Many shops and companies around the world increasingly use WhatsApp to conduct their business, especially with a pandemic raging on and people urged to stay home. To make it easier to conduct sales over the messenger, WhatsApp has announced that it's launching shopping carts. They're complementing the existing catalogs businesses can create to showcase their offers, essentially allowing them to run almost full-fledged online shops through the messenger.
Once the feature has rolled out to you, you can start using carts in existing catalogs from stores using WhatsApp to sell their goods. Catalogs are available with a tap on the store icon when you chat with a shop. Like on any other commerce platform, WhatsApp carts allow you to collect items from a store's catalog and then check out with all of them in one go. Once you've finished filling up your cart, you can send all items to the seller as a message, who can then confirm your order.
Carts will be particularly great for shops that usually sell multiple items at once, like restaurants and clothing stores. The new shopping feature is starting to roll out today as a server-side update, so be sure to see if you can already use it for your annual holiday shopping.