CX Design
Meet Auto QA: Quality Checks Are Here to Stay
TL;DR:
- Manual QA is time-consuming—Auto QA does the heavy lifting. It frees up team leads by automatically reviewing conversations with accuracy and consistency, so they can focus on improving support.
- Auto QA scores 100% of private text conversations, whether handled by a human or AI Agent. It evaluates support quality based on Resolution Completeness, Communication, and Language Proficiency.
- Auto QA supports multiple languages but provides feedback in English. It can assess tickets in any language supported by OpenAI’s GPT-4, ensuring global teams can benefit from automated QA.
- Start with individual meetings before a team-wide rollout of Auto QA. One-on-one conversations help address specific agent concerns and ensure a smooth transition.
Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) have long been the go-to metric for measuring support quality, with 53% of customer experience leads relying on them. However, CSAT only tells you part of the story.
When customers rate their experience 3 out of 5, what does it really mean? Did they rate the agent’s actions or the company’s policies? Was an agent helpful or inefficient? Did they take unnecessary steps to get to the answer?
Quality assurance checks can fill these gaps, but manual QA is a heavy lift. Team leads often struggle to review more than a small sample of conversations, leaving many issues unchecked.
Auto QA redefines quality assurance for today’s support teams. It transforms QA from a manual task into an automated feedback engine that helps your team deliver excellent support, every single time.
Let's dive into how Auto QA works, how accurate its scoring is, and how you can add it to your support workflow to start improving customer conversations today.
What is Auto QA?
Gorgias Auto QA upgrades the customer service QA process by automatically evaluating 100% of private text conversations, whether handled by a human or AI Agent.
Each message is scored on metrics like Resolution Completeness, Brand Voice, and Accuracy, helping teams fix and address areas of improvement.
With an automated QA process, brands can:
- Save time: Automated quality checks help team leads focus on the most critical tickets.
- Ensure consistency: Both human agents and AI agents are evaluated with a unified, comprehensive quality score.
- Boost performance: Agents can receive targeted coaching to provide more consistent customer experiences.
- Meet customer expectations: Customers benefit from higher-quality support with quicker resolutions and accurate responses.
How Auto QA works
Let's explore a real-life scenario: A customer reaches out about a product issue, seeking troubleshooting help. Here’s how the interaction unfolds:
Customer: "Hi, my device broke, and I bought it less than a month ago. -Kelly"
Support Agent: "Hi Kelly, please send us a photo or a video so we can determine the issue with your device. -Michael"
The ticket is eventually closed, but the customer doesn't leave a CSAT score.
In this case, Auto QA would provide the following insights:
- Communication Score: 3/5. Reason: The agent's wording could benefit from more empathy.
- Resolution Score: "Complete". Reason: The agent effectively addressed the customer's concerns.
How accurate is Auto QA’s scoring?
Auto QA uses a comprehensive scoring system that evaluates conversations on communication proficiency and knowledge accuracy.
To ensure accuracy, Auto QA only scores interactions with at least 250 characters and messages from both agents and customers. It's also smart enough to filter out automated responses, spam, and bot messages.
Auto QA automatically scores three main aspects:
- Resolution Completeness: Did the agent solve everything the customer asked about? This area is scored with a "Complete" or "Incomplete.” For instance, it correctly marks a ticket as "Complete" when a customer resolves their issue or when there's no clear question to address.
- Communication Quality: How well did the agent listen and show empathy? Uses a 1-5 scale, looking at how well your agents acknowledged a customer’s concerns and communicated the solution.
- Language Proficiency: Did the agent communicate properly? Uses a 1-5 scale to check spelling, grammar, and syntax.
For deeper feedback, certain criteria require manual scoring from team leads:
- Accuracy: How accurate was the information provided by the agent?
- Efficiency: How quickly did the agent handle the ticket? How well did they minimize the number of follow-ups?
- Internal Compliance: How closely did the agent follow your team’s internal processes and brand guidelines?
- Brand Voice: How well did the agent use brand vocabulary, greetings, sign-offs, and tone of voice?
How to integrate Auto QA into your workflow
Whether you're just starting with quality checks or transitioning from manual QA, Auto QA can seamlessly fit into your existing processes. Here's how to get started.
1. Set your standards
What does “good” look like for your team? Review Auto QA's scoring system and decide which metrics matter most for your brand, from Resolution Completeness to Brand Voice. This will help you set realistic targets for your team to work toward.
Tip: Start by prioritizing a couple of areas. This could look like prioritizing a 5/5 Resolution Completeness score while deprioritizing Brand Voice. As your team gets comfortable with Auto QA, you can ramp up to improving Brand Voice.
2. Agree on a scoring system
Since some criteria—Accuracy, Efficiency, Internal Compliance, and Brand Voice—require manual scoring, it’s best to agree on how your team will use the scoring scale.
For example, each score from 1 to 5 receives a distinct piece of feedback. Here’s what that would look for the Efficiency criteria:
- 1/5 stars: Excessive back-and-forth that could have been avoided
- 2/5 stars: Resolution took longer than necessary due to poor process
- 3/5 stars: Average handling time with some unnecessary steps
- 4/5 stars: Quick resolution with minimal back-and-forth
- 5/5 stars: One-touch resolution
3. Prepare your agents
Start rolling out Auto QA through individual meetings with agents rather than overwhelming your team with a general training session. One-on-one conversations allow you to better address each agent's specific questions and concerns. Make sure to cover the following:
- Explain that Auto QA is meant to help make conversations consistent, not police agents
- Explain the scoring criteria and what each score means
- Highlight which criteria agents should prioritize
If regular one-on-one meetings aren't part of your routine, consider introducing Auto QA during your weekly team meetings or through a dedicated training session. Just remember to leave plenty of time for questions and walk through multiple examples to ensure everyone is comfortable with the system.
4. Establish a review schedule
To solidify QA checks, create a simple routine for reviewing Auto QA insights with the Auto QA Report (navigate to Statistics > Auto QA).
- Weekly: Do a quick check of automated scores.
- Monthly: Analyze trends and patterns across conversations.
- Quarterly: Review and adjust quality benchmarks.
5. Act on insights
Once you’ve collected a substantial amount of Auto QA data, there are a few follow-up actions you can take to continue having high-quality conversations:
- Set the example by sharing high-scoring conversations in your team meetings.
- Coach agents individually by reviewing their tickets together. Celebrate high-scoring conversations and provide targeted feedback on areas for improvement. This immediate, personalized approach helps agents grow faster than general training sessions.
- Increase product and policy knowledge by refining internal guidelines on brand voice, escalation processes, and more.
Remember, Auto QA works alongside your existing processes—it doesn't replace them. Start small, focus on the metrics that matter most to your team, and scale up as you get comfortable with Auto QA.
Brands are excited about the power of Auto QA
We invited leading ecommerce brands to beta test Auto QA, and their feedback highlights how it's transforming quality assurance across support teams of all sizes.
amika's support team values the complete visibility beyond CSAT: "Auto QA dramatically widens the volume of tickets we can review," they share. "A 5-point scale only tells you so much, and relying on consumers providing feedback limits what you're able to learn from."
Peachybbies' CX team enjoys real-time improvement: "Being able to give real-time feedback is pivotal, especially during peak times," their team explains. "Auto QA catches pretty much everything I'd want a human QA agent to catch."
OSEA Malibu's managers discovered operational insights: "It helps managers understand when a macro or process is leading to incomplete conversations versus when an agent made a mistake," their support lead shares.
Bring quality into every conversation with Auto QA
By prioritizing QA, your team can identify potential problems early, reduce errors, and improve overall performance, leading to a smoother, more reliable experience for customers––and your CX team.
In the long run, brands focusing on QA can gain a competitive edge. Book a demo now to see what Auto QA can do for you.
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There are tons of CX metrics you could be tracking. But where you spend your time is crucial as a customer experience leader.
According to recent data, these are the top five CX metrics for you to prioritize and improve on in 2025.
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Why CX metrics are essential for success
Not tracking CX metrics is like putting a loaf of bread in the oven but leaving baking time to chance. Without a set timer, you could end up with an underbaked bowl of dough or a burnt mess. Unless you have a sixth sense, it’s going to be really challenging to end up with something good.
In the same vein, metrics provide clear parameters for success. Meet or exceed them and your team is doing well; fall short and you’ll be better equipped to identify pain points and solve them.
Here are a few additional reasons why setting customer support metrics is key to success.
- Measure success and ROI. By tracking KPIs like resolution time, first response time, and CSAT, you can gauge the health of your customer support program and potentially justify investments in CX initiatives in the future.
- Identify customer and team pain points. Metrics help uncover areas where customers or your team is struggling. For example, high resolution times or low CSAT scores signal friction in the experience that you can address.
- Create accountability within your team. When everyone on your team understands what success looks like, it aligns efforts and keeps everyone focused on shared goals.
- Prioritize resources. Metrics guide CX leaders on where to allocate resources—for example, leveraging AI and automation to tackle repetitive tickets when ticket volume adds up or resolution times are getting high.
- Get proactive. Metrics reveal trends in customer behavior which can help you predict customer needs and make proactive adjustments in your CX strategy. By monitoring customer sentiment and acting on feedback, CX leaders can create more personalized and positive experiences.
Tip 💡: AI and automation can be valuable sidekicks as you look to optimize and improve on metrics. That’s especially true for busy periods: in 2024, 70% of CX leaders relied on AI and automation during peak seasons.
Resolution time should be your main focus for 2025
Customers are done with being patient. One study found that two thirds of respondents valued speed to reply just as much as product price.
A recent survey we ran found the same thing.
In our 2024 customer expectations survey, we asked CX leads and agents which metric they used to track success. Here’s what they said:
- Resolution Time (71%)
- First Response Time (59%)
- CSAT (53%)
- Revenue or Sales Impact (41%)
- Ticket Volume (41%)
Resolution time is going to be a key differentiator for your team this year. It should be your primary focus when it comes to optimizing different facets of your customer service strategy.
Top 5 CX metrics for 2025 & how to improve them with AI
1) Resolution time
Resolution time is the average time it takes to resolve a customer request from start to finish.
How do you calculate resolution time?
To calculate resolution time, you’ll take the total resolution time within a set period and divide it by the total number of customer interactions your team tackled within that same time frame.
Average resolution time = Total resolution time in a defined period / Total number of customer interactions resolved in that period
How to use AI & automation to improve it
According to a 2023 study from Statista, 70% of support leaders noted that the customer support metrics that AI had the greatest positive effect on was resolution time.
You can use automation tools to send Macros to answer common questions, or leverage AI to interact as an agent via email or chat. The instant nature of these tools means that customers won’t have to wait in a queue for your team to get to them.
For example, Wildride implemented Gorgias's AI Agent to manage an influx of 1,000 tickets per week. After AI Agent took over 33% of email inquiries, the team saw a 24% decrease in resolution time. That allowed the team to focus on more complex issues, streamline their support process, and make their customers happier.
2) First Response Time (FRT)
First response time is the length of time it takes for a customer service team to send the initial reply to a customer inquiry.
How do you calculate first response time?
To calculate average first response time, take the total amount of time it took for your team to respond to initial customer requests and divide by the total number of tickets within a set time frame.
How to use AI & automation to improve it
Your team is busy––when they’re not tackling repetitive questions, they’re helping customers with complicated or high-effort requests. All of that work is going to bog down your FRT, especially during more buzzy periods like sales, new releases, or over the holidays.
By using AI to jump in to handle those more routine requests, you can significantly reduce your FRT and give your team time back to tackle more heavy-lift needs.
For example, AI Agent helped Glamnetic achieve a 91% improvement in first response time during Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2024. They got FRT down from their pre-AI Agent time of eight minutes to 40 seconds.
Here’s what that looked like in practice:
3) Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
CSAT scores show how satisfied customers are with a product, service, or interaction, typically gathered through surveys.
How is CSAT calculated?
CSAT is calculated via a five-point rating scale survey sent to customers after a support interaction, where one is the worst experience and five is the best. While it can be calculated in different ways, at Gorgias the average of all survey responses is your CSAT score.
How to use AI & automation to improve it
When customers reach out for support, they’re expecting a fast response––regardless if they have an issue or are contemplating their next purchase.
That’s why using automation or AI tools to provide that lightning quick response, even if it directs shoppers to a self-service resource, can be extremely effective in raising CSAT scores. These responses could be sent by an AI agent that responds like a human agent would or an automated Macro built to fire off pre-crafted templates to common questions.
In luxury golf brand VESSEL’s case, customers felt that the AI responses were helpful and seemed on-par with the level of support they’d expect from a human agent.
“Our customers expect almost immediate responses, and so being able to automate that, even if it's not necessarily the exact answer that they're looking for, but being able to send over information to give them the reassurance that we're looking into it or trying to find an answer, whatever it may be, that's been a huge help to our team,” says Lauren Reams, the Customer Experience Manager at VESSEL.
4) Revenue or sales impact
The direct or indirect effect of customer service or business activities on generating sales or revenue.
How do you calculate it?
There are different ways to calculate revenue generated and the sales impact of customer support, and quantifying the indirect impact can be difficult. But generally, the formula looks like this:
ROI = [ (Money earned - Money spent) / Money spent ] x 100
Resource: How to measure & improve customer service ROI
How to use AI & automation to improve it
Leveraging AI and automation can provide significant cost savings because it acts as an additional agent who can tackle repetitive questions, translating to money saved on the time it would take for human agents to manually answer those questions.
The results are tangible: by automating 48% of inquiries, Dr. Bronner's saved $5,248 in the first month, and $100K in the first year.
Jonas Paul Eyewear saw revenue influenced by AI Agent as well: the team tracked $600 of sales revenue directly to the tool after it effectively answered pre-sales support questions from shoppers.
5) Ticket volume
Ticket volume is the total number of customer service inquiries that a team receives over a specific period of time.
How do you calculate it?
The customer support tool you use will be able to calculate ticket volume for you, as it’s the total number of tickets that have come in within a set amount of time. If you don’t use a CX platform yet and are still using something like Gmail or Excel, you’ll perform this count manually.
How to use AI & automation to improve it
Set rules to trigger automated responses to common questions, or ask an AI agent to completely take them off your team’s plate.
Arcade Belts, for example, saw a 50% reduction in ticket volume by using Gorgias’s AI Agent.
How to get buy in to improve your CX program
Tracking CX metrics is valuable for more than just gauging your program's effectiveness. The more you improve upon your CX metrics, the more you can leverage them to prove your support function’s value within your company.
- Tie CX to revenue. Show how improvements in customer satisfaction or repeat purchase rates directly impact revenue growth.
- Show industry benchmarks. Compare your team’s stats to competitors or industry averages to demonstrate how well your support strategy is working.
- Demonstrate your team’s impact on sales and retention. Use the metrics you’ve collected to show support’s impact on converting customers asking pre-sales questions and getting repeat customers.
- Ask to expand your team’s budget. Pitch acquiring additional buy in and resources by presenting revenue generated, costs saved through tools like AI and automation, and happy customers created.
How to use metrics to evaluate AI performanceIf you want to transform customer experience for the long term, the AI tools you use should never be “set it and forget it” solutions. Just as you do with your human agents, you can use metrics to evaluate your AI agent to make sure it’s performing well. If you use Gorgias, you’ll find these metrics under the AI Agent dashboard.
To review AI Agent’s performance:
It’s also easy to retrain your AI's performance by adjusting settings like Guidance, refining the internal documents it draws from, setting up brand voice, or creating a Handover topic list to escalate certain types of tickets to human agents.
Start tracking top CX metrics
Whether you’re new to being a CX leader or you’re a seasoned pro, tracking and improving on your CX metrics will help your team stand out among the rest. A key way to improve them is to leverage AI and Automation tools, and Gorgias is here to help you do it.
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TL;DR:
- AI Agent on Chat automates up to 50% of chat conversations. It ensures customers get fast, context-aware answers, product recommendations, and seamless handovers to human agents when needed.
- AI Agent goes beyond automated tools like Flows and article recommendations. Unlike pre-set FAQ flows or suggested Help Center articles, AI Agent can handle complex inquiries like modifying orders and providing personalized product recommendations.
