From signup to your first delivered message.
7 answers
A phone number, a Meta Business account, and your business details.
Three things get you through setup without a stop: a phone number that can receive an OTP and is not already registered on the WhatsApp Business API, access to a Meta Business account for your business, and your registered business name, address and website.
You do not need a new SIM if you are already using the WhatsApp Business app, Coexistence lets you keep that number and that app.
The first account created is the owner account, everything else hangs off it.
Sign up at app.vedlink-ai.com. The first user becomes the owner: only the owner can connect channels, change the plan and grant feature access to staff.
Add your team afterwards from Settings. Each staff member gets their own login, and you choose which parts of the product they can open.
Five steps, roughly fifteen minutes, and you are live.
Work through it in order, each step depends on the one before it.
Import a spreadsheet, add one by hand, or let the inbox collect them.
Contacts import from CSV or Excel. Map your columns once (name, phone, email and any custom fields you have defined), and the import reports exactly which rows failed and why, instead of dropping the whole file.
Phone numbers are stored with the country code and no plus sign, so 9876543210 in India becomes 919876543210. Pick the country from the dropdown and VedLink normalises the rest.
A number that arrives in a chat is saved as a contact automatically, so you never have to import people who message you first.
Anything you send to someone who has not messaged you in 24 hours starts as an approved template.
Build the template in the visual editor (header, body, footer, buttons and variables), then submit it to Meta from the same screen. Approval usually lands in minutes, occasionally in a few hours.
Before you submit, run the category check. Utility templates cost less than Marketing ones and are far less likely to be rejected, and the advisor will tell you which phrases are pushing your template into the Marketing bucket.
Pick a template, pick an audience, check the preview, send.
Start small. Send to yourself and two colleagues first, confirm the media, the variables and the buttons all render the way you expect on a real phone, then run the full list.
A pre-send checklist appears before every bulk send: audience size, template status, header media and which field fills each variable.
Your display name, About text, logo and business hours come from your WhatsApp profile.
The name shown at the top of the chat is your WhatsApp display name, which Meta reviews. Your logo, About line, address, email and website sit in the same profile and you can change those at any time.
If you connected through Coexistence and customers still see only your number, that is a known Meta limitation rather than a setting you have missed.
Tell us the number, the time and what you expected. That is usually enough for us to spot it.