WhatsApp Inbox
The inbox is ZingaConnect's shared, two-way messaging workspace. Where campaigns send to your contacts, the inbox is where your team converses with them — replying to inbound messages, sending proactive outreach, and (on WhatsApp) selling directly in chat.
Conversations and messages
The inbox lists one row per contact, aggregating all of that person's channel threads. Select a contact and you see their consolidated, cross-channel timeline — WhatsApp, SMS, and email together in one view — with a composer to reply.
Under the hood, each channel a contact reaches you on is its own thread (WhatsApp session rules differ from an email thread), but the inbox blends them into a single per-contact conversation so your team sees the whole relationship.
Each conversation has:
- A status — open, pending, snoozed, or closed — so you can triage a queue.
- An assignee — the agent responsible for it, with an unread badge and a chime when a new inbound message lands on a thread assigned to you.
- Filters by status and by channel.
Identity is never duplicated in the inbox — a conversation is anchored to the shared contact record, so who you are talking to is the same person you see everywhere else in ZingaConnect and ZingaShop.
My inbox
My inbox is the same workspace narrowed to the contacts assigned to you, on its own nav entry beside the shared Inbox. Use the shared Inbox to triage what has just come in, and My inbox to work your own queue without the rest of the team's traffic in the way.
Assignment is per contact, not per thread: picking an agent in the conversation header claims every channel that person writes on, so they stay in that agent's My inbox whether they follow up on WhatsApp, SMS, or email. Closing works the same way — it closes the contact's threads together. Set the assignee back to Unassigned to hand them back to the shared queue.
Sending outbound messages
From a conversation you can send several kinds of message:
- Text — a plain message.
- Template — a reusable Email/SMS template, or an approved WhatsApp template. On WhatsApp, a template is required to open a conversation or to message outside the 24-hour window.
- Media — images, documents, and other attachments.
- Interactive — WhatsApp interactive messages, including product cards and catalog messages (see below).
You can also start a brand-new conversation with a contact, reply within an existing one, reassign it to another agent, and retry a message that failed to send. Delivery and read status are tracked on every outbound message.
Typing indicator
On WhatsApp, the customer sees a typing bubble as soon as you start writing a reply, and it stays up until your message goes out. It appears only once you have actually typed something — opening a conversation to read it does not raise one.
Two details come from WhatsApp itself rather than from ZingaConnect:
- The bubble lasts about 25 seconds, or until your message arrives — whichever comes first.
- WhatsApp attaches it to the read receipt of the message you are answering, so typing also blue-ticks that message. There is no way to show one without the other. In practice this changes nothing, because opening the conversation already marks it read.
A conversation you have only ever sent to — where the customer has not written to you yet — has nothing for WhatsApp to attach the bubble to, so no indicator is shown.
Inbound messages
Incoming messages arrive through your provider's webhooks and are attached to the right conversation automatically. ZingaConnect matches an inbound message back to its thread and to the contact, creating the contact if this is the first time you have heard from them. Delivery, read (blue-tick), and failure updates from the provider advance each message's status.
WhatsApp catalog and cart, sourced from ZingaShop
If you also run ZingaShop, the inbox can sell your products inside WhatsApp. The product catalog shown in chat is your ZingaShop catalog — the same products, priced the same, referenced by their ZingaShop SKUs. There is no separate catalog to maintain.
Once WhatsApp Commerce is connected on your WhatsApp channel (which requires a ZingaShop subscription, because the catalog is populated by ZingaShop), you can:
- Send a "View catalog" entry point that opens your full catalog in chat.
- Send a single product card or a multi-product list grouped into sections.
- Let a customer build a cart in WhatsApp and send it back to you as an order.
When a customer sends a cart, ZingaConnect turns it into a ZingaShop order and replies with the right way to pay:
- In-chat payment (WhatsApp Pay), where an itemised order with a native "Review and pay" button is sent — available when you have set up a payment configuration and WhatsApp Pay is live in the relevant country.
- A ZingaShop checkout link, otherwise, that takes the customer to your storefront to complete the purchase.
Either way, a single order is created and settled, so WhatsApp sales flow into ZingaShop alongside the rest of your orders.
Programmatic messaging
The inbox's send and receive capabilities are also available over the public messaging API, letting external systems send through ZingaConnect and subscribe to inbound and status events (so ZingaConnect can act as your messaging provider for another application). See the Developer API Reference chapter for endpoints, scopes, and webhook payloads.