- Setting up AI Agent on Chat is quick. Brands can activate AI Agent with a few clicks, improving efficiency during peak seasons and reducing the need for follow-ups.
- Updating AI Agent’s knowledge and behavior ensures the best customer experience. Businesses should refine their Help Center, set Guidance instructions, personalize AI Agent’s tone, and test responses before going live.
It’s clear that shoppers want answers fast—chat accounts for 20% of all customer support tickets.
The appeal is obvious: Chat is an easy-to-access customer service channel for quick questions and a convenient and subtle way to cross-sell complementary products.
But without the right chat tool, brands risk losing these valuable opportunities.
Introducing AI Agent on Chat, a conversational AI assistant that can automate up to 50% of chat conversations. This new feature upgrades chat by combining agent knowledge with superhuman efficiency and response times.
Now, customers can guarantee personalized interactions at any point of the shopping journey—whether they’re looking for a quick answer or a tailored recommendation.
With AI powering every interaction, one-to-one conversations become a seamless part of every customer experience.
Why Chat is better with AI Agent
Before AI Agent, customers reaching out through chat outside business hours had two options: following pre-set Flows (automated FAQ conversations) or browsing through suggested Help Center articles.
These features are great for quick answers to basic questions, but AI Agent takes support to the next level by handling more complex needs like modifying orders or offering personalized product recommendations.
With AI Agent in Chat, customers enjoy dynamic, real-time conversations available on multiple channels. AI Agent generates personalized responses that match exactly what customers ask for, automating 50% of chat interactions so agents get time back to upsell, create stronger relationships, and craft better experiences.
Related: How to optimize your Help Center for AI Agent
The key features of AI Agent on Chat
Upgrade your chat support from a basic Q&A tool into an intelligent assistant that handles customer inquiries 24/7. Here's how AI Agent makes that possible:
Real-time conversations
AI Agent responds within 15 seconds or less, offering fast responses that result in frictionless conversations. Unlike traditional chatbots, AI Agent also adapts to your brand’s unique tone of voice to enhance the customer experience and assure shoppers their questions will be taken care of.
24/7 availability
Today’s shoppers expect instant responses regardless of time zone or business hours. AI Agent on Chat means customers get the help they need, when they need it. This availability leads to higher customer satisfaction and fewer abandoned carts.
Instant product recommendations
AI Agent understands context and customer intent. Whether a shopper needs help finding the right product size or changes their mind and wants to compare features, AI Agent customizes its recommendations for each person.
Intelligent handovers
Some conversations, like technical issues or complaints, need a human touch. AI Agent recognizes these situations and smoothly transfers them to the right agent.
Using Handover topics, you can choose which types of inquiries should go straight to human agents. Then, if AI Agent lacks the confidence to provide an answer or can’t locate relevant knowledge in its database, it automatically escalates the conversation.
Read more: Handover rules
Why enable AI Agent in Chat now?
Based on Hiver’s 2024 study, 62% of customers prefer live chat to other support channels. With AI Agent in Chat, agents can cut down average response times while customers get the answers they need in one conversation with zero wait times or follow-ups.
Easy setup
AI Agent on Chat is ready to use in a few clicks. Simply connect your Shopify store and Chat widget to AI Agent, and you’re ready to resolve questions asked by visitors and loyal customers faster than you ever have.
Capture the growing demand for live support
Chat is often a customer’s first touchpoint with your brand, whether they’ve just discovered your brand or are on their third order. Meet customer expectations by being available with AI Agent on Chat. The faster you can ease their concerns, the faster they can head to checkout.
Maximize team efficiency
AI Agent makes scaling support effortless, especially during peak seasons like Black Friday. While it handles repetitive support tickets like order status and shipping questions, your team can focus on high-priority tasks like requests from VIP customers.
Eliminate the need for follow-ups
Drawing from knowledge sources like your Help Center and policy pages means AI Agent can often resolve inquiries within one conversation. No more unnecessary back-and-forths. Quick resolutions = happier and more loyal customers.
How to activate AI Agent on Chat
Ready to get started? Here’s how to activate AI Agent on Chat:
- Click Automate in the top left menu.
- Select your store from the sidebar, then click on AI Agent.
- In the Settings tab, under Chat Settings, select one or more Chat from the dropdown menu.
- Toggle Enable AI Agent on Chat on.
- Select Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
Already use AI Agent for email? No need to set up Guidance and Handover topics all over again—AI Agent will behave the same way in Chat.
Best practices for setting up AI Agent on Chat
Get the most out of AI Agent on Chat by following these best practices.
1. Prepare and optimize your knowledge base
The Help Center is AI Agent’s brain. This customer knowledge database is the key to AI Agent’s accurate and on-brand responses. To ensure your AI Agent is as trained as your human agents, include important topics in your Help Center like shipping, returns, cancellations, and account management.
No articles yet? No problem! Gorgias has 20+ article templates for you to use and modify. Or, even better, check out the AI Library for AI-generated articles based on your customer tickets.
2. Set restrictions with Guidance
AI tools perform best when you set limitations. A Guidance is the main way to control AI Agent’s behavior. It is a set of written instructions that outline how AI Agent should interact with customers, handle certain requests, and more.
We recommend publishing a Guidance on the top five questions you receive from customers.
Tip: AI Agent prioritizes Guidance above Help Center articles. Unlike Help Center articles, the content in your Guidance will not be customer-facing.
3. Personalize AI Agent's voice
The beauty of AI Agent is its ability to speak like one of your agents. Select from Friendly, Professional, or Sophisticated presets—or create a custom tone that aligns with your brand.
Need help finding your brand voice? Here are seven brand voice examples.
4. Test AI Agent’s responses before going live
Use test scenarios to see how AI Agent responds to common customer questions, such as order status, shipping questions, and return policies. To cover all your bases, test AI Agent as both a new and returning customer to make sure it delivers accurate responses no matter the customer's need.
5. Improve AI Agent’s behavior
AI Agent becomes smarter as it learns from you. Like a human agent, give your AI Agent feedback on its responses, from how it speaks, which topics it escalates, and what actions it takes in certain scenarios.
There are multiple ways to give AI Agent feedback on a ticket:
- Mark AI Agent’s message or any of the resources it used as correct or incorrect.
- Suggest that AI Agent use a different resource if a better or more correct piece of knowledge exists.
- Report an issue to the Gorgias Product team.
Coming soon: Actions on Chat
Soon, AI Agent will be able to perform actions like accessing Shopify order details and executing third-party app actions, such as updating shipping addresses and order cancellations, directly in Chat.
Excited to deliver an elevated chat experience? Book a demo now to experience the power of AI Agent on Chat.
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Featured articles
The Gorgias & Shopify Integration: 8 Features Your Support Team Will Love
Managing customer support as a Shopify store owner can feel like juggling too many tools at once.
Constantly switching tabs to look up orders, update customer information, or track returns wastes valuable time. Plus, it prevents your team from focusing on what really matters––delivering quick, personalized customer service.
Gorgias’s Shopify integration solves this. It keeps all your Shopify data in one place, so your team spends less time toggling tabs and more time helping customers. The result? Faster responses, better service, and more revenue.
Below, we break down the eight key capabilities of this integration, each paired with practical use cases to showcase its real-world value.
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1. View Shopify data in tickets
What it does: Shopify order data is displayed directly within support tickets, allowing agents to view essential details like order status, customer information, and transaction history without leaving the helpdesk.
Use case: An agent handling a “Where’s my order?” request can instantly check tracking information and update the customer.
The fashion retailer Princess Polly improved their customer experience team’s efficiency by using Gorgias's deep integration with Shopify. Agents can view and update customer and order data directly within Gorgias, eliminating the need to switch between multiple tabs.
Taking a streamlined approach led to a 40% increase in efficiency, an 80% decrease in resolution time, and a 95% decrease in first response time.
2. Perform Shopify Actions
What it does: Agents can update Shopify order and customer data with Shopify Actions right in Gorgias.
Key features:
- Create a new order: Add existing products or custom items, apply discounts, modify quantities, add notes and tags, and choose to charge taxes. Then set the order as Paid or Pending and email the invoice to the customer.
- Duplicate an order: Replicate an existing order and make adjustments as needed.
- Cancel/refund an order: Cancel or refund orders by setting quantities to refund, specifying shipping amounts to refund, providing reasons for cancellation, restocking items, and notifying the customer.
- Edit shipping address: Update the shipping address for an order.
- Insert product links: Add product links or product cards from tickets so customers can add the product to their cart quickly.
- Display the customer’s cart: View the exact items the customer has in their cart at the moment they reach out via Chat.
Use case: Agents can perform Shopify actions directly from Gorgias, such as adding products, applying discounts, updating quantities, or issuing refunds.
3. Embed customer-specific Shopify data in Macros
What it does: Create templated responses called Macros with dynamic Shopify variables to automatically incorporate customer-specific information.
Key features:
- Dynamic variables: Macros can include variables that pull real-time data from Shopify, such as order status, tracking numbers, and customer details.
- Automated actions: Beyond inserting dynamic content, Macros can perform actions like tagging tickets, setting statuses, or assigning conversations to specific agents. The automation streamlines workflows and ensures consistent handling of similar inquiries.
Use case: A customer inquires about their order. With one click, the agent uses a Macro that pulls in the order status and expected delivery date, creating a faster and more personalized response.
Take Try The World, a gourmet subscription service, needed a robust Shopify integration to handle an increasing volume of customer inquiries. By switching to Gorgias, they gained the ability to unify conversations and embed Shopify data directly into Macros. Now, agents could quickly generate personalized responses that included order details, tracking links, and customer-specific information.
Try the World’s support team’s efficiency skyrocketed, enabling them to handle 120 tickets per day, up from 80, and reduce response times to just one business day.
4. Provide product information with Macros
What it does: Macros with embedded Shopify data let agents quickly and accurately share pre-sale information like product links, stock availability, and discount codes, helping to convert prospective customers into buyers.
Key features:
- Dynamic Shopify variables in Macros: Agents can use dynamic variables to pull real-time product information.
- Pre-built responses for common questions: Macros can include templated responses tailored for pre-sale inquiries, such as providing direct links to products or applying discount codes.
Use case: A customer asks if a specific product is available in their size and color. The agent can apply a Macro that automatically pulls the product's inventory details and includes a discount code, sending a response like this:
“Hi {{ticket.customer.firstname}},
Great news! The product {{ticket.customer.integrations.shopify.products[0].title}} is currently in stock in the size and color you’re looking for. You can check it out here: [Product Link]. Use the code WELCOME10 at checkout for 10% off your first order! Let me know if you have any other questions!”
How it helps:
- Eliminates manual search and typing for agents.
- Ensures accurate, real-time product information for customers.
- Improves the likelihood of converting inquiries into sales.
5. Enable self-serve order management in Chat
What it does: Using Gorgias’s chat widget, customers can track orders or manage their purchases on their own with no agent assistance needed.
Key feature:
- Order management automation: Customers can access real-time order information, including status updates and tracking details, through the chat interface. This automation reduces the volume of live chat inquiries by up to 30%.
Use case: A customer wants to check the status of their recent purchase. By accessing the Chat widget on your website, they can enter their email and order number and receive instant updates on their order's progress, including shipping and delivery information, without waiting for an agent's response.
How it helps:
- Automates routine inquiries and frees up your support team to handle more complex issues.
- Enhances customer satisfaction thanks to immediate responses.
- Reduces the need for multiple communication channels, consolidating support interactions in one place.
6. Use Shopify variables in Rules
What it does: Rules paired with Shopify variables can automate various support tasks, such as identifying specific customer segments or tagging tickets, to boost efficiency and consistency.
Key features:
- Automated tagging: Rules can automatically tag tickets based on specific Shopify data. For instance, you can set up a Rule to tag tickets from customers with high order counts or significant total spending as "VIP."
- Prioritization of tickets: Rules can prioritize tickets that meet certain criteria, such as high-value orders or repeat customers.
Use case: A customer with a history of substantial purchases contacts support. A rule detects that the customer's total spending exceeds a predefined threshold and automatically tags the ticket as "VIP."
This tag can then trigger other workflows, such as assigning the ticket to a senior support agent or escalating its priority.
How it helps:
- Improves customer experience by prioritizing high-value customers.
- Maintains consistent service quality.
7. Track revenue with reporting
What it does: Gorgias offers comprehensive reporting that allows you to measure how your support interactions influence sales.
Key features:
- Tickets converted: Tracks the number of support tickets that led to a sale within five days of the ticket's creation.
- Conversion rate: Calculates the percentage of created tickets that resulted in sales, helping you assess the effectiveness of your support team's interactions.
- Total sales from support: Sums the revenue generated from orders associated with converted tickets, accounting for refunds and order adjustments to provide accurate figures.
These metrics are accessible under Statistics → Support Performance → Revenue in your Gorgias dashboard. You can filter the data by integration, ticket channel, tags, or specific time periods to gain detailed insights.
Use case: By analyzing Revenue Statistics, you can identify which support channels or agents are most effective in driving sales. For example, if live chat interactions have a higher conversion rate, you might allocate more resources to that channel.
Additionally, recognizing top-performing agents can inform training programs to elevate overall team performance.
For example, One Block Down, a Milan-based streetwear brand, struggled to manage a growing volume of customer inquiries across multiple platforms. By integrating Gorgias with Shopify, they centralized all customer interactions into a single platform, giving agents instant access to crucial information like order history and returns directly within tickets.
The setup allowed the team to measure the direct impact of their support efforts on revenue.
The result? An impressive 1,000% increase in support-generated revenue and a 1-hour average first response time. By connecting the dots between customer service and sales performance, One Block Down demonstrated how proactive, data-driven support can directly influence the bottom line.
How it helps:
- Quantifies the revenue generated from support interactions.
- Faster team optimization with data-driven insights.
- Understanding the correlation between support interactions and sales can help refine customer service strategies.
8. AI Agent integration
What it does: AI Agent automates Shopify actions like canceling orders, editing order details, and reshipping items.
Key features:
- Cancel Shopify order: AI Agent can automatically cancel unfulfilled orders upon customer request, restocking the items and issuing a full refund. A confirmation email is sent to the customer once the cancellation is complete.
- Edit order shipping address: When a customer needs to update their shipping address, AI Agent verifies if the order is unfulfilled, confirms the new address with the customer, and updates it in Shopify accordingly.
- Replace order item: AI Agent facilitates item replacements in orders by confirming the item to be removed and the new item to be added, checking stock availability, adjusting payments if necessary, and sending an updated order confirmation to the customer.
- Reship order for free: In cases where an order is lost in transit or arrives damaged, AI Agent can duplicate and resend the order at no additional charge.
- Remove order item: If a customer decides to remove an item from their order, AI Agent can handle the removal, restock the item in Shopify, process the refund for the removed item, and notify the customer of the updated order details.
Use case: A customer realizes they've entered an incorrect shipping address shortly after placing an order. They contact support, and AI Agent promptly verifies that the order is unfulfilled, confirms the correct address with the customer, updates the shipping information in Shopify, and sends a confirmation email—all without human intervention.
How it helps:
- Automating routine order management tasks reduces the workload on human agents.
- Quick and accurate responses to order modification requests lead to a better customer experience.
- Automated processes ensure consistency and accuracy in handling order changes, reducing the likelihood of human error.
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Introducing Conversational AI: The Smartest Way to Handle Chat, Actions, QA, and Insights
Today, we’re announcing our deeper investment in conversational AI for ecommerce.
"Since day one, Gorgias has been dedicated to helping ecommerce brands deliver exceptional customer experiences. We started with a helpdesk to centralize support, then introduced AI Agent to instantly resolve support questions,” says Romain Lapeyre, CEO of Gorgias.
“Now, we're taking the next leap forward with an AI Agent that powers the entire customer journey—anticipating buyer needs, boosting sales, and automating high-quality support. Today, I'm happy to announce Gorgias as the Conversational AI platform for ecommerce.”
Gorgias’s Conversational AI platform will let teams provide fast, scalable, and cost-effective support while helping them drive revenue growth. From automatic order changes and refunds to product recommendations and cross-sells, brands will be able to flawlessly combine their support and sales efforts.
The end result is an AI-powered customer journey where every customer interaction feels complete, personal, and connected, both before and after purchase.
