How replies work

Replying in Reva sends a real WhatsApp message from your business number. What you are allowed to send depends on when the customer last wrote to you — that is WhatsApp's rule, not Reva's, and it is the single thing that surprises people most.

The 24-hour window

When a customer sends you a message, WhatsApp opens a 24-hour window. Inside it you can reply with anything: normal text, photos, documents, voice notes.

Reva shows this above the reply box as Free-form replies available, with the time it closes.

After it closes

Once 24 hours have passed with no message from the customer, the window shuts. Reva says so plainly:

The 24-hour reply window is closed. Use an approved template until the customer replies again.

You can still reach them — but only with a template, a message WhatsApp has approved in advance. Press Templates above the reply box to choose one.

The moment the customer replies to anything, the window opens again for another 24 hours and free-form replies come back.

Why WhatsApp does this

The window exists to stop businesses messaging people who are not in a conversation with them. It is the same for every business on WhatsApp, and there is no setting in Reva that turns it off.

The practical consequence for a jewellery business: if you need to reach a customer about an order two days later, you need a template for it. Getting the templates you actually use approved, before you need them, is worth doing early.

Who can reply

Anyone in the department that number is routed to. The reply is sent from the business number, not from the person — the customer sees the shop, not the member of staff.

If you cannot reply at all

If the Templates button says No approved templates or Templates unavailable, the window is closed and there is nothing approved to send. The first is a content problem — no templates have been approved yet. The second means Reva could not reach WhatsApp to list them, which is usually temporary.