22 Best Shopify Customer Support Apps (In Helpful Categories)
Discover 22 customer service apps for your Shopify store, from helpdesks and live chats to FAQs and beyond.
HOW WE RESEARCHED AND PICKED
We interviewed 5 customer service agencies
To serve you expert-backed opinions
We analyzed +1,600 user reviews
Across sites like G2, Capterra, and the Shopify App Store
We listed who each app is "Best for..."
So you can easily find the best option for your unique needs
Whether your Shopify store is brand new or years old, one of your top priorities is providing a great customer experience to your shoppers. To do this well, you need the right customer support tools in your toolbox.
Below, we’ll share 22 suggestions for Shopify customer support apps of every variety, including helpdesks, live chat, chatbots, and more.
Use the table below to navigate to the type of tool you’re looking for, or just start scrolling to get the full story.
Helpdesks: The most comprehensive customer support apps
A helpdesk is customer service software that unites all your customer communication channels (email, live chat, social media, and so on) into one powerful inbox.
With the right helpdesk, you can answer all your customer questions, make updates to Shopify orders, set up customer self-service resources, and use automation to speed up all those processes.
Gorgias: Best Shopify helpdesk app
Gorgias is the customer service helpdesk built for stores on Shopify. While other helpdesks are built for all industries and could be used for online stores, 100% of Gorgias is designed to help ecommerce stores provide great customer service.
In Gorgias, you have access to:
Superior social integrations: Manage ad replies on Facebook and Instagram on top of DMs and comments, plus WhatsApp messages
Customer order portals: Let customers answer FAQs, request returns and order edits, and track order status in real-time through your chat widget or Help Center
Unmatched personalization: Gorgias is like a CRM that lets you pull customer data from Shopify and all your other apps to give customers their unique information — even in automated responses — for the best customer support
Efficiency automations: Streamline all your repetitive tasks, from triaging tickets and responding to basic questions to updating orders in Shopify
Sales-generating features: Reach out to shoppers with pop-ups, send personalized product recommendations, and generate unique discount codes to reduce abandoned carts and upsell
Powerful reporting and analytics: Generate reports on support performance and revenue generated from support, and use ticket fields for custom reports
Superior templates: Provide instant, personalized answers that also automatically trigger changes (like refunds or address changes) in Shopify
Unlimited users: Gorgias charges by the ticket, not by the user. Don’t worry: Spam messages don’t get billed as tickets, only real conversations with your customers
Gorgias pricing
Gorgias starts at $10 per month for up to three agents. Gorgias has a 7-day free trial.
Note: Gorgias is also available on other ecommerce platforms (BigCommerce and Magento) on top of Shopify.
Re:amaze: Another option for ticket management in Shopify
Re:amaze is another helpdesk that Shopify merchants use to offer customer service. Re:amaze is a great customer support helpdesk, with the standard features for a ticketing system:
Connect all your channels: Including social media DMs and email
Automate basic tasks: Including assigning customer queries to members of your customer support team
Generate reports: To understand important metrics like response time and CSAT
Set up FAQs: To deflect customer questions from other support channels
However, Re:amaze is not ecommerce-focused, so you won’t have access to as many ecommerce features as you would with Gorgias. One key difference is that Re:amaze is solely focused on customer service, while Gorgias helps you with customer service and revenue generation.
With Gorgias, you can reach out to customers to offer discounts and other incentives, offer pre-sale support, upsell customers, and track your support team’s impact on sales.
Re:amaze pricing
Re:amaze starts at $29/month per agent. Re:amaze has a 14-day free trial.
🆚 Compare Gorgias vs Re:amaze to make the right choice for your online store.
Zendesk: Another well-known option for a Shopify helpdesk
Zendesk is one of the best-known helpdesks, which is why we’re including it on this list.
Zendesk is so popular because it’s the oldest cloud-based helpdesk. However, ecommerce is one of Zendesk’s lower priorities: They’re more dedicated to enterprise-level users, like airlines and telecommunications companies with thousands of support agents.
For industries like ecommerce, with smaller contracts, Zendesk users often report a lack of dedicated ecommerce functionality, poor customer service, and challenging onboarding. Zendesk only has a 3.4/5 on the Shopify App Store.
Zendesk pricing
Zendesk starts at $19/month per agent. Zendesk has a 14-day free trial.
🆚 Compare Gorgias vs Zendesk to make the right choice for your online store.
Live chat and chatbot apps: Talk with shoppers in real-time
If your biggest priority is chatting with shoppers on your website, then you might be looking for a live chat app. On top of supporting customers after an order, live chat apps also help you offer pre-sales support to convert visitors into paying customers.
However, note that standalone live chat apps aren’t as robust as helpdesks: If you want to provide omnichannel customer support (or support on email, social media, WhatsApp, SMS, and/or phone on top of live chat), then you should consider a full-blown helpdesk.