Questions in Chat, resolved in seconds
Last year, we introduced AI Agent for email.
Some brands call their AI Agent Lisa, some call it Wally, and most treat it like a real member of the team. But this reliable support sidekick was only available to answer customers on email—until now.
Get ready for instant responses that tackle support inquiries of all sizes. Now, your customers can enjoy fast responses that keep their shopping experience as smooth as possible.
On top of improving first response times, AI Agent can play an even more critical role in unblocking sales, suggesting products, and driving upsells and cross-sells.
With responses sent in 15 seconds or less, brands can delight customers with near-instant resolutions.
Let your AI Agent take action
Actions let AI Agent perform customer requests on behalf of your support team. This includes changing shipping addresses, fetching fulfillment status, canceling orders, adding discounts, and more.
You can use a library of pre-configured Actions for popular apps like Shopify, Rebuy, Loop, and more. And you don’t need any technical skills to set them up.
With almost half of queries requiring some kind of update, Actions is your go-to for complete resolutions so you can get more accomplished.
Quality built into every support ticket
Quality checks have traditionally been manual, time-consuming, and inconsistent. Our brand new Auto QA feature changes that by automatically scoring 100% of conversations on resolution completeness and communication quality—whether from a human or AI agent.
With Auto QA, team leads can:
- Scale quality consistently and easily. Both human and AI agents follow the same quality standards, allowing for consistent, high-quality customer experiences.
- Coach smarter. Use real-time QA ratings in tickets to give agents targeted feedback.
- Track team performance. The dashboard highlights metrics by agent, showing what’s working and where to improve.
Gain clarity on your AI Agent’s impact
Support teams should be in complete control of their AI. That’s why the AI Agent Report and AI Agent Insights were created—to help you know exactly how your AI Agent is performing and contributing to your customer service operations.
The AI Agent Report provides full visibility into AI Agent’s performance, covering metrics like First Response Time, CSAT, and one-touch ticket resolutions. Fully integrated into your Support Performance Statistics dashboard, the report includes:
- The percentage of tickets automated by AI Agent
- The number of tickets closed by AI Agent
- Success rates for one-touch resolutions
- How satisfied customers are with AI Agent’s responses
AI Agent Insights takes it a step further. It analyzes AI Agent’s performance data and provides you with a dashboard of recommendations, including potential automation opportunities, popular ticket intents to optimize, and knowledge base improvements.
Meet your new AI sales assistant
Soon, we’ll be expanding our AI capabilities with the launch of AI Agent for Sales, a tool designed to assist customers on their shopping journey.
AI Agent for Sales helps brands boost their sales capabilities through smart product recommendations, on-page checkout assistance, and personalized conversations. Now it's easier to reduce cart abandonment, suggest complementary products to boost average order value, and overcome pre-sale objections.
This new tool will bridge the gap between marketing and CX, ensuring brands can scale personalized interactions 24/7 without increasing headcount.
Looking ahead with conversational AI
As we continue to innovate with conversational AI, our focus remains on helping you succeed.
By combining smarter tools with valuable insights, we’re creating opportunities for you to put your customers first and build deeper connections at every touchpoint.
Join us as we pave a new way for the future of ecommerce.
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AI Quality Assurance: The New Standard for Customer Support QA
TL;DR:
- The landscape of QA is moving from manual to AI-powered, where AI can analyze every customer interaction, uncover patterns, and suggest data-driven changes at scale.
- Automating QA allows ticket reviews to be routine. This means customers will always receive high-quality support.
- Every customer interaction is reviewed with AI QA — not just a sample. This gives support leaders full visibility into performance and service quality.
- AI QA saves time and improves agent and AI Agent feedback. By automating ticket reviews, agents receive instant, unbiased feedback, and leaders can focus on big-picture CX improvements.
This year, 71% of customer experience (CX) leaders are using AI and automation to handle the holiday shopping season. These tools, including AI agents and email autoresponders, speed up tasks like responding to customers and updating orders.
But answering tickets isn't enough. Responses must also be high-quality, whether from humans or AI. And while customer satisfaction (CSAT) is the standard measure of how successful these interactions are, they have major limits.
CSAT scores don’t tell the full story about whether agents were helpful or if they used on-brand language. These gray areas in quality lead to missed sales, higher return rates, and frustrated customers during peak periods.
AI quality assurance (QA) is changing that. In this article, we’ll see what QA looks like today, how AI can simplify the process, and how CX teams can use tools like Auto QA to improve quality across all conversations.
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Traditional customer support QA is falling by the wayside
Today, QA in customer support is a largely manual responsibility. Customer conversations are reviewed by CX team leads to ensure customer satisfaction and identify areas for agent coaching. Team leads evaluate agent responses against a checklist of best practices, including the proper use of language, product knowledge, consistency, and helpfulness.
However, reviewing tickets takes a long time.
QA is important, but it's hard to prioritize when customers are actively waiting for help with refunds, urgent order edits, or negative reviews. And when CX teams are under-resourced and short-staffed, it’s easy to put QA on the back burner.
What’s more, as AI plays a bigger role in responding to customers, quality assurance must evolve to ensure the quality of AI-generated responses, not just human responses.
Over time, the lack of QA in CX can hold back support teams for three reasons:
- Delayed feedback makes it harder for agents and AI tools to improve.
- Leaders have less time to train agents and refine workflows.
- Inconsistent service risks losing customer trust and loyalty.
What is AI-powered QA in CX?
AI-powered quality assurance (QA) uses AI to automate the process of reviewing customer interactions for resolution completeness, communication, language proficiency, and more.
Instead of team leads spending hours manually sifting through tickets, AI takes over and evaluates how well tickets were resolved by agents.
Shifting this traditionally manual work to an automated process pulls teams out of the weeds and into more beneficial work like speaking to customers and upselling.
With AI QA, routine ticket reviews are not just an optional part of your customer service strategy, they become a permanent part of it. The road to greater customer trust, resolution times, and stronger product knowledge becomes easier.
Read more: Why your strategy needs customer service quality assurance
Why choose AI-powered QA over manual QA?
Manual QA is like trying to review a handful of tickets during a flood of new customer requests. Team leads can only focus on a small sample, leaving most interactions unchecked. Without complete visibility, creating a standard across all interactions is challenging.
Now, switch over to AI QA. You don’t have to choose between QA duty or answering tickets — QA checks are automatically done. You’ll still need to monitor AI’s performance, but now there’s more time to focus on creating strategies that improve the customer experience.
Here’s how AI QA and manual QA measure up to each other:
7 benefits of using AI quality assurance in CX
AI quality assurance helps CX leaders move beyond manual reviews by offering fast, thorough insights into performance and customer needs. Here are seven key benefits it brings to your team.
1. Improved visibility into customer interactions
AI QA reviews every ticket, giving CX leaders a complete view of agent performance and customer trends. Nothing slips through the cracks, so you can act on real data each and every single time.
What the team wins: Key areas to focus on to improve the customer experience.
What the customer wins: A consistent support experience where their concerns are fully addressed.
2. Instantly identify major customer pain points
Only a third of customers highly trust businesses, and without QA checks in place, that trust only deteriorates.
AI QA feedback can highlight confusing policies or common product issues that lead to unhappy customers. With instant feedback, teams can quickly make changes and create better, consistent customer experiences.
What the team wins: Faster fixes for recurring issues.
What the customer wins: A smoother, frustration-free experience.
3. Faster identification of process gaps
Agents can receive feedback that instantly highlights gaps in workflows or unclear escalation steps. This is an efficient way to resolve issues within the wider team before they become more significant problems.
What the team wins: Process issues are solved quickly.
What the customer wins: Faster resolutions with little to no delays.
4. Standardized scoring for AI and human agents
AI QA evaluates both AI Agent and human agent interactions using the same criteria. This creates a level playing field and ensures all customer interactions meet the same quality standards.
What the team wins: Fair evaluations for both AI and human responses.
What the customer wins: High-quality support, no matter who handles the ticket.
5. More time for coaching and training
With less time spent on manual reviews, leaders can dedicate more energy to team development. Training sessions guided by AI insights help agents improve quickly and ensure the team delivers support that aligns with protocols.
What the team wins: More focused skill-building based on data.
What the customer wins: Clearer and more accurate support.
6. Drives continuous knowledge for the entire team
AI QA is helpful for showing agents which areas they need more training on, whether it's being better about using brand voice or polishing up on product knowledge. This leads to better support processes and stronger product understanding across the team.
What the team wins: Better support tactics and product expertise.
What the customer wins: Faster resolutions due to knowledgeable agents.
7. Enhanced customer experience through consistently high-quality support
Since all tickets are reviewed, teams can feel confident they’re delivering high-quality support on a regular basis. Customers get clear, helpful answers, while agents gain insights from every ticket with AI feedback.
What the team wins: Consistent support performance.
What the customer wins: Reliable support they can trust.
How accurate is AI QA?
AI QA analyzes tickets using predefined categories to evaluate how complete and helpful agent responses are. Let’s take a closer look at how it maintains accurate ticket reviews with an AI QA tool like Gorgias’s Auto QA.
It measures multiple metrics
Auto QA evaluates tickets based on three key areas: Resolution Completeness, Communication, and Language Proficiency.
For Resolution Completeness, it checks if all customer concerns were fully addressed. For example, if an agent resolves only one of two issues raised, the ticket is marked incomplete. Tickets where customers resolve issues on their own or don’t respond to follow-ups can still be graded as complete if handled appropriately.
Communication quality is scored on a scale of 1 to 5, assessing clarity, professionalism, and tone. Agents earn higher scores when they provide clear solutions and remain positive throughout the interaction.
Finally, Language Proficiency evaluates whether an agent displayed high proficiency in the language of the conversation. The score considers how well spelling, grammar, and syntax were employed.
Teams can improve AI with their own feedback
Auto QA isn’t set in stone. Team leads can expand on AI-generated feedback by adding their comments. For example, if a resolution is graded as ‘Incomplete,’ a team lead can explain why and provide additional context. This helps clarify the evaluation for the agent and also helps the AI model improve over time.
How to get started with AI quality assurance using Auto QA
Ready to bring the benefits of AI QA to your team? Here’s how to get started with Auto QA:
- Audit your current QA process to identify gaps. How do you currently review tickets? Pinpoint areas where manual QA falls short, such as inconsistent feedback or missed interactions.
- Pilot Auto QA with a small team. Introduce Auto QA to a small group of agents to test its impact. This allows you to find out how the new QA process fits into your workflow and how it affects agent performance.
- Use AI insights to refine processes. Analyze the feedback Auto QA provides to identify process gaps or recurring issues. Use these insights to update your workflow, improve training, and address root causes of customer pain points.
- Gradually scale adoption across the team. Once the pilot is successful, roll out Auto QA to more agents. Make sure everyone is trained on how to use its insights and integrate the tool into daily operations.
- Monitor and provide feedback to improve AI accuracy. Review Auto QA’s evaluations to ensure accuracy. Add manual feedback as needed to fine-tune its scoring on future tickets.
- Measure the impact on performance and satisfaction. Track key metrics like ticket close rates, resolution times, and customer satisfaction scores. Use this data to understand how Auto QA transforms your QA process and drives better results.
Make high-quality responses a standard with Auto QA
AI QA isn’t just about automating ticket reviews — it empowers CX leaders to focus on what truly matters: training and improving processes.
Leave spot-checking and inconsistent application of policies and brand voice in the past. As a built-in feature of Gorgias Automate, Auto QA makes high-quality customer interactions your brand’s standard.
Book a demo now.
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Further reading
The 26 Best Shopify Themes (Of the 13,191 We Analyzed)
Finding the best Shopify theme for your business may feel like a huge undertaking — and it is. You have to identify themes, test them, and determine criteria as you go. It can easily start to feel overwhelming.
To make this process a little easier for you, we’ve analyzed 13,191 Shopify stores and hand-picked the 26 most popular themes to help get you started. But before diving in, it’s important to understand how to approach choosing the right Shopify theme for your business.
The top ten Shopify themes we recommend are:
How to choose the right Shopify theme
A free theme or a premium one? A template or a custom theme? Which one you should choose actually depends on many factors.
If you’re looking for a Shopify theme for your store but don’t know where to start, answering the following questions might help:
- What is your product category? A clothing store’s design is different from a store selling online courses.
- How big is your product catalog? Are you running a one-product store or a store with multiple product categories?
- What features do you need? Do you want a slideshow on the homepage, an opt-in form, a mobile-friendly, intuitive design, or an embeddable video?
- What are your competitors doing? Knowing how your competitors’ stores look might give you an idea of your store’s appearance. Detect their themes to find out.
- What’s your budget? Are you willing to invest in a custom Shopify theme?
- Can you manage the theme yourself? Do you need help with the technical side? Do you want immediate support whenever you have a question?
There is no “one size fits all” strategy for choosing a theme because every business is unique, so take time to figure out the questions above to narrow down your options.
Pro tip: Get inspired from established stores by using a Shopify theme detector to identify the theme they’re using. You’ll get a lot of ideas to build your own ecommerce store, for sure.
26 best official Shopify themes for your ecommerce store
Shopify hosts a limited selection of themes on their website. These official Shopify themes go through intensive testing for quality and bugs. Usually, they sell at a premium pricepoint compared to non-approved themes — but offer merchants the most effortless and professional-looking stores.
1) Mojave
Price: $350
Website: Mojave Shopify Theme
Mojave is a flexible, modern, premium Shopify theme designed by DigiFist. It’s built with fashion, health and beauty, apparel, and clothing brands in mind. Mojave’s modern design features a detailed product page with large images, clean lines, and minimalist fonts that will capture (and hold) your customer's attention. Mojave supports all the new Online Store 2.0 features, such as drag-and-drop sections and blocks to create custom pages in your store without special coding. Mojave comes with flexible, well-designed blocks for images, products, videos, quotes, and more.
Additional key features
- Unlimited free trial and lifetime free theme updates
- Compatible with Online Store 2.0
- Over 20+ conversion-increasing features
2) Retina
Price: $220
Website: Retina Shopify Theme
Developed by Out of the Sandbox, Retina is an ideal choice if you’re selling apparel or furniture and housewares. Retina offers four styles: Austin, Montreal, Melbourne, and Amsterdam, with different color palettes.
Each style includes useful features like product recommendations, multiple home page videos, custom promotion tiles, product image zoom, and slide-out cart. You can also create a self-service FAQ page so customers can find answers to common questions themselves.
If you choose Retina, you can be sure your ecommerce website is mobile-friendly and leveraging Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to reach more Shopify customers.
Additional key features
- Modern boutique mobile-friendly design
- Simple setup and customization
- Testimonial sections and featured product callouts options
3) Flow
Price: $350
Website: Flow Shopify Theme
Flow offers three sharp and minimalist designs (Queenstown, Byron, and Cannes) that help your products stand out. This theme is great if you’re selling high-end items or you want to direct customers to unique features of your products.
Flow allows you to feature a YouTube or Vimeo video on the homepage, display your products in a masonry-style grid, and showcase information about a specific collection with a page sidebar. You can also add a slide-out cart so your customers can easily add products to their shopping cart without leaving the current page. There is a promotional banner where you can set up to promote your latest offers.
Keep in mind that you can contact the Flow developers team via email only. The phone and video call support aren’t available.
Additional key features
- Ideal for high-volume stores, flash sales, and selling internationally
- Easily customizable by utilizing drag-and-drop sections and blocks to create custom pages without coding
- In-depth marketing and conversion features (back-in-stock alerts, blogs, promo pop-ups, promo tiles, etc.)
4) Paper
Price: $260
Website: Paper Shopify theme
Paper is an easy-to-use and modern Shopify theme designed by Brickspace Lab. Paper’s clean and thoughtful design features large imagery with in-depth branding customizations. You will be able to take advantage of new Online Store 2.0 features and build custom templates with expertly designed drag-and-drop sections.
Additional key features
- Unlimited free trial and lifetime free theme updates
- Conversion-boosting design
- Performance-optimized page speeds
- Features to help you sell more, such as in-cart upsells
5) Parallax
Price: $240
Website: Parallax Shopify Theme
If you want to build a modern ecommerce site, think about Parallax. This theme offers a striking parallax scrolling effect, enhancing your brand’s style and making it more appealing to customers.
