What's really going on

You're not tracking a sales pipeline. You're running a chat storefront. Customers ping you on WhatsApp, you want to show them products from Shopify, they buy. That's a messaging + catalog problem, not a "where do my deals sit" problem. Most CRMs will bolt onto this badly and charge you per user for fields you'll never open.

What to do instead

1. AiSensy or Wati (₹ monthly tiers — check current pricing) — official WhatsApp Business API with a bot builder. Set up a keyword like "catalog" that triggers a product carousel.
2. Pabbly Connect (India-priced, check current pricing) — the glue between Shopify and your WhatsApp tool. Trigger: new product or "catalog" request. Action: send product list to the customer's WhatsApp thread.
3. Zoho Bigin (free for 1 user) — only if you also want to remember who bought what. Otherwise skip it for now.

First action, in the next 30 minutes: open AiSensy's free trial, connect your WhatsApp Business number, and build one auto-reply that fires when someone messages the word "catalog". Don't wire Shopify yet. Just prove the bot answers.

What you're being oversold

Anyone pitching you a full CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, even Zoho One) for this is selling you 90% software you won't touch. You don't have a pipeline. You have conversations. A CRM subscription here is ₹2,000-₹8,000/month burning for a contact list you could keep in Bigin's free tier. Doing nothing costs you every customer who asks "what do you sell?" at 10pm and gets no reply — those are the cheapest sales you'll ever lose.

When to revisit this

When you're getting more WhatsApp inquiries in a day than one person can reply to inside an hour.

The part worth getting right

Here's the fork. If your Shopify catalog is small and stable — say under 50 SKUs, changing rarely — WhatsApp's native catalog feature (free, built into Business API) is enough, and Pabbly just syncs new products in. If your catalog is large or changes weekly, you need a real bot flow that queries Shopify live when the customer asks, and that's a different build with different pricing. Pick the wrong path and you either overpay for automation you don't need, or you send customers a stale product list and lose the sale.