Shopify Inbox: Best free live chat app
Shopify Inbox is a free, basic, and customizable live chat app that you can use to offer customer support and convert shoppers on your website. It’s a great choice for solo store owners who want to offer basic customer support at no cost to them.
Shopify Inbox doesn’t offer a few key features:
It can’t connect to other channels: You’ll need a helpdesk for that
It’s not as great at Shopify order management as other apps: You can refund, duplicate, and edit orders easier in Gorgias
It doesn’t have as many chatbot and self-service features as other standalone chat apps: You’ll have access to more features in Tidio
Shopify Inbox pricing
Shopify Inbox is free.
🆚 Not sure if you need a chat app or helpdesk? Compare Shopify Inbox vs Gorgias to make the right choice for your online store.
Tidio: A more robust standalone chat app
Tidio is a live chat and chatbot app very similar to Shopify Inbox: It lets you chat with live shoppers to offer support and drive sales. It also has a free option that lets you answer up to 50 live chat questions per month.
Unlike Shopify Inbox, Tidio also has larger pricing options with additional features, including customizable chatbots, integrations with Facebook Messenger and Instagram, and more.
If you’re looking for a robust, standalone live chat tool, then consider Tidio.
Tidio pricing
Tidio starts with a free plan.
Gorgias: Another live chat app integrated into a helpdesk
If you want to offer live chat support, a standalone live chat tool isn’t your only option. Helpdesks like Gorgias typically offer a live chat channel. Here’s the Gorgias chat widget on Tushy’s website.
In Gorgias, you can set up a chat widget that:
Lets customers chat with your agents with questions
Allows customers to check the status of their order and request refunds and cancellations
Sends article recommendations from your Help Center
Shows agent availability and online status
Lets agents proactively reach out to customers to offer product recommendations, special discounts, and more
And since all of this occurs in a helpdesk, your agents can manage live chat in the same shared inbox as all your other channels. Plus, you can take advantage of Gorgias automations, integrations, and reporting to help maximize your team’s impact.
Gorgias pricing
Gorgias starts at $10 per month for up to three agents. Gorgias has a 7-day free trial.
Contact form: Create a structured alternative to email
Contact forms help you avoid confusing emails from customers, like “My product’s broken” without any additional context. These emails force your team to respond with follow-up questions, delaying the resolution and making the interaction longer than needed.
With a contact form, you give customers intuitive workflows with multiple-choice options and prompts to make these emails more structured and helpful for your support team. This can help your team resolve more customer inquiries in one touch.
Powerful Contact Form Builder: Best standalone contact form
If you’re looking for a basic contact form, Powerful Contact Form Builder in the Shopify App Store is a great choice.
With the tool, you can build simple (and lightly customizable) contact forms, as well as registration forms, multi-step forms, and cart forms. Plus, you can integrate the tool with Google reCAPTCHA to protect against spam.
Powerful Contact Form Builder pricing
Powerful Contact Form Builder is free if you only want a single contact form. For additional forms and features, you’ll pay between $10 and $25 per month.
Since the tool has a free version, there is no free trial.
Hulk Form Builder: Great customizable tool for contact (and other) forms
If you’re looking for a more customizable contact form builder, check out Hulk Form Builder. Compared to Powerful Contact Form Builder, Hulk Form Builder gives you more fields and flexibility to collect more information from customers seeking support.
Plus, Hulk Form Builder can be used for any purpose — not just customer support. And Hulk Apps creates many additional Shopify apps, including Advanced Wishlists, Mobile App Builder, and dozens more.
Hulk Form Builder pricing
Hulk Form Builder is free. You can upgrade to paid plans and get additional features for $10 or $20 per month.
Gorgias: Best contact form that’s integrated into a helpdesk
A standalone contact form is a great start. But on its own, a contact form will still send those submissions to your email inbox. Your support team will still have to respond manually, in a separate inbox from messages on all your other channels (like social media, SMS, and WhatsApp).
Gorgias is a helpdesk that also includes a contact form that you can embed on your website or Help Center. Here’s a Gorgias contact form on Loop Earplug’s website:
The benefit of using a contact form that’s integrated with your helpdesk is that submissions get sent to the shared inbox, where your agents are already managing email, live chat, social media, and other messages. Plus, you can use all the automations and integrations already built into your helpdesk, like updating a Shopify order or auto-tagging the ticket for reporting’s sake.
Gorgias pricing
Gorgias starts at $10 per month for up to three agents. Gorgias has a 7-day free trial.
FAQ pages and knowledge bases
An important element of offering great customer support on your Shopify store is customer self-service: giving customers resources to answer their own questions.
An FAQ page gives customers a simple scrollable page to answer common questions. A knowledge base is a more robust version of an FAQ page, organizing that information into categories and articles.