Parallax offers four styles: Aspen, Madrid, Vienna, and Los Angeles. These styles share features like parallax effect, a multi-level menu, promotional banner, multiple homepage videos, and slide-out cart.
Parallax is also developed by Out of the Sandbox, so you can be sure you’ll receive excellent customer support from the team.
Additional key features
- In-depth creative control (full-width images, slideshows, video, testimonials, featured promotions, and more)
- Slideout cart, quick shop, and promotional banners for ease of use for customers
- Distinctive scrolling style for long-format home page layouts
6) Taiga
Price: $350
Website: Taiga Shopify theme
Taiga is a blazing-fast and mobile-first premium Shopify theme for D2C brands designed by award-winning Shopify Plus agency Woolman. It gives you outstanding visual freedom: over 10+ video-supporting sections with unparalleled access to define your design settings. Zero customized code to make your brand feel unique.
Taiga is developed for the needs of modern merchants. Quality code powers winning speed: two components you need as a fast-growing sustainable business.
Additional key features
- Outstanding design settings
- Lightning-fast speed and performance
- Modern sections like Banner grid with video, Quick view, Countdown timer, Cart upsell, and Visual menu
7) Testament
Price: $260
Website: Testament Shopify Theme
Testament offers four styles (Genesis, Exodus, Revelation, and Deliverance), aiming to help you create a seamless shopping experience for your customers.
Testament supports quick view, multi-column menu, color swatches, collection page sidebar, and homepage video. The theme comes with the sticky navigation feature, allowing you to keep menus fixed to the top of your page as you scroll down.
Additional key features
- Designed for stores that process high amount of transactions in a specific time period
- Visual storytelling elements
- Designed specifically for stores that do in-person selling
8) Prestige
Price: $350
Website: Prestige Shopify Theme
Prestige is a premium Shopify theme designed for high-end ecommerce businesses and is great for businesses in clothing and accessories, health and beauty, as well as business equipment and supplies. It supports three styles (Allure, Couture, and Vogue) and is great for editorial content, visual storytelling, and physical stores.
Additional key features
- Image hotspot linking: Drag hotspots to tag images, making it easier for customers to discover your products
- Built-in timeline tool: Use this feature to tell the story of your brand
- Optimized for larger images: Display high-resolution product images hassle-free
- Homepage menu lists: Display menu lists on store homepage
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9) Impulse
Price: $350
Website: Impulse Shopify Theme
Impulse is great if you often run promotion campaigns because it allows you to display custom promotions in different places in your store.
Impulse allows you to display promotional content on collection pages and promote sales with custom promotion tiles. Its features also include homepage menu lists, collection sub-listing, custom collection sidebar filters, and pickup availability.
Additional key features
- Designed for high-volume stores
- In-depth marketing and merchandising features (promo features, customizable contact form, animation, product videos, and more)
- Product discovery features like MegaMenu and sticky headers
10) Motion
Price: $350
Website: Motion Shopify Theme
If you want to use animation and video in your store, consider the Motion theme. It’s a premium Shopify theme designed and supported by Archetype Themes.
Motion includes many interesting features that aim to bring your brand to life regardless of catalog size, including multiple text, image, and page animations as well as multiple auto-play YouTube and videos on homepage.
Additional key features
- Filter products by tag without reloading pages
- Support high-resolution images
- View product information in a pop-up
- Visual storytelling
11) Symmetry
Price: $320
Website: Symmetry Shopify Theme
Symmetry is another great Shopify theme for stores selling different product categories. It supports four styles: Salt Yard, Beatnik, Chantilly, and Duke.
One of Symmetry’s best features is reorderable homepage rows, allowing you to display products, blog posts, or promotions in any order with customizable rows. Besides, this theme provides slideshow, long-form design, quick buy view, and multi-column menu.
Additional key features
- Built specifically for OS 2.0
- Ability to customize page tabs, metafields, size and price catalog filters, and more
- Over 20 drag-and-drop sections to choose from
12) Envy
Price: $350
Website: Envy Shopify Theme
Envy offers an intuitive design with four styles: Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Gothenburg. It’s perfect for stores that focus on regular promotions and featured products.
Envy features include display discounts, free gifts, and other promotional content with a pop-up or a banner as well as the ability to tag images using image hotspot linking.
Additional key features
- Help customers easily navigate through the store with a multi-level menu
- Hover over a product image to zoom out
- Optimize for smaller devices and mobile commerce
13) Atlantic
Price: $280
Website: Atlantic Shopify Theme
Atlantic is great for high-volume stores. It’s designed to help you grow and scale your business faster.
Atlantic supports four styles (Organic, Light, Modern, and Chic). Features include a multi-column menu, slideshow, quick buy, modular-style homepage, and pickup availability. This theme receives many five-star reviews on the Shopify theme store because of its excellent customer support.
Additional key features
- Perfect for product discovery with features like image zoom, live search, and multi-column menus
- Ability to handle medium to large catalogs; ideal for growth
- Uncluttered design
14) Modular
Price: $300
Website: Modular Shopify Theme
Modular comes in three styles (Chelsa, Mayfair, and Hoxton) that are well-suited for a wide range of products. It also focuses on clean and minimalist design.
Using Modular, you can give customers a better experience with scrolling between product pages, adding items to their carts without leaving pages (one tactic to help recover abandoned shopping carts), and quickly filtering products by brand, price, etc. You can also add customer testimonials to build trust with first-time shoppers.
Additional key features
- Cart notes and stick cart
- Marketing features like back-in-stock alerts, blogs, FAQ page, press coverage, and more
- In-depth product discovery options like breadcrumbs, enhanced search, MegaMenu, and product filtering and sorting
15) Empire
Price: $340
Website: Empire Shopify Theme
Designed and supported by Pixel Union, Empire allows you to create a store that offers customers the same shopping experience as Amazon. Empire comes with three styles (Graphic, Supply, and Industrial) optimized for stores with large catalogs. Empire offers features like homepage menu lists, pickup availability, live search, advanced product filtering, and quick add-to-cart functionality.
Additional key features
- User-friendly, responsive design made specifically for dropshippers
- Many predefined color pallets and controls to create custom color schemes
- Integration with Shopify product ratings and reviews app
16) Pipeline
Price: $320
Website: Pipeline Shopify Theme
Pipeline is another minimalist Shopify theme with parallax effect scrolling and three unique styles (Light, Bright, and Dark). This theme is best suited for stores with a large number of products.
Like many other themes in this list, Pipeline offers a multi-column drop-down menu, a modular-style homepage, and advanced product filtering. The theme also supports large images, which means those images fit seamlessly into your pages.
Additional key features
- Optimized for mobile commerce
- Designed for stores that sell internationally as well as in physical stores
- Flexible, well-designed blocks for ease of customization
17) District
Price: $220
Website: District Shopify Theme
No matter what you’re selling, the District Shopify Theme could be great for your shop if you have large catalogs and a desire to showcase featured products and collections. District features Shopify’s Online Store 2.0, which uses drag-and-drop sections to create custom pages without coding.
Additional key features
- Flexible, well-designed blocks to spotlight images, products, videos, and quotes and support digital storytelling
- Cart notes, quick buy, and in-store pick up options
- In-depth marketing, conversion, merchandising, and product discovery features
18) Icon
Price: $260
Website: Icon Shopify Theme
If you’re looking for a Shopify theme to highlight images and other content, Icon may be perfect for you — especially if you’re also in the fashion, health and beauty, or home and garden industries. Icon is also uniquely set up for stores with large catalogs and dropshippers. This theme also features numerous marketing and conversion features like promo banners, in-menu promos, cross-selling, blogs, back-in-stock alerts, quickview, FAQ page, and store locator.
Additional key features
- Visually striking design
- Quick and easy launch with minimal steps required
- Extensive merchandising and product discovery features like image galleries, image zoom, lookbooks, MegaMenu, product filtering, and infinite scroll
19) Responsive
Price: $240
Website: Responsive Shopify Theme
Looking for a focus on your products? You may want to check out the Responsive Shopify theme as it puts your products and brand at the forefront, utilizing full-width imagery. Responsive is ideal for fashion, beauty, and sports and recreation shops with large catalogs. Even better, the Responsive theme looks stunning on every screen across devices.
Additional key features
- Wide-layout with features like image zoom, hero videos, and promo banners
- Highly customizable layouts, typography, and featured promotions
- Editorial content capabilities with longer-form text sections for storytelling
7 more non-official Shopify themes for your ecommerce store
Merchants can also find themes that aren’t in Shopify’s official theme library. These themes are often high-quality (especially those with a many reviews and high ratings, like the ones below) and usually a bit less expensive. But they aren’t vetted by Shopify, and therefore may be a little rougher around the edges.
1) Vendy
Price: $77
Website: Vendy Shopify Theme
Vendy is a premium multipurpose Shopify theme for fashion. It’s developed for comfortable use and flawless online store creation. Even if you are not tech-savvy at all, with Vendy you can launch a store of any complexity. Plus, this theme is perfect for dropshipping
What’s more? Vendy is a synonym for “responsive clean design.” Also, Vendy allows flexible editing in the Shopify Visual Builder and the number of pre-made layouts. Without a doubt, you will like varied page templates, catchy web forms, product wish lists and lists, and other perks. As well, this Shopify theme for fashion is packed with unique lookbook and blog templates. Just try it and customize it as you prefer!
Additional key features
- MegaMosaic section
- Dynamic filtering system
- Header and footer customization
2) Ella
Price: $89
Website: Ella Shopify Theme
Ella offers +17 homepage layouts, +16 child themes, +7 category pages, +10 product pages, multiple headers and footers, and more. It’s an all-in-one Shopify theme, ideal for any stylish fashion and clothing stores.
Ella allows you to design your store using features like quick shop, quick edit cart, quick update car, multiple languages, multiple currencies, product recommendation, upsell bundle, etc. This theme also includes smart search and suggestion features, enhancing the shopping experience.
Additional key features
- Over 22 homepage layouts and skins, including child themes
- Frequently bought together feature and upsell bundle with discount options
- Before-you-leave pop-up capability
3) Shella
Price: $79
Website: Shella Shopify Theme
When it comes to Shopify themes for fashion, Shella can be considered one of the best. This theme is developed with fashion in mind, meaning everything on it is optimized to help you get your fashion stores noticed.
Here is what makes Shella worth checking out:
- More than 89 pre-designed pages for layouts, collection pages, product pages, blog, gallery, and other pages
- Strong integration with dropshipping apps like Printiful, Privy, Dropshipper, Shopzie
- Conversion optimization features like countdown timers, number left in stock, free shipping progress bar
- Vertical MegaMenu, four levels for navigation menu, blocks for homepage, product filter options (title, description, price, vendor, type, and tags), and more
Additional key features
- Great for dropshipping
- MegaMenu
- Price and stock countdown
4) Basel
Price: $99
Website: Basel Shopify Theme
With plenty of design options, Basel allows you to design your store in many different ways. For example, Basel supports the drag-and-drop page builder, making it easy for you to add/remove/replace elements on pages. It also comes with several header variations, colors, and backgrounds.
Additional key features
- AJAX search, color swatches, product quick view, and 360-degree view
- 30 ready-to-use layouts, four blog styles, seven portfolio styles, four product hover effects
- Instagram widget, Twitter widget, testimonial slide, styled banners shortcode
- Developed with SCSS
5) Porto
Price: $99
Website: Porto Shopify Theme
Porto is a popular Shopify theme used by more than 45,000 ecommerce merchants. It’s built with amazing UI and UX experience and is continuously being updated.
Porto’s highlight features:
- +20 modern and classic demo concepts
- Optimized for speed performance
- Bunch of collections and product detail page variations
- MegaMenu and vertical MegaMenu
Additional key features
- Fully responsive with any mobile device
- Powerful admin panel
- Unlimited colors and skins
- RTL support, testimonial slide, AJAX loading, Google Fonts integration
6) Wokiee
Price: $89
Website: Wokiee Shopify Theme
As a Premium Shopify theme, Wokiee is not your basic theme; it can act as a powerful design tool to help your business grow. Even with its in-depth premium features, it is still easy to create fast, responsive, and mobile-friendly websites to provide a top-notch user experience.
Additional key features
- Full control through your own content management system, which allows for customization of navigation, site content, images, products, and more
- Over 80 predefined skins and layouts
- MegaMenu, instagram shop, wishlist, related products, and more
7) Roxxe
Price: $59
Website: Roxxe Shopify Theme
The Roxxe Shopify theme is a versatile choice for a shop that wants options but also desires a robust yet modern look. Roxxe has over 70 pre-built homepages, as well as 50 pre-designed layouts with sections you can rearrange and combine as you see fit. Needless to say, Roxxe is a fairly simple theme to use that also comes with plenty of easy-to-follow instructions.
Additional key features
- Fully responsive and option for retina-ready pages
- MegaMenu and customization in footer area to make newsletter subscription simple
- Quick-view option for customers to review product details in a lightbox pop-up without leaving the page they’re on
Take your Shopify Store to the next level with Gorgias
There you have it! We hope this list of the best Shopify themes made it easier to find what you need to get your online shop up and running. And check out our guide on Shopify vs. Shopify Plus if you're interested in additional ways to customize your site beyond these themes. As you continue building your brand and updating your website based on the needs of your customers, you’ll also want to review your customer service process.
Luckily, you can tap into a Shopify helpdesk app like Gorgias to level up.
Gorgias’ customer service platform is uniquely positioned to help Shopify owners with all of their customer service needs, from automating your most common tasks to using machine learning to better help customers.
Learn more about Gorgias for Shopify stores.
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12 Essential Strategies for How To Reduce Cart Abandonment
A Baymard Institute study finds that the average shopping cart abandonment rate for ecommerce stores is about 70%. Yup: 70% of shoppers who visit your store add products to their carts but don’t place an order. What does that mean in terms of revenue?
- Reducing cart abandonment by 33% is equivalent to growing your customer base by 23%
- Completely eliminating cart abandonment (while not feasible) would in theory triple most online stores’ revenue
Reducing cart abandonment may not be easy, but it’s a whole lot easier (and less expensive) than acquiring tons of new customers. Fortunately, most ecommerce websites aren’t yet optimized to keep cart abandonment rates as low as possible. After reviewing the most common reasons why customers choose to abandon their cart, we'll explore 12 such proven strategies that you can use to reduce cart abandonment and increase your store's conversion rate.
What is ecommerce shopping cart abandonment?
Shopping cart abandonment occurs when a customer places an item from an online store into their cart, but navigates away from the website before completing its checkout flow. It's a phenomenon that costs online retailers a lot of potential customers, given that the average cart abandonment rate is 70%. The metric varies across industries, with the automotive industry reporting the highest shopping cart abandonment rate (89.11%), according to Statista.
12 ways to reduce cart abandonment for your ecommerce store
- Provide the final cost upfront, including taxes and shipping
- Include a status tracker for enhanced UI during checkout
- Use a thumbnail image of the product throughout the checkout process
- Make navigation between the main website and shopping cart seamless
- Offer as many payment options as possible
- Invest in a customer support platform with live chat
- Create an enticing checkout button or call to action
- Include a guest checkout option
- Optimize website page speed and UI elements
- Incorporate a generous refund/return policy
- Consider marketing efforts such as retargeting
- Display exit-intent pop-ups
Reducing online shopping cart abandonment is one of the most effective ways for ecommerce sites to increase their revenue, and there are plenty of ways to achieve this goal. If you would like to boost your store's conversion rate and start bringing more customers across the finish line, then here are 12 effective strategies to consider:
1) Provide the final cost upfront, including taxes and shipping
Considering that unexpectedly high shipping costs are the number one reason online shoppers abandon their cart, it's essential to let customers know upfront exactly how much they will have to pay. Of course, this is somewhat complicated because you usually can't calculate shipping costs and taxes until after a customer enters their address. However, setting up your checkout process in a way that calculates final shipping charges as early as possible is key to preventing customers from being discouraged by extra charges.
How to do this
One option for providing customers with a final cost upfront is to charge a flat rate for shipping and taxes regardless of where the customer is located. This allows you to display final costs on your product pages rather than making your customers wait until checkout to see what shipping fees and taxes will be. While this might have a higher upfront cost, reducing cart abandonment could more than make up for the investment.
