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Use Case Guide: Collect Purchase Interest
Updated: Jun 28, 2026
Overview
Figure 1: A WhatsApp Flow for collecting purchase interest from customers.
WhatsApp Flows let you collect information from your customers, understand their preferences, and collect opt-in for promotions ahead of the sales season. With WhatsApp Flows, your customers can provide their details and interests in a fast and simple way, without the need to speak with an agent. A business can use these details and interests to drive targeted promotions and purchases.
This guide walks you through the entire process to build a Flow for 'Collect Purchase Interest' use case. The templates here can be adapted to suit your use case.
The Flows you build demonstrate how to:
- Collect relevant personal information from a user
- Allow users to select products or services they are interested in, which you can use in future promotional campaigns.
This template can be further adapted for any use case where you want to collect information from your customers to better understand their attributes and preferences, such as registering for a webinar, event, or newsletter.
Getting started
To follow this guide, ensure you have:
- Completed prerequisites for building Flows.
Flows JSON template
Flow JSON
{
"version": "7.3",
"screens": [
{
"id": "JOIN_NOW",
"title": "Join Now",
"data": {},
"layout": {
"type": "SingleColumnLayout",
"children": [
{
"type": "Form",
"name": "form",
"children": [
{
"type": "TextSubheading",
"text": "Get early access to our Mega Sales Day deals. Register now!"
},
{
"type": "TextInput",
"name": "name",
"label": "Name",
"input-type": "text",
"required": true
},
{
"type": "TextInput",
"label": "Email",
"name": "email",
"input-type": "email",
"required": true
},
{
"type": "OptIn",
"label": "I agree to the terms.",
"required": true,
"name": "tos_optin",
"on-click-action": {
"name": "navigate",
Enter to Rename, ⇧Enter to Preview
Preview
Run
Settings
Select screen
JOIN_NOW
Preview Flow
Join Now
Join Now
Get early access to our Mega Sales Day deals. Register now!
Name
Name
Email
I agree to the terms. Read more Read more
(optional) Keep me up to date about offers and promotions
Continue
Managed by the business. Learn more Learn more
Create new flow from a template
- In the Flows section of WhatsApp Manager click on the Create Flow button in the top right corner.
- In the Create page, fill in the details for the pre-approved loan Flow:
- Name - Type Collect Purchase Intent, or choose another name you like.
- Categories - Select Lead generation.
- Template - Choose Collect purchase intent. You can further customize the template to suit your use case.
- Click Create to create Flow.
You can preview the Flow on the right of the Builder UI.
The Flow remains in the draft state as you edit it. You can share it with your team for testing purposes only. To share it with a large audience, you'll need to publish it. However, you can't edit the Flow once you publish.
See also
Testing and debugging
Debug flow using the interactive preview
After you complete the configurations, toggle the interactive preview in the WhatsApp Builder UI to test the Flow.
- Trigger the interactive preview by clicking on settings menu in the Preview section of the Flow Builder and enabling Interactive mode toggle.
- In the modal that appears, select JOIN_NOW as the First Screen.
Now, click on the Actions tab at the bottom of the code editor in Builder. You'll see a navigate action in the list. Click on it to see the details of the action.
Return to Preview and proceed to complete the first screen and then click on the Continue button to navigate to the next screen. Back in the Actions tab, notice the new navigate action logged, and the details contain the data passed to the next screen.
Keep testing out the Flow and observe the data changes in the Actions tab. The Flow generates similar logs when users interact with it from their mobile devices.
Send draft Flow to your device
Before you publish your Flow you can also send it and test it on an actual device. To send draft Flow to your device, follow the instructions to send a draft Flow to your device.
See also
Publishing
When you first created your Flow, it entered the Draft state. As you edited and saved the modified Flow JSON content, it remained in the Draft state. You can send the Flow while it's in the Draft state, but only for testing purposes. If you want to send the Flow to a larger audience, you'll need to publish the Flow.
You can publish your Flow once you have ensured that:
- All validation errors and publishing checks have been resolved.
- The Flow meets the design principles of WhatsApp Flows
- The Flow complies with WhatsApp Terms of Service, the WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy and, if applicable, the WhatsApp Commerce Policy
Remember, once a Flow has been published it can no longer be modified. See Flow Status Lifecycle for more information on the different Flow states.
To publish your Flow, open the three dot menu to the right of the Save button and click Publish. Once published, the Flow can be sent to anyone.
Sending
You can send your WhatsApp Flow as:
- Template messages - these do not require a 24-hour customer service window to be open between you and the message recipient before the message can be sent.
- Interactive Flow messages - these can only be sent to a user when a customer service window is open between you and the user.
Learn more about sending your Flow
Receiving flow response
Upon Flow completion, WhatsApp sends a response message to the chat. You receive it in the same way as you receive all other messages from the user - via message webhook.
Learn more about how to setup messaging webhook
Monitoring
Flow monitoring is only applicable to Flows with endpoint.
Next steps
Now that you have successfully completed this guide, learn more about what you can do with this Flows in our Guides and Reference sections.