Helphub FAQ Page: Best standalone FAQ page
If you’re looking for a simple, searchable FAQ page, then consider Helphub FAQ Page. It’s a highly-rated, user-friendly Shopify app that makes it easy to create, manage, and deploy an FAQ page on your website.
With this FAQ page builder, you can group your questions into categories for easier skimming. Plus, you can hide the answers behind dropdowns to avoid making your FAQ page 10 miles long.
Helphub FAQ Page pricing
Helphub FAQ Page has a free plan that gives you up to 10 FAQs. For additional FAQs, you can upgrade to the $4/month or $8/month plans.
Gorgias: Best option for a more robust Help Center
At some point, you might outgrow an FAQ and want a more organized, searchable library of self-service content — also called a knowledge base. Gorgias’s Help Center gives you this kind of knowledge base, with a few additional features:
Request refunds and cancellations and enable order tracking
Add product quizzes and other interactive automation features
Embed your contact form to give customers an easy path to support
Gorgias starts at $10 per month for up to three agents. Gorgias has a 7-day free trial.
Call center app: Talk to your customers on the phone
If you’re looking to provide customer service over the phone, you’ll need a phone support solution. Below, discover two standalone phone support tools and learn how you can add voice support to your helpdesk for a more integrated solution.
Aircall: Best cloud phone software for Shopify stores
Aircall is an easy-to-use voice support solution that lets you:
Make and receive calls to your shoppers
Route calls to your support agents
Set up IVR to let your customers dial numbers to get to specific departments
Record voicemails
Send and receive SMS text messages
For most ecommerce merchants, phone support isn’t a top priority (compared to live chat and automated support). However, if you want phone support and don’t care about those channels, Aircall could be a great solution.
Aircall pricing
Aircall starts at $90/month for 3 users ($30/user with a 3-user minimum). Aircall also has a 7-day free trial.
For most ecommerce merchants, phone support is only one channel — and probably not the most important one. If that sounds like you, consider getting a helpdesk like Gorgias with built-in Voice support.
With Gorgias, you can:
Receive, place, and route customer calls
See shopper information (like past orders and support interactions) while speaking to them thanks to Gorgias’s CRM features
Manage phone support in the same tool as all your other channels
Gorgias pricing
Gorgias’s Voice add-on starts at $25/month and is only available starting on the Basic helpdesk plan ($50/month for unlimited users).
Subscription management Shopify apps
If your business offers subscriptions, you’re used to customer messages asking you to skip, modify, or cancel subscriptions on the daily. A great subscription management app will help you easily make those updates or — even better — let customers do it themselves without reaching out to your support team.
Recharge Subscriptions: A trusted subscription management app
Recharge Subscriptions is one of the oldest and most popular subscription management apps on the market. With Recharge, you can:
Easily set up a subscription option for your ecommerce business
Automate billing and payments
Customize your subscription options (frequency, duration, pricing, etc.)
Launch a customer portal so shoppers can manage their own subscriptions
Here’s what Recharge’s customer-facing subscription management portal looks like:
Recharge pricing
Recharge starts at $99/month, plus 1.25% of subscription sales and 19¢ per transaction. Recharge also offers a 30-day free trial.
Skio is a similar subscription management tool to Recharge, with two main features:
Skio is more expensive to get started: Skio’s smallest plan is 3x more expensive than Recharge’s smallest plan
Skio offers many more resources to help you succeed: Skio markets itself as the platform that helps your sell subscriptions without ripping your hair out
Skio offers easy migration, passwordless login, and dedicated Launch Engineers and Success Managers to help you get up and running. Plus, Skio offers your customers many more options for subscription management, including conditional skipping, subscription splitting, half skipping, and more.
Here’s a customer-facing subscription management portal on Skio:
Skio pricing
Skio starts at $299/month, plus 1% of subscription sales and 20¢ per transaction.
Similar to subscription management, returns and exchanges are a huge source of customer support volume for Shopify stores. Investing in a returns and exchanges app helps your brand improve the customer experience and deflect some inquiries about product returns.
Loop Returns: Best Shopify app for returns and exchanges
Loop Returns is a great choice to help your store manage returns and exchanges. With Loop, you get:
A simplified returns process for customers and merchants
Customizable returns policies and options
Automated return labels and shipping notifications
Discounts for exchanges, to help you mitigate lost revenue from returns
Here’s an example of a returns and exchanges portal built with Loop Returns:
Loop Returns pricing
Loop offers two starter plans: A $29/month plan that also charges for usage, and a flat $59/month plan. Loop does not offer a free trial.
Returnly: Best return app for brick-and-mortar retailers
Returnly is a similar app to Loop Returns. Returnly is slightly more expensive and doesn’t have quite as great of reviews as Loop, but it does have one major advantage: very simple in-store returns.