Another option is to design your cart page or checkout page so that customers can input their address immediately, allowing your system to calculate shipping costs and taxes right away.
2) Include a status tracker for enhanced UI during checkout
Even if you create a quick and easy checkout process, your customers won't know it's quick and easy until they are finished with it. One way around this is to use a status tracker that displays how far along a customer is in your checkout process. Installing a status tracker on your checkout page reassures customers that your checkout experience is fast and simple by showing them exactly how many steps they have left.
How to do this
A checkout app that includes a status tracker is the simplest way to keep customers updated on their checkout progress. Depending on the ecommerce platform that you use and your coding skills, you may also be able to create a checkout page status tracker yourself.
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3) Use a thumbnail image of the product throughout the checkout process
There is a certain degree of disconnect between online shoppers and the products they purchase that doesn't go away until the product arrives at their door. However, displaying a thumbnail image of the product that a customer is purchasing serves to remind them of why they added the product to their cart in the first place. This encourages them to see the process through to completion, helping reduce the chance of cart abandonment.
How to do this
Once again, optimizing your checkout page in this manner is done most simply by using a checkout app that allows you to add product thumbnails to your checkout page. Or, if you can't find an app that works for you, a little coding will do the trick as well.
Gorgias customer, Glamnetic, includes product image thumbnails in the cart and checkout page. Plus, they include a countdown to encourage customers to purchase in the next 10 minutes to further incentivize completed purchases.
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Read more: 3 tips to improve your product photography
4) Make navigation between the main website and shopping cart seamless
Once customers have added a product to their cart, navigating to their cart from the main website should be as easy as possible. The last thing you want is for customers to have to go searching for your checkout page, so be sure to design your checkout process so that navigation between the main website and shopping cart is seamless.
How to do this
Creating popups that direct customers to the checkout screen once they add a product to their cart is one effective way to make it easy for them to find your checkout page. Another option is to utilize "buy now" buttons that automatically take customers to the checkout page once they select a product.
5) Offer as many payment options as possible
Offering your customers plenty of payment methods to choose from can help reduce cart abandonment in two key ways. For one, it ensures that customers can find a payment method that works for them. For example, if you only accept credit cards and a customer is used to paying online with their PayPal account, they are likely to abandon their cart. In other cases, a customer may not feel comfortable entering their credit card information on your site and will only complete their purchase if alternative payment options are available. By offering numerous payment methods, you can ensure that you accommodate your customers' preferences no matter what those preferences happen to be.
How to do this
Choosing a payment processing solution that can accept various payment methods is the simplest way to offer your customers this level of flexibility. For example, with PayPal, ecommerce stores can accept credit card payments, debit card payments, payments via a PayPal account, and payments via PayPal credit cards.
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6) Invest in a customer support platform with live chat
Ecommerce customer service that can catch customers at critical moments is key to reducing online shopping cart abandonment. Suppose a customer has a question about your product that needs an answer before they feel comfortable completing their purchase. In this case, it's vital to answer their question quickly — before they navigate away from your website.
With a customer support platform such as Gorgias, you can install live chat widgets on your website that enable customers to instantly connect with a support agent, ensuring that they receive the timely support needed to nudge them toward completing their purchase.
Having live chat support ready is especially important when high average order value (AOV) customers are on the fence. Check out our customer story on CROSSNET, a Gorgias customer that once secured a whopping $450,000 through a live chat conversation:
How to do this
Gorgias makes it easy to offer live chat support, letting you provide pre-purchase support directly from your website. To see for yourself how Gorgias can help you reduce cart abandonment via pre-purchase live chat support, sign up for a demo of Gorgias today!
7) Create an enticing checkout button or call to action
Once customers add a product to their cart, you want to make the checkout button noticeable and enticing. Creating attractive checkout buttons complete with compelling CTAs will help encourage customers to take the next step once they've added a product to their cart. You may also wish to add a "buy now" button to allow customers to navigate straight to the checkout page after selecting a product.
How to do this
There are several great apps available that help with checkout button optimization. One Click Checkout is a Shopify app that allows you to create "buy now" buttons and popups that encourage customers to visit the checkout page after adding products to their cart.
8) Include a guest checkout option
We've said it before, and we'll say it again: Requiring customers to create an account before they can complete their purchase will make your checkout process too much of a hassle in the eyes of many customers. Instead, offer a guest checkout option. This allows customers to complete their checkout without creating an account, making your checkout process simpler for those in a rush. At the same time, customers that do wish to create an account still have the option to do so.
How to do this
Most ecommerce platforms and checkout apps will give you the option to offer guest checkout, making this a relatively straightforward strategy to execute.
9) Optimize website page speed and UI elements
Most customers aren't likely to have much patience if your checkout page is too slow to load or does not load correctly, making it essential to optimize your site's page speed and the UI elements of your checkout process.
How to do this
There are a lot of tools that allow you to optimize page load speeds, including a great tool created by Google called PageSpeed Insights. Ensuring that you are using an ecommerce platform or checkout solution that offers an optimized UI and fast loading times is also crucial.
10) Incorporate a generous refund/return policy
Customers are much more likely to feel good about purchasing a product from an online store when they are confident that they'll be able to return the product if it doesn't meet their expectations. While offering a generous refund/return policy may be a little difficult to stomach, the resulting increase in conversions is almost sure to be more than worth the expense!
How to do this
Start by writing a refund/return policy that customers will find reassuring, then be sure to display this policy prominently on your product pages, checkout page, or both.
Parachute includes a clear label to show off their free and carbon-neutral shipping and returns:
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Also, to make returns and exchanges even easier for your customers and agents, consider a dedicated app. Our favorites are Loop, Returnly, and ReturnLogic: they’re some of the most comprehensive and affordable apps on the market, plus they integrate with Gorgias for a more centralized returns process.
Related: Return policy template generator
11) Consider marketing efforts such as retargeting
Retargeting customers who abandon their cart via cart abandonment emails is one proven way to reduce cart abandonment. Sometimes customers just forget about their order, and all it takes to get them back to your checkout page is a simple reminder. Best of all, many email marketing solutions enable you to create automated abandoned cart campaigns, enabling you to retarget customers with little to no manual effort.
How to do this
Many email marketing tools like Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign make it easy to create automated abandoned cart recovery campaigns. Utilizing one of these solutions is by far the easiest way to get started retargeting customers who abandon their cart.
As far as the copy, check out the cheeky email our friends and Braxley Bands send to customers who leave items in their cart:
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They also follow this email up with a text message that offers a 15% off discount.
12) Display exit-intent pop-ups
Our analysis of 300 Shopify store owners showed 50% of online stores use website pop-ups to engage visitors. This isn’t surprising since pop-ups can yield a conversion rate of between 3% and 11%, compared to standard rates around 2%.
An exit intent pop-up captures customers with items in their shopping cart, usually to offer more information or a coupon code to convince them to place the order. As long as you respect the user experience (and don’t create an obnoxious, hard-to-escape pop-up), you will likely see lower cart abandonment rates with a pop-up.
How to do this
Your ecommerce platform will have pop-up tools like SmartPopup or Pixelpop available for integration. If you use Shopify, check out our list of Shopify pop-ups for a complete rundown of the best tools.
Why does shopping cart abandonment happen?
There are a variety of reasons why online shoppers choose to abandon their carts. The most common offenders are as follows:
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Complicated checkout process
The "Law of Least Effort" is an important part of the customer experience for online businesses, especially when it comes to the checkout process. The more complicated something is, the less likely it is that people will do it. If your checkout process is overly lengthy and complex to the point that it's much easier to just abandon the cart and shop on Amazon, then that's probably what most of your customers will do.
Surprising added shipping costs
According to research from the Baymard Institute, extra, unexpected costs (such as shipping costs or taxes) is the number one reason why customers choose to abandon their cart. This demonstrates how critical it is to keep these costs as low as possible and display them at the very start of the checkout process.
Want to reduce shipping costs? Read our guide on how to offer free shipping.
Requiring customers to create an account before purchasing
Requiring customers to create an account before they can complete their purchase falls under the category of making your checkout process too complex. While it's certainly beneficial to offer customers the option to create an account at checkout, it's also a good idea to offer guest checkout for those who don't want to take the extra steps to set up an account.
Customers don't feel safe with payment options
Even today, when online shopping is a normal part of almost everyone's life, most customers are still rightfully wary about where they enter their credit card information. It's important to build trust with your customers by offering payment methods they already know and trust, such as PayPal and Apple Pay. This is especially true if your website lacks trust seals (like Norton secured) and social proof (like reviews and testimonials) to prove your legitimacy.
Competitor has products that are cheaper or ship faster
Many customers continue to do product research even after adding a product to their cart. Naturally, if they can find the same product cheaper somewhere else or find an online store that offers faster shipping, the chances that they'll return to your store are slim.
Confusing or insufficient refund/return policies
Customers like the peace of mind that comes with knowing that they can easily return or exchange their product if it doesn't meet their expectations upon arrival. Without this assurance, they are much more likely to abandon their cart. Because 30% of all products ordered from online retailers are returned, an easy-to-understand and customer-friendly return policy is key to helping an online store build trust with its potential customers.
No discount codes or promo codes offering deals
Some customers add products to their cart with the expectation that they will be offered a promo code or deal at some point in the checkout process. When they don't receive any such deal, they abandon their shopping cart.
Ecomm website has performance issues
If your checkout page freezes, is slow to load, or suffers from other performance issues, customers are more likely to navigate away from the malfunctioning page and never return. These may sound like minor inconveniences to you, but may be costing you customers in the long run.
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Provide world-class customer service to help reduce cart abandonment with Gorgias
Along with offering a wealth of other business-boosting benefits, great customer service is key to optimizing an online store's conversion rate and preventing abandoned carts. With Gorgias, you can get started with live chat to provide your customers with pre-purchase support that will generate more conversions.
Check out our case study of three stores that increased sales with live chat for more examples of the revenue-boosting power of a great customer experience.
Or, to try our customer service platform free for seven days, sign up for Gorgias today!
6 Tips to Deliver an Outstanding Post-Checkout Experience
Your job doesn’t end once a customer makes a purchase.
Of course, the marketing work you do pre-purchase plays an important role in establishing a well-rounded shopping experience, but there's a world of tactics to employ after your customer hits the “buy” button that can help you entice first time shoppers to make a second purchase.
Remember that without designing an inclusive experience that encourages customer retention, you may struggle to create a solid growth path for your business. If you want to keep new customers coming, reengage past shoppers, and reduce returns, here are six tips for delivering an outstanding post-checkout experience.
6 Ways to create a better post-checkout experience for your customers
- Offer amazing customer support
- Make the most out of your confirmation email
- Make delivery dates and next steps clear
- Stay in touch later with remarketing
- Enhance the “unboxing” experience
- Ask for reviews and follow up after the item arrives
1) Offer amazing customer support
First and foremost, let’s make sure you’re offering great customer support before we explore other options for improving your post-checkout experience. While you might already be doing everything you reasonably can to ensure your customers don’t experience disruptions or problems after a purchase, sometimes hiccups happen. It’s not so much about avoiding problems entirely but rather how you deal with them when they occur.
Sometimes your shoppers will reach out to you after a purchase with questions about their item’s delivery or how to return something. (This is much easier with the right returns management and order management software.) And they may be frustrated or impatient. Make it easier for them (and ultimately better for you) by offering ways to contact you on the channels they prefer. Also, offer proactive customer service in the form of FAQ pages and clear return policies to confusion (and save your agents time).
For instance, if your analytics tell you that your audience is most active on Facebook, make sure your page makes it clear how to reach your support team. You can do this by including the relevant links in the About section and of course, be turning on a chatbot function.
Caption: Dollar Shave Club offers multiple options for contacting their support team in their page’s About section
But even so, customers may make contact simply by posting on your page or commenting on your posts. Employ a catch all approach by integrating your Facebook page to your Gorgias helpdesk and you’ll be able to automatically publish personalized answers in the comment threads.
And if you don’t have one, get live chat on your site! Gorgias can also help with that by allowing you to seamlessly integrate a live chat into your website, with also a list of customizable rules. The live chat button will show consistently on all pages of your site, both on mobile and desktop.
Your customers don’t need to hunt down a special contact page or dig up an email address. They always know exactly where to go when they need help. Also, using live chat is useful to create a personalized, human-centric, accessible, and fast shopping experience, which the value of can’t be discounted!
2) Make the most out of your confirmation email
While the confirmation email should always include basic information (think an order summary and delivery timeline), you can add a few extras to empower your customer to make the most out of their experience with your brand.
If you’re working with a recommendation engine and already produce editorial content, this would be a great opportunity to attach one or two relevant blog articles to the lower third of your confirmation email. Not only serving as a helpful encouragement to spend more time on your site, but sending relevant content helps to reinforce the idea that you are an expert in your field.
Caption: The order confirmation email from Warby Parker includes tips on how to be sure you’ve picked the perfect frames for you
You may also wish to consider including a promo code as a thank you for ordering - it can be a small expense that ensures a customer returns.
3) Make delivery dates and next steps clear
Once your customer purchases an item from your site, you would benefit from having a system in place that allows them to review their item’s delivery status. This could be as simple as a “vanity” order confirmation page that appears once the purchase is confirmed. Show a simple timeline that displays where they are at in the delivery timeline starting with an origin destination and ending with their home address.
Even if they didn’t register on your site and never return to this page, showing them such an order tracking timeline leaves a good impression on your customer by reinforcing the concept that what they’ve purchased really exists and is on its way.
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4) Stay in touch later with remarketing
You may have been under the misconception that setting up remarketing ads was reserved exclusively for your bounced traffic. While that’s certainly an effective way to recapture lost traffic, you can also use them to remind previous customers about your products when it makes sense to do so for you.
For example, let’s say you’re a cosmetic company and you’ve just launched a new moisturizer. By setting up a remarketing ad that targets those customers who purchased a similar product from you three months ago, you’re finding them again just as they may be in need of restocking. This helps place customers who may have otherwise forgotten about your brand back into your marketing funnel with the goal of getting them to buy from you again.
5) Enhance the “unboxing” experience
Let’s embrace the fact that we’re living in the age of social media by applying it to your shipping experience. Make your orders feel like the gift that they are by packing your product in a customized box and filling the empty space inside with fun, yet recyclable fillers like crinkle paper or business cards, personalized notes with instructions on how to leave a review or something simple but enjoyable like brand stickers. When relevant, you may also want to consider including a sample of an upcoming item into your box, or a flyer advertising its existence.
When you create an “unboxing experience” you’ll not only trigger those loyalty-building positive emotions in your customer’s brain but you’re also encouraging them to post about your brand on their social feeds - free advertisement to a similar audience of future customers!
6) Ask for reviews and follow up after the item arrives
Reviews are one of the most effective ways to increase sales and encourage new customers to shop with you. You need them to grow your business. But not everyone, even happy shoppers, are hardwired to follow up a purchase with a review. In this instance we like to follow the simple manta: ask and you shall receive.
Asking for reviews doesn't have to seem desperate (even though we all desperately want them). Start by building a review request into your post-checkout email workflow that automatically delivers a request to review the purchased product after delivery occurs. Play around with the sound of your email and don’t be afraid to employ a curious but humble tone that expresses your genuine desire to know that they enjoyed what they bought or how they like to see it improved in the future.
We hope you find these six tips useful when it comes to making the most out of your post-checkout experience. As always be patient and in time, you’ll reap the rewards of a job well done. Keep an eye on your retention rate to measure your post-checkout success.
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7 Key Zendesk Features [+ Pros and Cons of Zendesk]
You may know Zendesk as the first (and the biggest) customer service software. It’s usually evaluated against Freshdesk, Gorgias, Help Scout, and other ticketing systems (also called helpdesks).
But, is it the right customer service tool for you? The answer depends largely on your type and size of business:
- Zendesk makes software for everything from sales to customer relationship management and employee experience
- Zendesk markets to businesses of all sizes, from small and medium businesses to huge enterprise businesses
- Zendesk makes tools for every industry, from healthcare to government
For some customers, the sheer size and scale of Zendesk could be hugely appealing. For others, it may indicate a lack of focus and specialization.
