One WhatsApp number per shop, covered from the floor

Customers do not want a central hotline when they are asking if the branch near them still has an item. They message the number printed at that shop. Replacing those local numbers with one national line makes the conversation worse, not better. Chato does not ask you to do that.

Each shop number is its own session. The chats for the north store never appear inside the south store's list. Staff who only work at one address only need access to that address. You share the north session with the north team and leave it at that. The sidebar on the owner's login still shows every store, which is what a manager needs when they are not standing in any one of them.

Connecting a store is the WhatsApp Web flow. The phone that already uses that shop's WhatsApp scans a QR code from Linked devices. The phone stays on, as it does for WhatsApp Web. There is no new number to buy inside Chato, and no paperwork to register a business account with Meta before the shop can keep using the line it already has.

The failure mode in a shop is physical. The WhatsApp phone is in a drawer, in someone's pocket, or with the person who went on a break. The customer is asking a question that anyone at the counter could answer: are you open, do you have this size, can I collect today. They wait because the handset is not in the room.

Share that store's session with the Google emails of the people who work there. Give them send access if they should reply, or view access if they only need to see what was promised. When a shift ends, you do not collect a phone. The next person signs in and sees the same chats. If someone leaves the shop, revoke their share and they lose the session immediately.

This is still one WhatsApp number as far as the customer is concerned. They are not moved into a queue, and a chat is not assigned to a named salesperson. Everyone with send access on that store's session can reply. If you need a rule that only one person may see a particular customer, Chato does not do that. The split you do get is between stores, because each store is a different number.

Shops do not have a flat volume of messages. A number is quiet at opening and busy on Saturday. Reports in Chato are per session, so the Saturday shop does not hide the shop that has gone silent. You see which linked numbers are online, how many messages they have handled, and when they last had activity. Today's totals sit next to the longer-running totals, and average reply time is kept per number.

That is enough to notice a store whose phone has dropped offline, or a store that is answering much more slowly than the others. It is not a staff rota and it is not a campaign report. You will not get a chart of which employee sent which reply. You will get a clear view of each location's line.

The included chatbot can sit on a store session and answer the questions that do not need a person: opening hours, the address, whether parking exists. Turn it on for the shops where those questions dominate, and leave it off for a store that wants every reply typed by staff. The bot is part of the €5 for that number. It does not send promotions to people who have never written to you.

Chato will not merge three shops into one WhatsApp identity. It will not route a message from the north number to a south-store employee who was not given that session. It will not run a broadcast of template messages to last year's customers. Those are jobs for the official WhatsApp Business Platform, and they come with that platform's setup.

What you can do this week is put every shop number into one sidebar, let the people on each floor reply without holding the phone, and see which location is busy. The trial is seven days and one session, with no card. Add the other shops after you subscribe, at €5 per number per month.

If the same company also has a private line for a landlord, a supplier, or a manager, connect it as another session and do not share it with the shop floor. Separation is the default. Sharing is a choice you make per number.