WhatsApp & Compliance

The short answer: grey-market WhatsApp automation tools are cheaper right up until the day your number gets banned — and then the real cost lands all at once, as lost conversations, lost history, and a sales team that has to start over.

What “grey-market” actually means here

Unofficial WhatsApp tools typically work by automating a personal or business WhatsApp app through unauthorized means — not through Meta’s actual Business Platform API. Meta actively detects and bans numbers using these methods. It’s not a rare edge case; it’s a known and expected outcome of using them at any real volume.

What a ban actually costs you

• The number itself. Every contact who has that number saved, every existing chat thread, gone.
• Chat history. Past conversations, quotes shared over chat, commitments made — unrecoverable.
• Time. Re-registering a new number and rebuilding contact trust isn’t instant.
• Trust with buyers. A number that suddenly stops responding, mid-deal, doesn’t read as a technical glitch to the person on the other end.

None of that shows up on the invoice for the “cheap” tool. It shows up three months later as a Monday morning crisis.

What the official API gets you instead

No ban risk from how you’re connecting

The official Meta WhatsApp Business API is the sanctioned way to send and receive WhatsApp messages at scale. You can still violate Meta’s messaging policies with bad behavior (spam, unsolicited bulk messages) — but you’re not carrying the structural risk of an unauthorized connection method.

A real shared team inbox

Official API access is what makes a genuine shared inbox possible — multiple reps working the same WhatsApp number, with round-robin assignment on replies, instead of one person’s personal phone being the bottleneck.

Approved templates and read receipts

Broadcast messages go out on pre-approved templates, and you can actually see who read them — which is what makes a WhatsApp campaign measurable instead of a guess.

The honest trade-off

The official API generally costs more per message and requires business verification with Meta. That’s a real cost. But it’s a known, predictable cost — not a one-time bill that arrives as “your number is gone and so is six months of conversation history.”

EZCRM connects exclusively through the official Meta WhatsApp Business API for exactly this reason — see how the WhatsApp Business module works, or read more on our approach on the Security page. If you’re currently on a grey-market tool and weighing the switch, book a demo and we’ll walk through migrating your templates.

If your SMS campaigns in India aren’t landing, DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology registration, mandated by TRAI) is the first place to look. Non-compliant messages don’t bounce with a helpful error — telecom operators silently drop them. You get no delivery, no notification, nothing in your logs to explain why.

What DLT actually requires

Three separate registrations, done in order, each with its own turnaround time:

1. Entity registration

Your business registers as a sender on the DLT platform used by Indian telecom operators. This is a one-time step and needs to happen before anything else.

2. Header (Sender ID) registration

The 6-character sender ID that appears as who the SMS is “from” (e.g. EZCRMX) gets registered and approved separately.

3. Template registration

Every single message template — including the exact variable placeholders — must be pre-approved. You can’t free-type an SMS body and expect it to send; it has to match a registered template pattern exactly.

The checklist before you send a campaign

• Entity registered and approved on DLT
• Sender ID (header) registered and approved
• Every message template registered, including the exact variable format
• Template category correctly marked as Transactional, Promotional, or Service Implicit/Explicit — sending a promotional message under a transactional template is a common rejection reason
• Consent captured and documented for promotional sends, since operators can and do audit this
• Variable content tested — a small formatting mismatch between your registered template and what your system actually sends is the single most common cause of “approved but still not delivering”

The mistake that costs teams the most time

Template mismatch. A template gets approved as “Your quote {#var#} is ready, view at {#var#}” — and then the system sends slightly different punctuation or spacing than what was registered. Operators reject the delta silently. This is the single biggest cause of “DLT is approved but my messages still aren’t delivering,” and it’s almost always a byte-for-byte formatting issue between the registered template and the live send.

Why this matters for follow-up, not just marketing blasts

DLT compliance isn’t only a promotional-campaign concern. Transactional messages — quote-ready notifications, appointment reminders, payment confirmations — all route through the same DLT infrastructure. If your CRM’s SMS module isn’t handling registration and template matching correctly, routine follow-ups silently fail right alongside marketing sends.

EZCRM’s SMS module is built DLT-compliant from the ground up, with template management that keeps your registered templates and live sends in sync. See it under the Engage section of our features page, or book a demo if you’re setting up SMS campaigns for the first time.