Receive UPI Payments Through WhatsApp(Recommended) | Developer Documentation

ChatArchitect availability: UPI payments in WhatsApp. ChatArchitect supports ordinary links to an external payment website. The recommended native UPI payment flow is not provided through ChatArchitect.

Use the external payment-link guide for the supported customer workflow. Your payment service handles checkout and transaction confirmation; WhatsApp delivery callbacks do not confirm payment. The imported Meta implementation below is retained as a separate reference and does not describe an available ChatArchitect setup.

ChatArchitect scope: Native Meta product catalogs, product cards, shopping carts and catalog order events are not supported by ChatArchitect. Review catalog availability in ChatArchitect when this imported payment reference mentions product messages. Confirm support for the payment operation separately for your ChatArchitect connection before implementing it.

Receive UPI Payments Through WhatsApp(Recommended)

Updated: Mar 11, 2026

For businesses working with Billdesk or Zaakpay payment gateways, use the deeper integration with these PGs. Refer to Payment Gateway Integration Guide

For businesses working with Razorpay, PayU, or Cashfree payment gateways, use a faster integration path. Refer to Enhanced Payment Links

This is the recommended UPI Intent integration. Using the older payment configuration method? See previous docs and plan to migrate to dynamic VPA.

Your business can enable customers to pay for their orders using all the UPI Apps installed on their devices via WhatsApp. Businesses can send customers invoice (order_details) messages, then get notified about payment status updates via webhook notifications from Payment Gateway.

Overview

Currently, customers browse business catalogs, add products to cart, and send orders in with our set of commerce messaging solutions, which includes ChatArchitect catalog availability.

With the WhatsApp Payments API, businesses can send customers a bill so the customer can complete their order with all the UPI Apps.

How It Works

The business must send an order_details message for the consumer to initiate payment. This type of message is a new type of interactive message, which always contains the same 4 main components: header, body, footer, and action. Inside the action component, the business includes all the information needed for the customer to complete their payment.

An order_details message contains the following fields that are worth noting:

upi_intent_link - Fields that will be supplied by your payment gateway and denote where a payment will be sent.reference_id - This is used to track the lifecycle of the order. Payment statuses are published against this ID. This could be order-id or transaction-id used to create the upi-intent at payment gateway.

Once the message is sent, the business waits for a payment or transaction status updates directly from Payment Gateway. Upon receiving payment signal for an order, Business should relay this payment signal to consumer through interactive order status (order_status) message.

Updating users about the payment signal is important as this message updates the order details message and order details view for the consumer reflecting the order confirmation from the merchant. This is shown with an example in subsequent sections.

Purchase Flow in App

In the WhatsApp customer app, the purchase flow has the following steps:

Customer sends an order with selected products to the business, or the business identifies the products that the customer has shown interest to purchase.

After receiving the order/identifying the product, if a merchant accepts payment methods other than UPI, such as credit cards and payment wallets, then the merchant will send a message to the user to get their preferred payment method for the order.

When consumers want to pay using UPI payment method, then merchants should retrieve the UPI payment intent by calling Payment Gateway. Merchant needs to use UPI intent to construct order details messages and send it to the consumer.

When the consumer taps the Pay now/continue button, they will be given the option to choose UPI payment Apps - WhatsApp or any other UPI payments apps. Consumers may choose any UPI option to pay for the order.

Consumer pays for the order and the payment method is saved for the future and automatically selected for the next payment transaction. Also, one quick note is the order details screen order-status will continue to show “Order pending” until the merchant sends order status interactive message.

Once the payment is complete, the business receives a notification from Payment Gateway and the merchant needs to send order status updates to the consumer client notifying consumers about the progress to the order, this will update the order details message CTAs and order details screen - order status description.

Integration Steps

The steps outlined below assume that the business is about to send order details message to the consumer client.

The following sequence diagram demonstrates the typical integration flow for WA Payments API:

Step 1: Get UPI Intent from Payment Gateway

Once the consumer has expressed their interest to purchase an item using UPI payment method, merchant needs to call payment gateway to create a UPI intent, the following is the sample UPI intent link:

upi://pay?pa=abc@psp&pn=ABC&tr=877376394&
  am=10.00&cu=INR&mode=00&purpose=00&mc=5399&tn=877376394

Merchant/Partner could send the entire UPI intent as it is in the upi_intent_link type payload. These will be discussed in detail below.