As you choose a customer service platform for your business, take a closer look at Zendesk, its features and functions, and whether it will create the best customer experience for your business (at the best price).
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What is Zendesk and what does Zendesk do?
Zendesk is one of the oldest cloud-based customer service platforms sold on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. It offers an enormous array of tools, including a helpdesk, email marketing, live chat, sales, employee engagement, and customer engagement software.
Zendesk's key features
Zendesk recently streamlined its product offerings, combining them into three separate tiers, each with its own pricing structure. You can choose three Zendesk Support plans, three Zendesk Sell plans, and five Zendesk Suite plans — a total of eleven pricing tiers and packages. Each of the pricing tiers and packages has its own collection of products and services, which can get confusing.
Below, we highlight some of the main customer service features Zendesk offers. Certain features are only available for Suite customers and Professional or Enterprise level customers, so double check before you sign a contract.
Helpdesk (Zendesk Support)
Some people call Zendesk “the godfather of helpdesk tools” because they have been around for a long time. In that time, they have built tons of features onto their ticketing system:
- Convert phone, chat, email, and social media requests into tickets
- Centralize tickets from disconnected channels into one place
- Manage and work on support tickets
- Create personal ticket views
- Support conditional and custom ticket fields
- View the activity log and the name of the agent handling it
- Support reporting and dashboards
Let’s zoom in on a few features for your customer support needs.
Live chat
Zendesk has two types of live chat: Zendesk Live Chat (legacy) and Zendesk Messaging.
Zendesk Messaging is a larger app that, on top of live chat on your website, lets you have conversations on messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. The tool centralizes all of these conversations so the agent can quickly switch channels. However, centralized chat is only available through their Messaging app, a separate tool that connects to Zendesk’s Agent Workspace, which involves some additional billing to set up.
Zendesk Live Chat, on the other hand, is a legacy product that only lets you have conversations on the website. In other words, it doesn’t centralize messages from Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or other messaging apps.
Once you have figured out which solution is right for you (and navigated some nickel-and-diming), Zendesk allows you to add chat to your website and talk with customers across messaging apps in real-time:
- Reach out to a customer with a chat to guide them to the checkout process (if you pay extra for Sunshine Conversations)
- Collect contact information with pre-chat forms
- Use chatbots to reroute customer conversations (which can lead to a dodgy customer experience)
- Create dashboards for to monitor the team’s performance on live chat
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Knowledge base
Like many other helpdesk solutions, Zendesk offers you features to build a scalable support system, primarily through FAQs and community forums.
With the basic plan, you can create, organize, and share help center articles in one language. You can also embed support articles, which they call embeddables, as web widgets.
More advanced customer self-service features and support for over 40 languages are only available for customers of higher pricing tiers. And the community forums feature is only available for the Pro and Enterprise customers.
Ticketing system
A support and helpdesk solution needs to have a way to collect support tickets, and Zendesk's support ticket system takes a pretty traditional approach to ticketing. In general, their ticketing aims to:
- Collect helpdesk requests from email, social media messaging, chat, and other locations into one spot
- Easily track conversations in one central inbox to streamline your support workflow
- Respond to customer issues quickly
Some helpdesks group tickets into broader conversations; for example, we at Gorgias consider each customer interaction over three days in one channel as a single “billable ticket,” which we believe better reflects the nature of customer service in ecommerce.
However, some businesses may prefer using a tool that sticks to the old-school method.
Reporting and analytics
Zendesk offers Zendesk Explore, which is an arm of their product that gives you a base for collecting, measuring, and analyzing data about your customers and their customer experience:
- Get pre-built reports about performance (updated daily)
- Enjoy automation of analytics and reporting
- Use analytics to improve the customer experience
- Customize your dashboards (for Pro and Enterprise customers)
Community forums
Zendesk Gather, which is available for Suite Professional, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus plans, is Zendesk’s community forum solution. You can build online communities that relate to your company or your products, which can help with your branding and give you additional feedback:
- Create spaces where your customers can talk to each other
- Gather honest feedback from customers
- Allow customer interactions with each other to troubleshoot each other's issues to reduce helpdesk workload
Sales CRM (Zendesk Sell)
Zendesk Sell is the tool's CRM system. It helps improve your sales team's productivity and visibility by storing the full customer account, in context, in one central location:
- Reduce the steps needed to pull up customer information
- Improve customer communication with the sales team
- Increase overall productivity of your sales team
Zendesk pros and cons
Like most apps, Zendesk has both pros and cons. As you decide if it's the right tool for you, you’ll need to weigh both to make an informed decision. Below, we’ll cover some of the most significant pros and cons of using Zendesk.
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Pros of Zendesk
- An all-in-one lead generation and customer service platform
- Chat, phone, email, and social media all in one place
- Provides a lot of customization options
- Extensive, powerful reporting and analytics
- Robust integration with third-party applications and systems
- Supports multiple languages
- Can track customer history across different mediums or departments
- Easy to set up teams on the platform
Cons of Zendesk
- Potentially high price tag with complicated pricing plans
- Doesn’t provide robust integration with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, or BigCommerce
- Best support features are only available at higher pricing tiers
- Not the right ticket management system for ecommerce and small businesses
- Requires a significant amount of time and effort to get familiar with the software
- User interface is not intuitive or customizable
When is Zendesk right for your business?
Zendesk currently has over 170,000 paid customers, operates in 160 countries around the world, and has a 4.3 out of 5 stars rating on G2, which helps businesses find helpdesk software choices. It clearly works well for many companies.
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Zendesk may be right for your business if you have:
1) Complex product offerings and a very large team
Zendesk is a behemoth, which is right for behemoth companies. Specifically, companies with 500+ employees and complex product offerings.
One of the biggest benefits of Zendesk for such large teams is that it comes bundled with so many features and backed by so much staff. When Zendesk leverages its entire toolset and consulting, it can service companies that wouldn’t get adequate support from a smaller, more dedicated helpdesk. Think airlines, hospitals, and other enterprises.
If you are large enough to have seven-figure budgets for customer support and expect to work with Zendesk consultants to migrate onto the system, Zendesk may be the right choice for you.
2) A desire for customizable reporting (for Professional and Enterprise customers)
At its core, Zendesk is an enterprise product designed for enterprise organizations that require detailed, advanced reporting and analytics. With the Zendesk Explore add-on, you can have a dedicated product solely for reporting and analytics.
And if you want to pay for more insight, Zendesk consultants will work with your developers and reporting team to streamline insights, build customer configurations, and push analytics to enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools like Oracle and Salesforce.
3) Your business requires enterprise integrations
Zendesk has over 1,000 integrations. It integrates with enterprise-level programs like Oracle, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce. Most tools helpdesk provide integrations suited for customer service teams at online stores and small businesses, but few connect to the kinds of mammoth software needed for banks, airlines, and other businesses with high regulation.
Is Zendesk a suitable helpdesk for ecommerce stores?
As mentioned earlier, Zendesk scores very well on Capterra, which indicates many customers are very happy with the service. But many of those customers are not ecommerce businesses. Based on reviews on other platforms, Zendesk may be too much for some ecommerce businesses.
Shopify is one ecommerce platform that is integrated with Zendesk. There are many Shopify helpdesk apps that help ecommerce businesses manage the communication they receive from customers, including Zendesk.
If you take a look at the reviews for Zendesk on the Shopify App Store, you'll find that ecommerce store owners rate the app as 3.6 out of 5 stars, on average. Of the 134 reviews, 39 were rated 1 star.
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Some of the reasons for low ratings included:
- Difficulty understanding and changing billing options
- Poor customer satisfaction from the support team
- Not user-friendly
- Difficulty setting up a new storefront with an existing account
- Bugs that affect the ability to install with Shopify
- Have to integrate Zendesk Support in the Shopify store and install Shopify into Zendesk, which is complex
- Must already have a Zendesk account set up to use the app in Shopify, which that causes many to look for Zendesk alternatives
- Inability to disable the chat widget
Zendesk pricing options
One of the concerns many users have about Zendesk’s customer support software is its complex pricing tiers. And while complex plans could indicate a host of options to best suit your needs, they could also make it difficult to understand what each plan includes (leading to a surprising lack of features down the line.)
It’s difficult to sum up Zendesk’s pricing since there are so many plans and packages, but you can see the cost (billed monthly) for the eight support-related plans below, plus the price of main add-ons below that:
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If you can't see the pricing on images above, check out the information below:
Plan options listed below with pricing:
- Zendesk Support Team: $25/agent per month
- Zendesk Support Team: $25/agent per month
- Zendesk Support Professional: $59/agent per month
- Zendesk Support Enterprise: $125/agent per month
- Zendesk Suite Team: $59/agent per month
- Zendesk Suite Growth: $99/agent per month
- Zendesk Suite Professional: $125/agent per month
- Zendesk Suite Enterprise: $199/agent per month
- Zendesk Suite Enterprise (Custom): $215+/agent per month
Add-on features listed below (listed for each pricing plan) with pricing:
- Zendesk Chat (Team): $19/month
- Zendesk Chat (Professional): $35/month
- Zendesk Chat (Enterprise): $70/month
- Zendesk Talk (voice support, available for all plans): $2/month per number, plus additional fees per minute, voicemail, transcription, and recording
- Zendesk Guide (Professional): $19/month
- Zendesk Guide (Enterprise): $34/month
Foundational support plans (ticket systems)
Zendesk Foundational Support plans include just the helpdesk software and ticket systems. It has three pricing tiers:
- Zendesk Support Team: For $25 a month per agent, you can get an integrated ticketing system, business roles, and customer interaction history
- Zendesk Support Professional: For $59 a month per agent you get all of the features of the Foundational plan, as well as the option to add business hours, customer satisfaction surveys, multilingual support, service level agreement management, and automatic redaction
- Zendesk Support Enterprise: This $125 per agent a month plan adds conversation routing, custom team roles and permissions, customizable agent workspaces, sandbox test environment, and third-party data storage
Zendesk Suite plans (including features offered)
If you want all of the products Zendesk offers, you'll want a Zendesk Suite plan. Here are the pricing tiers:
- Zendesk Suite Team: For $59 a month per agent, you will receive most of Zendesk's products
- Zendesk Suite Growth: For $99 a month per agent you will add customized ticket layouts, AI-powered knowledge management, a self-service customer portal, SLA management, and multilingual support
- Zendesk Suite Professional: For $125 a month per agent, you get access to more self-service capabilities (like community forums), additional customization features, and more storage bandwidth
- Zendesk Suite Enterprise: For $199+ a month per agent, you get every base product Zendesk offers, plus HIPAA compliance, and events connector for Amazon Web Services, and several other advanced features
Zendesk for sales plans
We didn’t go into much detail for Zendesk Sell, since we’re evaluating Zendesk’s features as a customer service platform. But if you're looking for a product to manage just your sales team, here's how much you’ll pay for Zendesk for Sales:
- Zendesk Sell Team: For $25 a month per user, you get one custom sales pipeline of up to three paid users, and a fully-featured mobile CRM platform with prebuilt apps and integrations
- Zendesk Sell Professional: For $59 a month per user, you get the features of the bottom tier along with the option for custom apps and interactions, unlimited paid users, email tools, analytics, and custom field building
- Zendesk Sell Enterprise: For $125 per user, you'll receive all of Zendesk's sales tools and the option to add two sales pipelines, more analytics, task automation, and customized notifications
What ex-Zendesk customers say about Gorgias
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"What has been really great (and different from Zendesk) is that Gorgias has allowed us to grow tremendously. It allows as many seats as needed. That is really great to be able to flex up the roles of agents as needed.
Cody Szymanski, CX Manager, Shinesty
Zendesk’s designs focus on the needs of enterprise clients of all industries, rather than ecommerce businesses. This means many should-be core features for online stores come at an extra cost. If you're running an ecommerce business, you might find yourself resonating with what some ex-Zendesk customers have to say about Gorgias, an ideal alternative to Zendesk.
- Jonathan Kennedy says, "Zendesk is overkill for 95% of Shopify merchants. I think Gorgias has come in and set a high standard."
- Primewines says, "This is it! Have used Zendesk and tried others, but we really need a system that is simple, robust, and integrates well with Shopify. Nothing comes close to Gorgias."
- Ryan Jones says, "Big fan of Gorgias after shifting from Zendesk. We felt like Zendesk was a bit of overkill for us — being such a large, enterprise solution — we weren't using enough of it to really warrant it."
Take a look at a handful of reviews that mention Zendesk and Gorgias:
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Princess Polly saw a 40% increase in agent productivity after switching away from Zendesk
Princess Polly is one of the fastest-growing online women's fashion brands in the US and Australia. They used to use Zendesk until they switched to Gorgias: "After migrating to Gorgias, we saw a 40% increase in agent productivity,” says Alexandria Collis, Director of Operations at Princess Polly. “It's an amazing tooI. I was able to see an opportunity, grab it by the reins and take control of our ticketing system without working through some of those silos which we experienced with our old helpdesk."
The switch to Gorgias wasn’t just great for agents; the tool helped Princess Polly improve the customer experience they offered. “Gorgias knows the best ways to address customer issues and build the right tool to help meet those needs,” Alexandra says. “I'd recommend Gorgias to anyone that is highly focused on the overall customer experience. Really the experience from the start to finish, and then beyond."
Read Princess Polly’s customer story to learn more about their swap from Zendesk to Gorgias.
Learn more about Gorgias: The #1 Alternative to Zendesk
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Like we said, Zendesk is a powerful product that offers certain enterprise-level features and integrations no other tool in the category can match. But for many ecommerce brands that want dedicated support for their exact type of business, it can be overwhelming and pricey.
Want to see our focus on ecommerce in action? Check out our public feature roadmap. You can see that we’re always improving Gorgias (based on feedback from ecommerce customers). We spend our time making Gorgias the best tool for online stores — that’s it.
Learn why Gorgias is an excellent alternative to Zendesk for ecommerce businesses, including a side-by-side feature breakdown between Zendesk and Gorgias.
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8 Tips to Reduce Shipping Costs and Speed Up Delivery
Anyone who recognizes that ecommerce customers have high expectations these days also recognizes that fast shipping is part of what keeps those customers happy. We’ve seen non-essential items on Amazon be delayed because of COVID-19, and that’s cause quite a bit of grumbling from both customers and ecommerce businesses. While guaranteeing fast shipping to your customers is definitely a good thing--16% of people have abandoned a shopping cart if the estimated delivery time is too slow--it’s a double-edged sword. Your customers will love getting their order in one or two business days, but it can also be cripplingly expensive.
The solution is complicated. If shipping faster costs more, do you pass the cost along to your customers? Do you let it eat into your profit margin? Believe it or not, there are other options. Is it possible to have your cake and eat it too? Yes, but you’ll need a crash course in logistics if you’re going to find affordable ecommerce shipping. Let’s dive in!
1. Implement zone skipping
If you’ve ever had to ship your inventory cross-country and had the accompanying jaw-drop when you discovered how expensive that was going to be, you’ve encountered shipping zones before. The further you ship your products, the more it’s going to cost -- obviously -- so how do you get around it?
The answer is zone skipping. To skip zones, you need to store your inventory strategically so that you can choose which location to ship from (and pick the closest one). For example, if you get an order from a customer in Los Angeles and you have inventory stored in Miami and Las Vegas, you’ll want to send them that product from Vegas to save a bunch of money on shipping (and ensure that the order gets to them speedily).
Whether you store and manage your own inventory or rely on a national fulfillment network of warehouses, zone skipping is a smart money saving solution. For example, you’ll probably keep some inventory in a warehouse in Miami, have a location in Pennsylvania to hit the northeast, maybe one in St. Louis for the midwest, and one in Las Vegas to cover the west coast.
2. Consider dimensional weight
Shipping carriers don’t just measure the weight of your packages in pounds and ounces anymore - if this is news to you, this could be a major opportunity to decrease your costs. When a carrier determines the cost of shipping, they charge you the greater of the two weights - dimensional and actual. Actual weight is just what it sounds like, but dimensional weight measures the size of your package. The bigger it is, the more it costs to ship, even if it’s as light as a feather. It makes affordable ecommerce shipping tough for businesses with large or bulky packages, because they always get charged the dimensional weight.
