Arbalet: WhatsApp commerce for an emerging-market brand.
End-to-end conversational commerce on WhatsApp — payment, inventory sync, and AI-driven order capture — for a fast-growing retail brand expanding across West Africa.
The challenge
Arbalet was growing fast across multiple cities, with most of their order volume coming through WhatsApp anyway — handled by a small team typing replies and copying numbers into spreadsheets.
A traditional e-commerce stack would have been wrong here. Customers don't want a website. They want WhatsApp, with photos, with voice notes, with the friend-of-a-friend feel that's already working.
The brief was to industrialize what was already working — without breaking the customer relationship that made it work.
Our approach
We mapped the existing chat flows for two weeks before writing a line of code. Pattern: every conversation went through roughly five states. We built a state-machine over WhatsApp Business API, with an AI agent that took over only where it added speed without removing the human feel.
The stack
- ChannelWhatsApp Business API via Meta partner — direct, no aggregator layer.
- AI agentClaude with custom prompts in French and English, tuned to the brand's tone.
- PaymentsMobile money (Orange, MTN) + card payments via Stripe — region-appropriate.
- InventoryLightweight inventory sync to the existing warehouse system. No rip-and-replace.
Launch and adoption
We piloted with one product line for three weeks before opening to the full catalog. The metric we cared about wasn't conversion rate — it was the team's freed hours. The agent now handles the first half of every conversation; the team picks up from there.
Customer feedback in the first month was unambiguous: response times faster, ordering smoother, and — critically — the brand's voice still recognizable.
What's next
Phase 2 extends the system into outbound — restock notifications, reorder prompts, and post-purchase upsells, all in WhatsApp, all in a brand voice that doesn't feel like a marketing automation tool.
“They didn't push us to abandon WhatsApp for a website. They built a system that made WhatsApp work better. That's the difference between a vendor and a partner.”
Tell us what you're trying to ship.
Book a 30-min strategy call. We'll tell you in 30 minutes whether AI makes sense for your business — and if it does, exactly what we'd build, in what order, for what budget. No deck. No follow-up email sequence. Just a real conversation.