Step 2: Assemble the Interactive Object

To send an order_details message, businesses must assemble an interactive object of type order_details with the following components:

Object	Description
type object	Required. Must be “order_details”.
header object	Optional. Header content displayed on top of a message. If a header is not provided, the API uses an image of the first available product as the header
body object	Required. An object with the body of the message. The object contains the following field: text string Required if body is present. The content of the message. Emojis and markdown are supported. Maximum length is 1024 characters
footer object	Optional. An object with the footer of the message. The object contains the following fields: text string Required if footer is present. The footer content. Emojis, markdown, and links are supported. Maximum length is 60 characters
action object	Required. An action object you want the user to perform after reading the message. This action object contains the following fields: name string Required. Must be “review_and_pay” parameters object See Parameters Object for information

Parameters Object

Object	Description
reference_id string	Required. Unique identifier for the order or invoice provided by the business. It is case sensitive and cannot be an empty string and can only contain English letters, numbers, underscores, dashes, or dots, and should not exceed 35 characters. The reference_id must be unique for each order_details message for a given business. If there is a need to send multiple order_details messages for the same order, it is recommended to include a sequence number in the reference_id (for example, “BM345A-12”) to ensure reference_id uniqueness.
type object	Required. The type of goods being paid for in this order. Current supported options are digital-goods and physical-goods
beneficiaries array	Required for shipped physical-goods. An array of beneficiaries for this order. A beneficiary is an intended recipient for shipping the physical goods in the order. It contains the following fields: Beneficiary information isn’t shown to users but is needed for legal and compliance reasons. name string Required. Name of the individual or business receiving the physical goods. Cannot exceed 200 characters address_line1 string Required. Shipping address (Door/Tower Number, Street Name etc.). Cannot exceed 100 characters address_line2 string Optional. Shipping address (Landmark, Area, etc.). Cannot exceed 100 characters city string Required. Name of the city. state string Required. Name of the state. country string Required. Must be “India”. postal_code string Required. 6-digit zip code of shipping address.
currency	Required. The currency for this order. Currently the only supported value is INR.
total_amount object	Required. The total_amount object contains the following fields: offset integer Required. Must be 100 for INR. value integer Required. Positive integer representing the amount value multiplied by offset. For example, ₹12.34 has value 1234. total_amount.value must be equal to order.subtotal.value + order.tax.value + order.shipping.value - order.discount.value.
payment_settings object	Required. See Payment Settings object for more information.
order object	Required. See order object for more information.

Payment Settings Object

You can pass UPI intent as it is or parse the UPI intent parameters and pass them in a json structure. We support both the formats, so following are the two variants of payments settings objects:

Payment Settings Object for UPI intent link

Object	Description
type string	Required. Must be set to “upi_intent_link”
upi_intent_link object	Required. An object that describes payment account information: link string Required. The UPI intent that is generated from Payment gateway. The UPI intent only supports the following “&” separated attributes- pa, pn, mc, purpose and tr Example: upi://pay?pa=merchant_vpa&pn=Merchant_Name&mc=merchant_category_code&purpose=purpose_code&tr=pg_generated_id

Order Object

Object	Description
status string	Required. Only supported value in the order_details message is pending. In an order_status message, status can be: pending, captured, or failed.
type string	Optional. Only supported value is quick_pay. When this field is passed in we hide the “Review and Pay” button and only show the “Pay Now” button in the order details bubble.
items object	Required. An object with the list of items for this order, containing the following fields: retailer_id string Optional. Content ID for an item in the order from your catalog. name string Required. The item’s name to be displayed to the user. Cannot exceed 60 characters image object Optional. Custom image for the item to be displayed to the user. See item image object for information Using this image field will limit the items array to a maximum of 10 items and this cannot be used with retailer_id or catalog_id. amount amount object with value and offset -- refer total amount field above Required. The price per item sale_amount amount object Optional. The discounted price per item. This should be less than the original amount. If included, this field is used to calculate the subtotal amount quantity integer Required. The number of items in this order, this field cannot be decimal, has to be integer. country_of_origin string Required if catalog_id is not present. The country of origin of the product importer_name string Required if catalog_id is not present. Name of the importer company importer_adress string Required if catalog_id is not present. Address of importer company
subtotal object	Required. The value must be equal to sum of order.amount.value * order.amount.quantity. Refer to total_amount description for explanation of offset and value fields The following fields are part of the subtotal object: offset integer Required. Must be 100 for INR value integer Required. Positive integer representing the amount value multiplied by offset. For example, ₹12.34 has value 1234
tax object	Required. The tax information for this order which contains the following fields: offset integer Required. Must be 100 for INR value integer Required. Positive integer representing the amount value multiplied by offset. For example, ₹12.34 has value 1234 description string Optional. Max character limit is 60 characters
shipping object	Optional. The shipping cost of the order. The object contains the following fields: offset integer Required. Must be 100 for INR value integer Required. Positive integer representing the amount value multiplied by offset. For example, ₹12.34 has value 1234 description string Optional. Max character limit is 60 characters
discount object	Optional. The discount for the order. The object contains the following fields: offset integer Required. Must be 100 for INR value integer Required. Positive integer representing the amount value multiplied by offset. For example, ₹12.34 has value 1234 description string Optional. Max character limit is 60 characters discount_program_name string Optional. Text used for defining incentivised orders. If order is incentivised, the merchant needs to define this information. Max character limit is 60 characters
catalog_id object	Optional. Unique identifier of the Facebook catalog being used by the business. If you do not provide this field, you must provide the following fields inside the items object: country_of_origin, importer_name, and importer_address
expiration object	Optional. Expiration for that order. Business must define the following fields inside this object: timestamp string – UTC timestamp in seconds of time when order should expire. Minimum threshold is 300 seconds description string – Text explanation for expiration. Max character limit is 120 characters

