Telegram for business

When Telegram is the right channel

Telegram makes sense when your customers or community are already there. That is common in crypto and fintech, gaming, media, education and among audiences in regions where Telegram is a main messaging app. If your customers are not on Telegram, a bot will not bring them; a website, email or an app they already use will serve them better.

Where it fits, a bot has real advantages. There is nothing to install, sign-in is the user's Telegram account, notifications arrive where people already read messages, and a conversation can turn into a purchase or a full web interface without leaving the chat.

If your customers are split across several messaging apps, build the logic once, behind your own API, and add a thin connector for each platform. The answers, the catalogue and the order records then live in one place, and adding a second platform later is a contained piece of work rather than a second project.

Support bots

A support bot is usually the best first project, because it saves time immediately and teaches you what customers ask. Start with buttons rather than free text: a menu of the top questions, each with an answer your team controls, and a clear way to reach a person.

1. 01

   Answer the top questions

   Opening hours, order status, account help, pricing pages. Keep the text in an admin page so staff can change it.

2. 02

   Collect before handing over

   Ask for the order number or account email first, so the person who picks it up has what they need.

3. 03

   Hand over to your help desk

   Send the conversation into the tool your team already uses, and send replies back through the bot.

4. 04

   Add AI answers later, with sources

   Once the answers are written down, an assistant can answer from them in free text, citing which answer it used, and hand over when it is unsure.

Taking payments

Telegram's Bot Payments API lets a bot send an invoice that the user pays inside the chat. For physical goods and services, payments go through third-party providers such as Stripe, Telegram states that it does not collect payment information, and it takes no commission ^[1]. Because Telegram never holds the card details, refunds and disputes are handled with your payment provider, not with Telegram ^[1].

Digital goods and services follow a different rule. Telegram states that payments for them must be carried out exclusively in Telegram Stars, its in-app currency, because of the app stores' rules for selling digital goods, and that a bot selling them another way may not be shown to mobile users ^[2]. Decide early which of your products are digital and which are not; the answer changes the payment flow, the accounting and sometimes the price.

• Physical goods, bookings and services delivered in person: an invoice through a payment provider you choose.
• Digital content, subscriptions and in-bot features: Telegram Stars.
• Either way: confirm the order in your own database before fulfilling it, and send a receipt your customer can keep.
• Ask your accountant and your advisers how sales in Stars are recorded and taxed for your business.

Mini apps

When a conversation becomes awkward, such as browsing a catalogue, choosing seats or reading a dashboard, a mini app opens a full interface inside Telegram. Mini apps are web apps written with JavaScript and launched inside the Telegram client ^[3], so they are built with the same tools as any modern web app and can share code with your website.

Telegram passes the mini app information about the user who opened it. Its documentation warns that this data must be validated on your server before it is used, by checking a signature made with the bot's token ^[3]. Skipping that check lets anyone pretend to be any user. It is the single most important security step in a mini app.

Channels, groups and where the bot fits

Many businesses on Telegram already run a channel for announcements and a group for their community. A bot works alongside both rather than replacing them.

• In a channel, a bot can publish scheduled posts, product updates or status notices from your own systems, so nobody copies and pastes.
• In a group, a bot can welcome new members, answer commands, run polls and enforce simple rules, within the privacy limits below.
• In a private chat, a bot can do what neither a channel nor a group can: hold a one-to-one conversation, take a payment, look up an order and open a mini app.

A useful pattern is to announce in the channel and act in the private chat: a post about a new product carries a button that opens the bot, and the bot takes it from there.

Limits and privacy you need to design for

• In a single chat, Telegram asks bots to avoid sending more than one message per second ^[4].
• For bulk notifications, bots cannot broadcast more than about 30 messages per second unless paid broadcasts are enabled ^[4]. A message to every subscriber has to be queued, and a large list takes time to reach everyone.
• In a group, a bot cannot send more than 20 messages per minute ^[4].
• Privacy mode is on by default for bots in groups: the bot receives commands meant for it, replies to its own messages and service messages, not every message in the group ^[5]. Design group features around commands and replies rather than reading everything.

Those limits are reasonable for a business bot, but they rule out some ideas. A bot that promises to message thousands of users at the same instant, or to moderate a busy group by reading every message, needs a different design.

Three Telegram projects, priced from our rate card

The worked examples below show the range from our rate card today, with the payment schedule and the monthly running cost. They are priced when you open the page.

Running a Telegram bot safely

• Keep the bot token in a secrets store. Anyone with it controls the bot; if it leaks, revoke it through BotFather at once.
• Receive updates through a webhook on your own server with a secret header check, so only Telegram can call it.
• Validate every mini app request on the server, as above.
• Store only what you need. Telegram user IDs, chats and orders are personal information under privacy law, and your privacy notice should say what the bot keeps and why.
• Log every payment event and reconcile it against your provider's records daily.
• Monitor the bot like any other service: uptime, errors, queue length for broadcasts.
• Keep a separate test bot with its own token for staging, so changes are tried on real Telegram clients before your customers see them.

Measuring what the bot does for you

Decide before launch how you will judge the bot, and have it record what you need. For a support bot: questions answered without a person, handovers, time to first reply and the questions that keep arriving with no good answer. For a shop: conversations started, invoices sent, invoices paid and where people drop off. For a mini app: opens, completed journeys and errors. A small dashboard with those numbers tells you what to improve next, and whether the bot is earning its keep.

A checklist for your brief

1. 01

   Confirm your audience is on Telegram

   If they are not, choose the channel they use.

2. 02

   Choose the first job

   Support, sales or a mini app. One, done well, before the next.

3. 03

   Sort your products

   Physical or digital, because that decides the payment route.

4. 04

   Name your systems

   Help desk, shop, booking system, CRM: everything the bot must talk to.

5. 05

   Decide who edits the content

   Answers, catalogue and messages should be changeable by staff without a developer.