With Returnly, your customers can take a product they ordered online into the store for a simple return process. This saves your company money on shipping, plus gets customers inside your store (where they could potentially make an exchange or another purchase).
Here’s a customer returns portal on Returnly:
Returnly pricing
Returnly starts at $149/month. Returnly also offers a 14-day free trial.
ReturnLogic: A return app that prioritizes efficient returns over exchanges
ReturnLogic is yet another great option to manage your returns and exchanges. One of the main differences of ReturnLogic compared to Loop Returns and Returnly is that, while those two apps try to encourage.
ReturnLogic claims that offering discounts on exchanges hurts your profit margins, and that processing very cost-efficient returns is more profitable in the long run.
Here’s a ReturnLogic customer portal:
ReturnLogic pricing
ReturnLogic starts at $299/month and doesn’t offer a free trial.
With this next category of apps, you can turn positive interactions into great marketing assets, in the form of reviews and user-generated content (UGC). Both of these assets make your brand appear more trustworthy to future shoppers.
While this isn’t customer support in the traditional sense — answering incoming questions — it is an important part of a great customer experience. Customers want their positive opinions and contributions to be recognized.
Plus, customers sometimes leave negative reviews instead of reaching out to customer support, so you should take a support-minded approach to reviews and UGC.
Okendo: Best Shopify app for reviews and UGC
Okendo makes it easy for you to collect customer reviews and UGC from your customers, as well as moderate and promote those assets.
With Okendo, you can:
Send personalized review requests to increase review response rate
Collect photo and video reviews from customers
Attribute ratings to specific elements (like sizing, quality, and more) to make reviews more helpful for future shoppers
Display branded reviews and UGC on your website, social media, and marketing materials
Okendo pricing
Okendo starts at $19/month for businesses with up to 200 orders per month. Okendo also has a 14-day free trial.
REVIEWS.io: A reviews platform with advanced reputation management
REVIEWS.io is similar to Okendo — you can request reviews, display them across major platforms (from your website to Facebook and Google), and earn shopper trust.
One major difference is that REVIEWS.io has advanced reputation management, which helps you funnel reviews toward different websites — from Amazon to Facebook and Google Seller — to try and balance reviews on each platform.
This way, you can put your best foot forward, no matter where customers find you.
REVIEWS.io pricing
REVIEWS.io offers a free plan for merchants with 25 monthly orders or fewer. The next lowest plan is $45/month. REVIEWS.io offers a 14-day free trial.
Additional Shopify customer support apps to consider
That covers the major categories of customer support apps, but we have a couple more suggestions that can beef up your customer experience even further:
Support quality assurance: Klaus
Klaus is an app that you can use to improve your customer service team’s response quality with the help of AI.
Klaus automatically crawls your customer support responses to perform internal quality reviews that flag a conversation’s tone, areas for improvement, and key support metrics.
You can use Klaus to guide your agent training and identify trends in your customer support quality to get a fuller understanding of your customer service quality than through customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys alone.
Klaus pricing
Klaus's pricing is completely custom, depending on the number of agents on your support team and the features you’re most interested in. Klaus does not offer a free trial.
Siena AI is a highly empathetic chatbot powered by AI technology to craft instant, helpful answers to customer questions on a variety of channels. Siena AI also integrates with your helpdesk, analyzes every incoming ticket, and determines whether the question is a good fit for AI or needs your team's help. By integrating Siena AI, you can also tag, organize, and report on automated responses to get the full picture of your support performance.
Siena AI comes pre-trained on hundreds of common ecommerce scenarios, and has adaptive intelligence to quickly understand the context and nuances of each incoming ticket. It can also adapt messages to fit each channel (a text message should be shorter than an email) and 100+ languages.
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What makes a Shopify customer support app great?
If you dig through the hundreds of apps on the Shopify App Store, you’ll find plenty of gems and just as many lumps of coal. Like any app, you’ll save time by choosing solutions that integrate with the rest of your ecommerce tech stack.
You’ll also want to narrow your search to software that receives regular updates, offers a variety of pricing plans, and allows you to customize the platform.
But what about customer service apps, specifically? The best apps help you:
Is surprise and delight a customer support best practice?
Yes and no.
Top-notch customer support is like an ice cream sundae, and efforts to thrill customers are the sprinkles and cherries on top. Sprinkles and cherries are great, but they don’t make for a satisfying sundae on their own.
Customers won’t be that amused if you make them wait on hold for 45 minutes and greet them with lighthearted jokes. Likewise, you’ll make a customer feel frustrated if you spend your budget on freebies but ignore implementing customer feedback about the product.
More than anything, customers who contact a brand's customer service team want their problems solved quickly and well. Fast, helpful, low-effort experiences are the base of your sundae, and any extra efforts to delight the customer are sure to fall flat if you can't do that.
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