Item Image Object

Object	Description
link string	Required. A link to the image that will be shown to the user. Must be an image/jpeg or image/png and 8-bit, RGB or RGBA. Follows same requirements as image in media

By the end, the interactive object should look something like this for a merchant upi intent type catalog-based integration:

Step 3: Add Common Message Parameters

Once the interactive object is complete, append the other parameters that make a message: recipient_type, to, and type. Remember to set the type to interactive.

These are parameters common to all message types.

Step 4:Make a POST Call to Messages Endpoint

Make a POST call to the /[PHONE_NUMBER_ID]/messages endpoint with the JSON object you have assembled. If your message is sent successfully, you get the following response:

Errors

WhatsApp Payments Terms of Service Acceptance Pending

If you see the following error, accept the WhatsApp Payments terms of service using the link provided in the error message before trying again.

For all other errors that can be returned and guidance on how to handle them, see WhatsApp Cloud API, Error Codes.

Step 5: Consumer Pays for the Order

Consumers can pay using WhatsApp payment method or using any UPI supported app that is installed on the device.

Step 6: Get Notified About Transaction Status Updates from payment gateway

Businesses receive updates to the invoice via payment gateway webhooks, when the status of the user-initiated transaction changes. The unique identifier reference-id passed in order_details message can be used to map the transaction to the consumer invoice or interactive order details message.

Please refer to our PG integration guide for the exact payment signals. Cashfree and CCAvenue

Step 7: Update order status

Upon receiving transaction signals from payment gateway through webhook, the business must update the order status to keep the user up to date. Currently we support the following order status values:

Value	Description
pending	User has not successfully paid yet
processing	User payment authorized, merchant/partner is fulfilling the order, performing service, etc.
partially-shipped	A portion of the products in the order have been shipped by the merchant
shipped	All the products in the order have been shipped by the merchant
completed	The order is completed and no further action is expected from the user or the partner/merchant
canceled	The partner/merchant would like to cancel the order_details message for the order/invoice. The status update will fail if there is already a successful or pending payment for this order_details message

Typically businesses update the order_status using either the WhatsApp payment status change notifications or their own internal processes. To update order_status, the partner sends a order_status message to the user.

The following table describes the returned values:

Value	Description
reference_id	The ID provided by the partner in the order_details message
status	The new order status
description	Optional text for sharing status related information in order_details. Could be useful while sending cancellation. Max character limit is 120 characters

Merchant should always post this order-status message to the consumer after receiving transaction updates for an order. As the order_details message and order details screen experience is tied to to the order status updates.

Security Considerations

Businesses should comply with local security and regulatory requirements in India. They should not rely solely on the status of the transaction provided in the webhook and must use payment lookup API to retrieve the statuses directly from WhatsApp. Businesses must always sanitize/validate the data in the API responses or webhooks to protect against SSRF attacks.

Checklist for Integrated Merchants

Ensure that an order_status message is send to consumer informing them about updates to an order after receiving transaction updates for an order.

Ensure the merchant is verified and WABA contact is marked with a verified check.

Verify the WABA is mapped to appropriate merchant initiated messaging tier(1k, 10k and 100k per day)

Merchant should list the customer support information in the profile screen in case the consumer wants to report any issues.