The good news is if your dimensional weight is greater than your actual weight, you can decrease the size of the package to save money. The more you can minimize the volume of your package the more you can save. Think about how to streamline your packaging experience, whether it’s removing unnecessary infill, using boxes that are more specifically fit for your inventory, or getting rid of any bulky extras that you’re throwing in. Making any one of those changes, even if it seems small, can add up to be huge over time.
3. Determine whether to ship flat-rate or not
For something that claims to simplify the costs of shipping, it is a lot more complicated than it seems at first glance. However, offering flat rate shipping has the potential to save you money, so let’s go over what kinds of businesses can save big with flat rates.
Each carrier has its own flat rate shipping system, so it’s well worth your time to check out a full explainer of flat rate shipping. However, it boils down to a few specific instances in which flat shipping could help you save big.
The first is if your products are small, but heavy - this means you’re getting hefty shipping charges due to the actual weight of the product, and shipping in a flat rate box that doesn’t charge by weight could save you a lot. The second is if you ship from coast to coast frequently - for example, if you have a warehouse on the east coast but a lot of your orders come from the west coast. When you ship with UPS or USPS, the flat rate shipping charge doesn’t change depending on distance, so you’d likely save big there. It could also be a good choice if you need to charge your customers a flat rate, or if you fulfill your orders yourself (and then you could take advantage of the convenience).
If you don’t fall into the above categories, though, stay away from flat shipping. It will likely cost you more in the end.
4. Offer bulk rate shipping discounts
Buy more, pay less. That’s the dream, right? It is when you can manage to get a bulk rate discount from your shipping carrier. If you’re selling a high volume of products and you haven’t looked into getting a bulk discount, you need to get on that ASAP. However, it can be kind of confusing to figure out how to get that discount, as it’s not exactly something that the shipping carriers freely advertise.
There are a few ways you can try to get discounts for more affordable ecommerce shipping from carriers. If you’re a small business and you’re fulfilling everything yourself, you’re most likely to get bulk rates by using a platform like ShipStation or Shippo. They’ll let you compare prices and figure out the cheapest way to ship your items as quickly as possible, and they’re able to take advantage of bulk rate discounts by negotiating with carriers on behalf of all of their clients. Shopify offers a very similar service through their own platform, called Shopify Shipping.
However, unless you’re an enterprise-scale company, the chances are good that the best rates are going to come if you partner with a 3PL fulfillment company. They typically ship a huge volume of packages and are thus able to negotiate a discounted rate - without you having to do as much work.
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5. Beef up your last mile options
The last mile - metaphorically speaking, anyway - is the last step between the warehouse and the customer. This last step can sometimes take the longest. If you’ve ever tracked a package on its way to your house, you may have noticed the significant gap of time between it being out for delivery and actually being delivered. That’s because this step is complicated and relies on a lot of different cogs spinning together as one machine. It can depend on the third party you work with, how busy they are, where their facility is located, what courier they use, and many other factors that are completely out of your control.
As you can imagine, cutting down on the time and cost spent in the last mile is critical. But how can you do it?
First, don’t be afraid to A/B test different courier services to see which one does better. Something like a drone delivery service, while very cool, is probably way too expensive. But trying different companies can help you find that sweet spot between costly and quick. While Fedex and UPS frequently outsource to USPS for the last mile because of their coverage, other options have popped up in the last few years. Just like Uber Eats or Lyft, drivers contract with companies and use their car to complete deliveries - in this case, getting your package to the customer’s door.
You can also consider a pick-up option, which cuts out that last mile entirely. Make the customer come to you! If you have brick-and-mortar stores, setting up in-store pickup is an easy choice. If not, you may even want to consider participating in something like the UPS Access Point program.
6. Encourage larger average order sizes
In general, the more items you can ship in the same box, the more you can save on shipping. And when you’re saving on shipping, you can give some of those savings back by offering upgraded fast shipping or free shipping. But how?
A common way to encourage larger order sizes is to offer free shipping once they hit a certain minimum (like $50). However, you can try a new take on that, which is to offer upgraded shipping once they hit the minimum, which will reward them for ordering more by getting it to them faster. To set your minimum, look at your average order amount and set it a bit higher than that, which should bring your overall average order amount up over time. To do a trial run, try doing a customer appreciation campaign with upgraded shipping at your new minimum to gauge the popularity.
Another option is to sell in kits or in bulk when you can. By packaging best-selling or complementary products together you can easily increase the size of the order (and it’s an easy upsell for your customer as well). Ultimately, the more items you can fit in one shipment, the cheaper it will be to get it there quickly. This is a great way to balance affordable ecommerce shipping with fast shipping speeds.
7. Minimize the weight of your product and/or packaging
Hot take: no one cares about your inserts. Not-so-hot take: the unboxing experience is a crucial part of the impression you make on your customer. Both are true; how?
It’s true that unboxing is a big part of your image, and it takes on a life of its own on social media. The problem is that when companies think of unboxing, they think the more the better - and that’s not necessarily true. Practically, those materials take up valuable space and weight in the box, leading to marginal increases in shipping cost that become significant at scale. They also take longer to assemble, and all of the inserts you throw in will be tossed in the recycling bin (or the garbage) eventually, even if they do bring in an extra lead or two. It’s not worth it.
What is worth it is designing smart. Your unboxing experience doesn’t have to be over the top and filled to the brim with extras - a smart, thoughtful experience is just as meaningful for your customers, and packaging trends are moving that way as well. Consider talking to a package design company to see how you can really wow with design and ditch the inserts, or think about how using less can actually be more effective (like moving towards a more environmentally-friendly image).
8. Restrict where you offer fast shipping
Lastly, fast shipping does not have to be an all-or-nothing game. With the U.S. being the size that it is, at a certain point, you’re going to have to make some exceptions to where you can get to quickly. Just ask anyone in Alaska or Hawaii-- they’ll be the first to tell you that it takes ages for shipments to arrive. Finding fast and affordable ecommerce shipping for the entire U.S. is going to be pretty difficult, especially if you’re not working for a 3PL, so you’re going to have to make some sacrifices. Sorry Alaska and Hawaii.
To make conditional fast shipping work for you, you can set parameters that will allow you to offer fast shipping where it is reasonable and affordable to you. This could be within major urban zones, or areas within a certain radius of the warehouse(s) that store your inventory. You can consider shipping to more remote areas, or places a certain distance outside of your core shipping radius, to be like shipping outside the lower 48. Even if you can’t offer fast shipping to all of your customers, you can at least increase your conversion rate where you do offer it without breaking the bank.
Related: Our list of the 12 best shipping softwares for ecommerce.
Final thoughts
Fast shipping and low costs are a balancing act. With customers expecting everything faster than ever (and freer than ever) it can feel overwhelming to try to make everyone happy. In reality, you’re going to be best served by cutting your own shipping costs as much as you can, and taking advantage of any deals you can get by using special services. Hope that cake tastes good!
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A 10-step Guide to Ecommerce SEO for Beginners
To make a profit, helping people find you easily is a top priority. That’s where SEO comes into play.
This in-depth guide will help you:
- Find out how eCommerce SEO functions
- Learn why the SERP position is so important to a website
- Understand which steps you need to take to improve rankings
What is ecommerce SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a marketing method for getting more organic traffic from search engines such as Google.
Although paid ads will attract more people as well, SEO will cost you a lot less. Moreover, it can help you yield better results in the long run. Paid ads are hindered by things like ad blockers and ad blindness -- and they only work when you’re investing money into them.
In ecommerce, SEO requires you to optimize meta- and product descriptions, headlines, website speed, and design, and many other things.
Why does your SERP position matter?
Every day, Google processes roughly 3.5 billion searches. That amounts to around 40,000 searches every second.
A good number of these searches are product-related. That means there are plenty of opportunities to grab shoppers’ attention.
But most people are aware of this fact.
As a result, there are literally millions of stores around the Internet. The competition is fierce. Failing to rank on the first page of Google will result in total failure for one simple reason.
When looking for a web store, most people only look at the first few results. That’s not a hunch -- it’s backed up by the latest research. A recent study conducted by Chitika revealed that the first organic result on Google usually gets 95% of traffic.
Although thousands of ecommerce store owners invest huge amounts of money into optimization annually, it doesn’t mean they’re doing it right.
That’s why you need to ensure that you’re concentrating on important aspects of your website to avoid spending needless amounts of money.
If you want people to find your products easily, follow these 10 steps…
1. Take care of your structure
The way your site is organized plays a major role in your optimization efforts. Two basic elements every ecommerce website needs to have::
Breadcrumb navigation
This type of navigation allows customers to know what page they’re on, without constantly looking at the URL bar above. If you want to see good use of breadcrumb navigation, then visit Dormify’s official site.
Clean URLs
You also need to have clear and clean URLs. That means your URL address needs to be easy to read. Let’s say you’re selling suits online and that your domain name is www.suitshopping.com. You don’t want URLs to be made up out of random characters.
You want to have them clean for two reasons: a) to make sure Google indexes the site quickly b) help visitors navigate the website easily. Here’s how URLs should/shouldn’t look:
- Messy URL: https://www.suitshopping.com/index.php?page=blog
- Clean URL: https://www.suitshopping.com/blog
With clear navigation, you’ll ensure that Google indexes your website properly and that visitors can find their way around the site seamlessly.
2. Research and target long-tail keywords
When it comes to keywords, instead of going for one-word-long, general keywords, targeting long-tail ones should be your priority.
If you’re just starting out, you can’t expect to compete with the big dogs for general keywords -- no matter your market or niche.
That’s the only way you’ll see results.
Just take Sportsman’s Warehouse for example. If you’re into camping or fishing, you’ve probably heard about their website. Five years ago, they were competing for major, hard-to-rank-for keywords like “finishing equipment” and “camping gear.”
Then, in 2015, they started focusing on more specific, long-tail keywords. After 12 months, they tripled their ROI. Compared to the year before, they saw a 31% increase in organic search and a 25% rise in organic revenue.
3. Optimize your product pages properly
As an online merchant, your objective is to sell as many products as you can, right? Naturally, one of your biggest concerns needs to be making sure that product pages not only look great but that they’re optimized with Google algorithm in mind.
Product descriptions need to contain the correct keywords and all of the images have to be tagged properly. You also can’t forget to optimize your:
- H1/H2/H3 Tags - On-page text used by Google to interpret website content
- Meta Titles - Bits of HTML code that tell Google the title of the page
- Meta Descriptions - Piece of code that says Google what the page is about
You also can’t forget about product page design.
Take the case of Lightproof, for instance. It shows how a small change can mean a lot to your bottom line. By simply making a change to their CTA button, the electronic accessory company managed to increase its monthly revenue by 16%.
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4. Ensure that your site is friendly for mobile
Whether you’re aware of it or not, a large portion of visitors will visit your store via smartphone.
The number of mobile shoppers is surprisingly high.
Consider this: last year on Black Friday, a third of people only shopped on their mobile devices. So while a mobile-first approach will help you rank better - mobile optimization is now officially a ranking factor - but it will also increase sales.
Here’s what to do:
- Make website/store design is responsive
- Keep the page loading time on mobile low
- Create a simple checkout for mobile shoppers
Also, read about the Google mobile penalty. That way, you’ll know if you’re doing anything wrong.
5. Add sitemap to Google Search Console
Most popular platforms - including Shopify and WooCommerce - generate a sitemap automatically, you should still take things a bit further. By that, we mean that you should go ahead and add your own sitemap to Google Search Console.
Why is this so important?
You want Google to index every page you’ve created correctly. From basic to product pages, ensuring that Google has found all of the pages will validate your efforts.
If you’ve never submitted anything to GSC, here’s a quick guide on how to submit your sitemap.
6. Optimize your page loading time
Letting your website become too slow is a huge mistake. They don’t say that we live in an age of instant gratification for nothing. Here’s the catch: the slower the site is, the less popular it is.
Slow loading speeds can hinder your entire sales funnel. 52% of shoppers (on mobile) will leave your site if it doesn't load right away. So if you don’t want to start losing customers quickly, do everything in your power to keep things fast.
When it comes to loading speeds, every millisecond counts. Having your website a second slower than it was initially can cost you a lot.
A one-second delay in loading time can reduce your conversion rate by 7%. If your website is bringing in $10,000 monthly, it will cost you $700. On a yearly level, that amounts to $8,400, which is not a small sum by any stretch of the imagination.
7. Invest more in content creation
No matter how many times we hear it and how cliché it sounds at this point, content will always be king. After all, it appeals both to people and Google.
As HubSpot explains, people who prioritize content creation are 13X more likely to see a positive return on their investment. Content creation may be hard work, but it’s more than worth it.
Your blog needs to be updated on a regular basis. Whether you want to invest in article, audio, or video creation, it doesn’t really matter. How much content you need to create and at what frequency you should post it is all up to you.
Consider using social media and email marketing to distribute your content for wider reach.
8. Create content that’s easy to digest
Let’s stay on the topic of content creation for a bit. Most people will not read every single word you write. Research shows that less than 2 in 10 people will read an entire web page before leaving it.
People want to find the thing they’re looking for quickly.
They don’t want to spend an hour going through material only to read a few sentences they wanted. That’s why you need to keep your paragraphs short, easy to digest, and scan.
Readability apps that can assist you here are WebFX’s Readability Test Tool and Datayze’s Readability Analyzer.
9. Work out a link building strategy
We’ve been talking about ranking so much thus far, but we still haven’t discussed the most effective technique for improving your SERP rank: link building.
If you haven’t heard about link building, here’s an explanation: this is a practice of building one-way hyperlinks to improve visibility on Google. Some of the more widely-used strategies include outreach, guest posting, and broken link building.
The more people link back to your site, the more valuable your store is in the eyes of Google. The problem with ecommerce link building is that many websites don’t want to link to someone selling something. That’s why you need to get creative:
- Affiliate Marketing: You can always offer discount codes and landing pages to affiliate websites in your industry to give them the initiative to help you with a backlink.
- Resource Sections: Create guides and educational content for your blog and reach out to blogs in your niche to get featured in their “resources” section.
- Bloggers + Giveaways: Run giveaways with influencers and bloggers in your industry to score backlinks, brand exposure, and social reach.
10. Don’t forget about internal linking
Let’s face it: not all pages are created equal. Some are more Google-friendly than others. This can be used to your advantage. Use popular pages on the site to refer consumers to product pages to create link equality.
By placing links to products on these high-ranking pages, you’ll drive more visitors to the shopping section of your website.
Interlinking also contributes to organic visits. Just take a look at Ninja Outreach and their effort. By ensuring that their pages are strategically interlinked, they managed to increase their organic traffic by a staggering 40%.
Start investing in SEO ASAP
Getting organic traffic has never been easy for any niche, nor will it ever be. In ecommerce, it can be especially challenging. Unlike PPC, it can take several months to see results from an SEO campaign.
Does this mean that SEO is not worth it? Of course, it is. Standing out in Google is important for every store. (If you have a Shopify, check out our guide to Shopify SEO.)
Before launching your very first campaign, here’s what you need to remember:
- Without optimization, your business as a whole will definitely suffer
- The higher you rank, the more visitors will you be able to attract
- If you want to do SEO correctly, take it one step at a time and be patient
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Influencer Marketing for Ecommerce: Strategies & Tips for Getting Started
Almost 50% of consumers depend on ecommerce influencers to guide their purchasing decisions.
Partnering up with an influencer your target audience resonates with can help you attract new customers, cultivate your community, and grow your sales.
We've discussed the benefits of social media for customer service, but in this blog we'll discuss using social media influencers to expand your brand's reach. Here’s what you’ll learn in this guide:
- What influencer partnerships are all about and how can you use them
- Why companies similar to yours choose influencer marketing
- How to find the right influencers and get started on your first campaign
What is influencer marketing for ecommerce?
Influencer marketing is the process of working with social media influencers to advertise your ecommerce products on their social channels to their followers. Usually, you'll work with influencers whose followers are within your target audience.
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How to leverage influencer marketing
You know how it works, how to use it, but you’re still not sure how to create an influencer marketing campaign. Don’t worry, it’s not that complicated.
