How to send WooCommerce SMS and WhatsApp notifications from your own phone number

Email order updates have a problem: people don't read them. They land in a promotions tab, or they get read three days later. A text that says "Your order #1042 has shipped" gets read almost immediately.

Most WooCommerce SMS plugins solve this by connecting your store to a bulk SMS provider like Twilio, Vonage or a local aggregator. That works, but it brings per-message fees, sender ID registration, and in the US the 10DLC registration process for business texting. For a store sending a few hundred order updates a month, the setup is often more work than the messages are worth.

This tutorial shows a different approach. You send WooCommerce SMS notifications through an Android phone with a normal SIM card, and WhatsApp notifications through your own WhatsApp number. Customers see a number they recognize, they can reply, and you pay your mobile plan's normal rates.

I'll use two plugins we build at Tekservix: the SMS Gora SMS gateway plugin and the WAservix WhatsApp API gateway plugin. Both are free plugins; the services behind them have paid plans with free trials. I'll also cover when a Twilio-style provider is still the better choice.

What you'll set up

By the end you'll have:

• An SMS to the customer when an order moves to processing, completed, on hold, cancelled, refunded or failed
• An instant alert to your own phone when a new order comes in
• SMS or WhatsApp alerts when someone submits a contact form
• An optional WhatsApp chat button on your store

You need WordPress 6.2 or newer, PHP 7.4 or newer, WooCommerce (for the order messages), and an Android phone running Android 7 or later for SMS.

How a phone-based SMS gateway works

The idea is simple. An app on an Android phone stays connected to a cloud service. When your store wants to send a text, the plugin calls the service's API, the service passes the message to the phone, and the phone sends it as a regular SMS from its SIM card.

That has real advantages for a small or mid-sized store:

• No sender approval. The message comes from a normal phone number, so there's no sender ID or campaign registration to wait for.
• Replies work. Customers can text back, and the reply shows up in your inbox and in WordPress.
• Cost follows your mobile plan. Many plans include unlimited local texts.

And some limits you should know about:

• The phone needs power and signal. If it goes offline, messages wait in a queue until it reconnects.
• Your carrier's fair-use rules still apply. A SIM is not built for 50,000 marketing texts a day.
• In the US, carriers filter high-volume business traffic from regular numbers. For large volumes there, a registered 10DLC or toll-free number from a provider like Twilio is the safer route.

For order updates, appointment reminders and admin alerts, a phone gateway is usually enough. For mass marketing in the US, it isn't.

Step 1: Set up the SMS gateway

1. Create an SMS Gora account at tekservix.com/smsgora. There's a free trial.
2. Install the SMS Gora app on your Android phone and sign in. The phone shows up in your dashboard as a linked device. Dual-SIM phones let you pick which SIM sends.
3. In the dashboard, open API keys and create a key. Copy it somewhere safe.

Keep the phone on a charger and turn off battery optimization for the app. Some Android brands kill background apps aggressively, and that's the most common reason a gateway phone "stops sending".

Step 2: Install the WordPress SMS plugin

Download the plugin zip from the SMS Gora WordPress plugin guide, then in WordPress go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin, choose the zip and activate it.

If you manage sites with WP-CLI, upload the zip to the server and run:

wp plugin install sms-gora.zip --activate

Then open SMS Gora > Settings, paste your API key and save. The settings screen then shows your account and how many of your phones are online.

If you'd rather keep the key out of the database, define it in wp-config.php instead:

define( 'SMSGORA_API_KEY', 'your-api-key-here' );

Step 3: Turn on WooCommerce SMS notifications

In the WooCommerce order SMS section of the settings page you get one message per order status. Turn on the ones you want and edit the text. Placeholders fill in order details:

Hi {first_name}, your order #{order_number} is on its way. Questions? Just reply to this text.

A few things I'd recommend:

• Start with two statuses, usually processing and completed. Texting on every status change feels noisy.
• Keep messages under 160 characters. Longer texts split into several SMS, and some carriers charge per part.
• Say who you are in the first few words. The customer may not have your number saved.

Next, add your own number under new-order alerts. Store owners who still refresh the WooCommerce orders page all day tend to like this one the most.

Step 4: Get SMS alerts from contact forms

The plugin hooks into Contact Form 7, WPForms, Elementor Pro Forms, Gravity Forms and Fluent Forms. Pick the form, enter the number that should get the alert, and write a short template with the form fields you care about.

This is the quickest fix for "we didn't see the enquiry until Monday". For service businesses it often matters more than order texts.

Turn on the hourly limit in the Safety section too. It's off by default. If a bot floods your contact form with spam, the cap stops automatic texts before they burn through your SIM credit.

Step 5: Add WhatsApp notifications (optional)

In many countries customers would rather get WhatsApp than SMS. The WAservix plugin works the same way as the SMS one, but sends from your own WhatsApp number.

1. Create a WAservix account at tekservix.com/waservix (free trial) and link your number by scanning a QR code, the same way you'd link WhatsApp Web.
2. Download the WAservix plugin from the WAservix docs, upload it to WordPress, and paste your API key.
3. Turn on the order messages you want. You can attach an image or document link, like an invoice PDF.
4. Optionally add the floating chat button, or place it anywhere with the [waservix_chat] shortcode.

One honest warning. WAservix links your number as a companion device. It isn't the official WhatsApp Business Platform from Meta. That means no business verification and no per-conversation fees, but WhatsApp's spam rules apply to your number directly. Only message customers who expect to hear from you, warm up a new number slowly, and leave the hourly limit on. If you need a verified green-tick sender or high-volume broadcasts, Meta's official API through a provider is the right tool.

Step 6: Receive replies and delivery reports

Both plugins can show delivery status and incoming messages in WordPress. In the plugin settings, copy the webhook URL and secret into your SMS Gora or WAservix dashboard. After that, the message log shows sent and delivered status (and read status on WhatsApp), and replies appear in WordPress too.

Developers get hooks for this. For example, to forward every incoming SMS to a Slack channel or your helpdesk:

add_action( 'smsgora_wp_received', function ( $from, $text, $data ) {
    // $data is the full webhook payload; pass what you need to your own handler.
    error_log( 'SMS from ' . $from . ': ' . $text );
}, 10, 3 );

And to send a text from your own code, such as a custom booking plugin:

smsgora_send( '[phone]', 'Your appointment is confirmed for 3pm tomorrow.' );

Phone gateway vs Twilio-style plugin: which one?

	Phone gateway (SMS Gora)	SMS provider plugin (Twilio, Vonage, etc.)
Sender	Your own phone number	Provider number or sender ID
Setup time	Minutes	Hours to weeks (registration)
Cost model	Monthly plan + your SIM rates	Per message, varies by country
Two-way replies	Yes, to a normal number	Yes, with extra setup
Very high volume	Limited by SIM and carrier	Built for it
US business texting at scale	Risky	Recommended

If you're a store or service business sending hundreds or a few thousand messages a month, start with the phone gateway. If you're sending tens of thousands of promotional texts in the US, use a registered provider.

Going further

Once order updates run on SMS and WhatsApp, two things tend to come next. Some stores add the Tekservix AI Sales Agent, which answers product questions on WhatsApp and SMS using the store's own pages and hands the chat to a person when needed. Others turn the store into an Android and iOS app with our website to app builder, which has its own WordPress plugin for push notifications and app-only content.

But don't start there. Turn on two order texts and a new-order alert, run them for a week, and check how many customers reply. That will tell you more about what to add than any feature list.