for Alondio than for a support tool, because everything Alondio sends is business-initiated and templated anyway.
Opt-in
Section titled “Opt-in”Explicit consent from a customer to receive marketing messages. Required, and recorded with a timestamp, a source, and the channel it came through.
In Alondio this is a hard gate in the send path, not a checkbox in a settings screen: a marketing message with no matching consent record is not sent. That is deliberate, and it is not configurable.
Embedded Signup
Section titled “Embedded Signup”Meta’s in-app flow that lets you create or connect a WABA without leaving the Shopify admin. It is the onboarding path Alondio uses, and it is why you do not need a Business Solution Provider or a partner onboarding form.
See Connect WhatsApp.
Quality rating
Section titled “Quality rating”Meta scores each of your phone numbers based on how recipients react — blocks and reports push it down, engagement holds it up. A low rating reduces your messaging limit, and a very low one can stop your number sending entirely.
It is visible to you in Alondio. Sending frequent, poorly targeted marketing is the fastest way to damage it, which is one reason Alondio has no broadcast feature.
Messaging limit
Section titled “Messaging limit”A tiered cap on how many unique recipients you can message in a rolling 24 hours:
250 → 1,000 → 10,000 → 100,000 → unlimited
You start at the bottom and move up as you send consistently to a good quality rating. The limit counts unique recipients, not messages, so three messages to one customer in a day count once.
For most Shopify stores the starting tier is comfortably enough — 250 unique customers per day is a lot of abandoned carts.
Alondio is a product of Appvanguards SRL, registered in Romania. CUI RO41268079.