A WhatsApp AI agent for your grocery store: what it does and where it stops

Start with what customers ask. Customers ask whether an item is in stock, delivery slots, minimum order value, and whether they can order their usual list again. An agent answers all of that from your own information. Then give it the work grocery stores repeat every day:

1. Weekly offer broadcast every Monday morning — Fresh deals broadcast to all registered customers — creates a weekly shopping habit from your store.
2. WhatsApp order management centralised — All orders flow into Reputoo's dashboard — organised, trackable, and never lost.
3. Order confirmation + delivery ETA on WhatsApp — Instant confirmation, payment link, delivery status, and delivery alert — all automated.
4. Loyalty points for every ₹100 spent

The agent runs these on WhatsApp in the customer's language, day and night, and writes what it did back to the contact record so staff see the full history.

Note what the agent did: understood a mixed-language message, read the order back in full, offered specific slots, reused the saved address, and left the total to the person who weighs the vegetables.

Everything the agent says comes from what you give it. For a grocery store, that is six documents, most of which already exist on paper or in someone's head:

1. Store profile — address, landmarks, timings, holidays, phone number, branches.
2. Delivery rules — areas or pin codes, minimum order, delivery charge, slots and their cut-off times.
3. Payment methods — cash, UPI, cards, credit accounts and who is eligible.
4. Returns and replacements — what can be returned, within what time, and how.
5. Price list — packaged items with brand, size and price, one row each, with the local names customers use.
6. Things that change daily — a short note someone updates each morning: fresh arrivals, items out, and the day's produce prices if you want the agent to quote them.

Write them the way you would explain the store to a new employee. The agent reads plain sentences well; it does not need a special format.

An AI agent is only as accurate as what you give it. On Reputoo it answers from your knowledge base — pages crawled from your website, documents and price lists you upload, and policies you write down — rather than from general knowledge. Two rules keep it right:

• If it is not in the knowledge base, the agent says it will check and hands over, rather than guessing.
• Prices, timings and policies live in one place. Update the source and the agent's answers change with it.

It also needs to see the records your grocery store already keeps — what to connect: A billing POS and sometimes a delivery app; the order history is what makes reordering work.

A grocery store's facts change faster than most businesses'. The agent is only as current as what it reads, so decide what it may quote:

• Packaged goods: a price list uploaded to the knowledge base, updated when prices change. The agent can quote these.
• Loose produce: either a short daily price note someone updates each morning, or a rule that the agent says prices are confirmed at packing.
• Stock: unless inventory is connected, the agent says it will check — and the question goes to a person.

An agent that says "yes, available" and is then corrected costs more trust than one that says "let me check".

Orders arrive at night, when a family plans the next day's cooking. The agent can take them in full and queue them for the first morning slot, telling the customer exactly that. What it should not do is promise a delivery time the morning team has not agreed to — put the store's rules (first slot, cut-off time) in the knowledge base and let the agent repeat them.

These are the moments customers remember, and they are worth a human:

• Orders on personal phone — no system, no scale. Hundreds of WhatsApp orders on your personal phone. Orders get lost. You can't track or organise. It's unsustainable.
• Zepto/Blinkit taking your regular customers. Your morning regulars order from Blinkit now. Not because you're worse — because they don't get reminders to order from you.
• Weekly offers not communicated proactively.

The agent can open each of these conversations and collect the details; a person should close anything involving a complaint, an exception to policy, or money that has not been agreed. Handover goes to the shared inbox with the full conversation attached.

The agent replies in the language the customer writes in, across 36 languages, and handles the mixed Hindi-English that most grocery messages in North India are written in. Product names are the exception to watch: add the local names customers use ("pyaz", "vengayam", "kanda" for onion) to your price list so the agent maps them to the right item.

The agent can explain the policy — "packaged items can be returned unopened within two days; fresh produce is replaced if there is a problem at delivery" — and collect what the store needs to act: order number, the item, and a photo. It should not approve a refund on its own. Decisions about money go to a person, and the agent's job is to make sure that person has everything in one message.

A good handover means the customer never repeats themselves. Before passing a chat to staff, the agent should have:

• the order number or delivery date;
• what went wrong, in the customer's words;
• a photo, if it is about a damaged or wrong item;
• what the customer wants — replacement, refund or just to be heard.

It then tells the customer who will reply and roughly when. Staff pick up a conversation that is ready to resolve, not one that starts with "can you share your order number?".

Payment is where customers most want a clear, calm answer. The agent can handle the routine ones completely:

• "How can I pay?" — cash, UPI or card on delivery, or your payment link, as set in the knowledge base.
• "I paid but it says pending" — ask for the time and the UPI reference, reassure the customer that the store will check, and hand over with those details attached.
• "What do I owe on my account?" — only if credit accounts are kept in Reputoo; otherwise the agent says the owner will send the statement.

It should never ask for a card number, a UPI PIN or an OTP, and your knowledge base should say so in plain words — customers who have been targeted by payment scams will be reassured to hear it.

The same agent that answers on WhatsApp can answer your grocery store's phone line as Vajra, Reputoo's voice agent, so a customer who calls gets the same answers as one who messages. It speaks 36 languages and switches to the caller's.

1. Upload the store profile, delivery rules and price list.
2. Turn the agent on for after-hours first, so staff review its work in the morning before it takes daytime traffic.
3. Each morning, read the handovers and anything the agent said it would "check" — every one is a missing fact.
4. Add those facts to the knowledge base the same day.
5. After two weeks, move it to all-day, with the inbox staffed for handovers.

A neighbourhood grocery store has a voice: the owner who knows regulars by name, the cashier who asks after the family. The agent can carry some of that. Tell it, in its instructions, how the store talks — warm and short, using "ji" where your customers expect it, greeting regulars by name — and what it should never do, like pushing offers into a complaint. Read a day of its conversations as if you were the customer, and adjust the instructions until they sound like your counter on a good day.