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When to update the catalog, not every time someone asks

You set one day a month to review what's out, what's new, prices, and order in the catalog, and make clear that anything sold out gets pulled right away, not held until that date.

By Yodai · Published September 6, 2026 · Updated October 12, 2026

WhatsApp lets you share your catalog on social media, and if yours is linked from your website, Instagram, or your ads, it needs to be current when someone clicks through. A customer writes, "do you still have this?" and you're not sure. You open WhatsApp Business with the customer waiting on an answer and change the price by hand, in a rush, trying to recall off the top of your head whether it went up or down since last time. The following week, someone else asks about a service you stopped offering two months ago that's still listed, photo and price and all, as if nothing had changed. And a third customer asks for the July promotion discount, which is still in the catalog in September because nobody remembered to pull it. What's posted counts: under Article 61 of Spain's Consumer Protection Law, the terms of an offer, promotion, or ad are enforceable by consumers even if they don't appear in the contract.

You already know what should come first in your catalog, what to call your sections, what each photo needs to show, and how to keep the price in chat from clashing with the one on your website. One piece is missing, and it's the one that holds up all the others: when you review that catalog so that what you learned in the earlier lessons is still true a month from now, and three months from now, not just the day you built it.

Only touching the catalog "when it's needed" means touching it in a hurry, with the customer right there. That's how a mismatched price slips through, or a sold-out product the catalog still lists as available. What you need is to stop waiting for a customer to find out what's no longer true, and check the catalog before they ask. WhatsApp's own help center recommends keeping your catalog updated so your customers can easily find your latest deals.

Why a fixed day, not an alarm that goes off when someone asks

Checking the catalog only when a customer asks has a basic flaw: you only find out about what someone notices. If nobody asks about the sold-out product, it stays listed for months. If nobody compares your website to the chat, the mismatched price goes uncorrected indefinitely. The catalog can be wrong for weeks without you knowing, simply because nobody has run into the mistake yet. And that matters for trust: Stanford University's web credibility guidelines, based on three years of research with more than 4,500 people, found that people trust sites more when they show signs of having been updated or reviewed recently.

Pick a fixed day each month to review the whole catalog, not just what happens to be visible, and that includes the order: the catalog's sections, which WhatsApp calls collections, can be reordered and renamed right from the catalog, according to its help on collections. It doesn't have to be a long task: a few minutes, always with the same list, so you're not relying on remembering what to check each time you sit down to do it. The bigger the catalog grows, the more that fixed list matters: with five products you remember them all by heart, with thirty you don't, and with eighty you're basically trusting that something's slipped through.

Some people think that if the business is small, they don't need this ritual, that they already keep it all in their head. It's the opposite: the less time you spend on the catalog the rest of the month, the easier it is for something to slip by, because you're not glancing at it while using it. A big business has someone keeping an eye on this every day without calling it a review; a small one needs to set the day precisely because it doesn't.

How to keep the habit

The monthly review competes with everything else that needs doing that day, and it loses if it doesn't have its own slot on the calendar. Set it as a fixed appointment, with a time, just like you'd set the bookkeeping review or a vendor payment. If someone else in the business handles WhatsApp, write the review down as their task for that day, with the same four-point list, not as something that "gets done anyway."

If you miss a month, don't wait until the next one to pick it back up; do it as soon as you remember and reset the first Monday as the date. A single slip is easy to fix: in a study on how habits form described by researchers at University College London, missing the routine occasionally didn't seriously hurt the process, and progress bounced back quickly after a slip (those were daily routines, not monthly ones). What you want to avoid is going months without doing it, because then it's no longer clear when it was due. And if you hand the review off to an employee, give them the four-point list in writing the first time: without it, everyone checks whatever comes to mind that day, which is almost never the same thing.

This wraps up what started with deciding what to show first and in which sections. A catalog that's built well but never reviewed breaks down just like one that was poorly built from the start, only slower: the mistake doesn't show up on day one, it shows up by month three, once nobody remembers reviewing it. What holds up everything else you've learned in this course is that the catalog stays true the next time someone opens it, not just the day you built it.

In Yodai the WhatsApp bot answers with your prices and your hours, and hands the chat over when someone asks for a person. See how the WhatsApp bot for your business works.