Here’s what you need to know about launching an influencer campaign.
1. Create a marketing persona
You can’t pick a partner if you don’t know who you want to attract. That’s why creating a “marketing persona” needs to be the first thing you do. Determining what age, gender, and interests of your average customer can help you a lot.
Let’s say you’re selling women's clothing. You do your homework and find out that most of your visitors are ladies in their 40s from North America and Canada. This knowledge narrows your search down. You need an English-speaking influencer that appeals to middle-aged women.
That can get things going.
2. Select social platforms
Once you get to know your audience, you’ll easily find out what are some of their social media platforms on the Internet. Consider platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
If you’re looking for a universal solution, then you should reach out to Instagram influencers, since the platform has one of the most diverse user-bases. According to Social Media Today, Instagram is the most active influencer platform.
3. Look for the right influencer for your store
You of course want a partner with a good reach. Contacting a person with less than 1,000 followers doesn’t make any sense, correct? That person can’t be even called an influencer. But you shouldn’t get stuck on every metric.
Engagement is what you’re looking for.
Sometimes, smaller is better. You might be surprised to know that micro-influencers are far more effective than big ones. In fact, an average micro-influencer gets 7X more engagement than a far-reaching one.
4. Reach out to multiple influencers
As soon as you nail what type of audience you’re targeting and what kind of person would suit your store best, you need to start getting in contact with influencers. However, you can’t just reach out to one and hope you get a response right away.
You need to contact a few social media personalities at the same time. Using a platform such as FameBit, or #Paid you’ll be able to contact several influencers, sort them by followers, age, and other metrics that can be helpful for your marketing campaign.
5. Evaluate your potential partners
As we keep saying, you need to find someone that your buyers will find relatable. Relatability is twice as important as popularity if you want to attract the right kind of people.
Talk to the influencers, see what their values are, do they align with your values, and see whether or not they’d shop at your store if you didn’t reach out to them.
6. Set the objectives for your partnership
Like any other form of marketing, your influencer strategy can and has to be measured. You can’t expect to have a successful strategy without some tweaks along the way. And you can’t really make any corrections to your strategy if you don't know how it’s performing in the first place.
According to research from the Digital Marketing Institute, these are the biggest KPIs for measuring your effectiveness:
- Reach and Awareness
- Audience Growth
- Referral Traffic
- Conversion Rate
- User Engagement
Your KPI choice depends on your needs and ambitions. Sit down with the rest of your team, discuss in which direction you want to take things, and only then select important KPIs.
7. Select a platform to measure your campaign
For three-quarters of business owners, measuring ROI is the biggest challenge of an influencer marketing campaign. Nonetheless, measuring success should be one of the most important parts of your campaign.
You need to have the right tools if you want to get the job done right. NeoRech can help you track referrals and monitor the effectiveness of every single influencer you have, while TapInfluence can help you measure your ROI more effectively.
8. Launch your first influencer campaign
Once you have your influencers in place, your KPIs all set, and all of the measuring tools in place, you can give your partners permission to start the campaign.
For the first couple of days, the surge of visitors might not be huge. However, after a month or so, you can expect to see some serious results from the campaign.
9. Ask for testimonials
This is a perfect opportunity to get some content for your website. You can always ask for a couple of testimonials from the people you’re working with and place the quote alongside their pictures on your website.
Now your visitors can see who works with you.
Every person that visits your website will know that the influencer vouches for your store, products, and organization. That testimonial will allow you to build your brand, establish credibility, and boost trust among your consumer base.
10. Make the partnership mutually beneficial
Last but not least, try to make the partnership mutually beneficial for both parties. By that we mean, consider offering the influencer some discount codes or some of your products.
The influencer can and will send a good number of users your way. That shouldn’t be a one-and-done deal. More than a third of influencers like to work with brands long-term. If the first campaign turns out as planned, why not do it a few more times?
Why businesses rely on influencer marketing
A business can’t rely only on influencers to increase sales. You should look at this as an enhancement tool for your current marketing strategy.
It’s a great, cost-effective way of improving marketing efforts. Nearly 90% of marketers feel that influencer marketing has a better ROI than other, more traditional marketing channels.
Let’s look at a few more ways influencer marketing can help your store…
They have real sway with their followers
While a niche influencer may not be able to reach millions of people, they can still have a lot of influence over a small group of users. Niche influencers attract are comprised out of users who share the same interests, buy the same products, and visit the same stores.
Therefore, by working with an influential person, you’ll be able to reach that small amount of people and turn them into regular customers. You just need to find a person that caters to your target audience. For example, if you go into a random gym in your area, you’ll probably find someone wearing Gymshark clothing. The company is huge. At the moment, it’s valued at about $200 million.
And how did the company manage to find the right influencers? By knowing their target audience.
Their gym clothing was aimed at millennials. As soon as Gymshark launched a line of women’s clothing, they sought out young fitness influencers like Nikki Blackketter to team up with them. Soon after, their “Flex Leggings” became a huge hit among millennials.
They're really relatable
As we established, while celebrities may be influencers, they’re usually seen as spokespeople for certain brands and companies. Why is that? That’s because celebrities live completely different lives than 99% of us.
Simply put, the average person can’t relate to most celebrities. Relatability is everything if you want your campaign to generate real results. Almost 90% of Gen Z-ers and Millennials follow influencers because they’re relatable.
They can help niche or taboo businesses
If you’re selling niche products that aren’t considered mainstream, you may have trouble finding success with mainstream advertising. For instance, anything that Google deems “dangerous advertising” is heavily prohibited.
Everything CBD and marijuana-related products to martial arts equipment and hunting gear all fall into that category. Stores that sell similar products can get a healthy amount of visitors and brand exposure from influencers.
Partner up to get your profits up
If you want to partner up with an ecommerce influencer to grow your online store, you should start by thinking about how that partnership can help your store increase sales and help your brand become more known. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Influencer marketing works perfectly on people who dislike traditional marketing
- Social platforms allow influencers to make the most out of their connection with users
- Continuously investing in influencer marketing can be beneficial for both parties
And remember: even though influencer marketing is still new and always adapting, it’s just a regular marketing strategy that needs to be monitored and measured. For that, you need the best tools. Speaking of which, check out our post on the best social media integrations for Shopify.
If you are starting out with an influencer campaign, especially on Instagram you may see a spike in engagement on your Instagram feed. If those users are commenting on your posts - especially your products, don’t just ignore them, welcome them to your community.
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10 Customer Appreciation Ideas to Grow Your Business & Retain Return Shoppers
Your customers are the backbone of your business. Ask any successful entrepreneur and they’ll agree that your number one priority should be to nurture satisfaction with your shoppers. Show them some love and run a customer appreciation campaign.
What is customer appreciation?
A win-win for your shoppers and your brand, a customer appreciation campaign or a shopper appreciation campaign is a promotion that a company runs to celebrate its customers. It can include discounts, small gifts or freebies, contests, and more. The point is to delight your customers.
You can run a shopper appreciation campaign annually, quarterly, monthly -- there are no set rules. But, one constant with all successful shopper appreciation promotions is that they show customers recognition and gratitude for shopping with the brand beyond a simple ‘thank you.’
A promotion like this will help you retain shoppers and increase eCommerce conversions.
Customer appreciation ideas to show gratitude and retain loyal customers
Let’s explore some ideas to kick off your next customer appreciation campaign.
- Run a flash sale
- Feature customers in social media posts
- Make it an annual event
- Share brand promotions with your personal network
- Send handwritten notes
- Send free swag
- Follow up with your brand advocates
- Donate to a cause
- Send a gift card
- Reward customers with a loyalty program
- Offer a price cut
1) Run a flash sale
This idea goes against what I mentioned earlier about letting shoppers know what you’re planning in advance (to generate hype). But, if you have limited resources and you think it’s time to show customers you truly care, a flash sale is a viable option.
Above is an example from Hand-Picked, an online jewelry and gift retailer. For just four hours, everything in their store was on sale at a 40% discount. They announced the sale on social media for their followers, which created an atmosphere of exclusivity and urgency -- very appealing.
2) Feature your shoppers on social media posts
People love it when you love them. Show your customers appreciation by sharing their images on social media to your followers. Attention like this makes shoppers feel like they do when their new friend shares a photo of them -- like they’re someone to be proud of.
Rianna Phillips is an accessories seller with a flair for glam. In the above example, they share a photo of their customer, @imb_amande, “looking effortlessly chic.” In this case, they’ve placed their product (a pretty, pink phone case) in a real-life glamorous-looking scenario while showing their gratitude for the purchase; this tactic appeals to the customer(s) you promote and onlookers who might want to try the product.
3) Make it an annual event
One way to encourage customer loyalty is to make sure your shoppers have something to look forward to. Plan your promotions in advance and make sure your shoppers know that they can consistently expect exciting deals from your brand.
[Image source: Plum Deluxe]
Above, you see a landing page that Plum Deluxe keeps up on their website all year long. A recent tweet with a product photo let their followers know that time was almost up to get in on the discounts for what has been their full month of gratitude. Follow their lead and keep your shoppers interested in you long-term.
4) Share brand promotions with your personal network
Sometimes it’s beneficial to share your professional promotions with your personal connections. When you say thank you to your shoppers is one of the better times to do so. You don’t want to pitch your products and services to your friends and family because that’s annoying. But, there are ways to make brand shares tasteful.
Amethyst Babe is an online boutique body product retailer. Behind the scenes, @theillestpisces runs the show. With her personal followers, she retweets her branded promotional tweet. Now, everyone knows, if they order, they will receive a surprise gift with their purchase. Which of your store’s posts should you be sharing with your personal network?
5) Send handwritten notes
Thank you notes are a classic way of letting someone know you appreciate them. You send them to your friends and family. Why not send them to your customers? Consumers absolutely love handwritten cards because they give the shopping experience a tremendously personal touch.
Casper is a mattress company that sends handwritten thank you notes with their deliveries. They keep them simple and welcome customers to their “family.” You can take this idea and run with it for nearly any product offering. If you couldn’t possibly write enough notes yourself, look into a printing alternative.
6) Send free swag
Branded merch is a win for both parties because your shoppers will appreciate the gesture. And, if they choose to sport your gift, they’ll be marketing your company to their friends and family in the real world. It’s like a thank you note that serves as a commercial for your brand.
Above, you see some free Beatles pins that are going into some packages as surprise gifts for Pizzawednesday’s weekend Etsy orders. What better way to get people excited about your products than send them a little extra? What unique swag could you use to delight your shoppers?
7) Follow up with your brand advocates
When your customers check in with you on social media or they tag you in their posts, make sure to follow up. Engaging with advocates, both big and small, gives you an opportunity to make someone happy. Plus, it’s just good PR. Don’t just aim for influencers, either.
Every brand mention is a chance for you to deliver an exceptional experience to your customers. Love Always Claire understands the value in simply acknowledging shoppers when they have something nice to say. You never know what good can happen for your business if you ignore your patrons.
8) Donate to a cause
On behalf of your most loyal customers and brand advocates, consider making a donation to a cause. This is one of the best forms of PR you can get. You’ll have a fanatic on your team who wants to share what you’ve done with the rest of the world, and you’ll make people feel great.
On behalf of the Burst Southeast Team, Burst Oral Care donated $2,500 to the Wounded Warrior Project, for example. During your promotion, you can choose a charity to donate to or run a contest wherein the winner chooses which organization gets your donation. Just make it fun and relevant. Because of its nature, this tactic is always a success.
9) Send a gift card
Another classic way to express your gratitude, a gift card can be an excellent promotional tactic. Depending on your budget, you can send a gift card for your online store or send your shoppers out to lunch or for a coffee. For the most impact, you’re best to execute this tactic as a surprise.
For example, when a customer couldn’t find what they were looking for in their local store, Argos sent them a gift voucher to use online. In this case, they were making up for a mistake, but you don’t have to mess things up before you deliver a delightful experience. Try taking a look at your ten top-purchasing customers from the past year and send them a gift card.
10) Reward customers with a loyalty program
A loyalty and rewards program is one of the best ways for an online store to create customer retention. And, it’s an excellent way to show your appreciation for the purchases made. in the eyes of your customers, make sure your rewards are worth talking about. If you do, they will share their story with the world.
Above, Luisaviaroma created a hit with a “private sale” for special shoppers. They sent a huge discount to a select few on their luxury fashion, making at least one customer feel like the star of the show. And, that is how a brand effectively shows their appreciation.
11) Offer a price cut
Sometimes a simple discount can get people excited and chatting. And, it doesn’t necessarily have to be 75% off to cause a stir. Find out how much you can afford to shave off your prices and start handing out savings to your loyal shoppers. It’s a simple offer and it works.
Marshall Artist, modern tailoring online, offered a 15% discount for new shoppers and it got people talking. When customers were able to connect over their purchases, it created a sense of community in the Tweetosphere. And, people were connecting over the business in a positive light. You can mimic this tactic by offering percentage and dollar amounts off your prices for specific actions.
Customer appreciation campaign best practices
Your customer base is inspired to shop when they feel like they’re getting something of value. To most consumers, there’s nothing more valuable than feeling appreciated. Follow these best practices when creating a campaign to acknowledge your gratitude.
1) Start promoting in advance
Before your campaign commences, it is crucial to give potential shoppers a sneak peek of what’s to come. You need people to know that something big is about to happen so they can get ready to engage. Anticipation is at the heart of a successful campaign.
So, run a pre-launch email series and let social media followers know what’s happening. You can also add a countdown bar to the top of your website or online store; try using it as a lead-generation tool by collecting email addresses of shoppers who want a notification when your promotion officially starts.
By letting people know what’s up in advance, you ensure more traffic to your store on the day of launch.
2) Make it all about your customers, not your brand
If you want shoppers to promote you, you need to promote your shoppers. Don’t focus too much on your product or service. Instead, feature customers as the VIP of your party. You’re not exactly saying, ‘happy birthday,’ but you want customers to feel like you are -- you’re celebrating and it should be fun. I’ll bet you can come up with something just as clever while staying relevant to your products and services. Then, bring it to social media.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great platforms to get shoppers engaged with your brand. So, call your customers to action on these social channels and thank them for joining in.
3) Make every shopper feel important
To your customers, the engagement they have with your brand is one-on-one. So, keep this in mind when you connect with people. Don’t talk to shoppers as if you’re speaking to a crowd. Especially since your interactions primarily take place online, remember to keep the experience hyper-personalized.
Encourage your customer support team to enthusiastically address each customer who engages with you on social media, email, live chat, and by phone. Then, try to enhance the experience by letting everyone know about the promotion you’re currently running.
4) Carry the vibes into the future
The fun shouldn’t stop here. In fact, you should use your promotion as a springboard for creating an exceptional brand experience all year long. Shoppers appreciate consistency. So, show them that you can consistently make them feel like a vital part of your business every single day.
[Image Source: Sunski]
Use your customer appreciation campaign as an opportunity to launch a new, ongoing campaign. Here are some of the best types of long-term campaigns to start during a shopper appreciation week or day promotion:
- User-Generated Content (UGC) Campaign - Start a hashtag promotion on Instagram, ask for product reviews, or ask your shoppers to submit certain photos of your products for a contest. Incentivize customer action with a discount or gift. Then, keep it going to continue generating interest in your brand each day of the year.
- Referral Program - It might be time to start asking for referrals. If so, you can use customer appreciation week as a starting point. Maybe you could offer additional bonuses during launch, but make sure your satisfied shoppers want to continue telling other people about your products.
- Loyalty or Rewards Program - A loyalty program can go hand-in-hand with your new referral program. And, it doesn’t have to end with your shopper appreciation day or week.
- Discount - Now might be the time to start giving shoppers a new shipping discount on sales over a certain price. Or, maybe you want to start offering markdowns on bulk orders in certain categories. The possibilities are endless.
Ultimately, you want to use your campaign to kickstart a new company lifestyle, not just a few sales. If you’re interested in making the processes easier on yourself, check out some of our favorite Shopify apps, which include platforms for ongoing loyalty, rewards, and other campaigns.
5 Customer appreciation scripts to inspire your support team
Right now, customer appreciation scripts might be what your team needs to help set the mood when connecting with customers. During your campaign, share these scripts with your team to get them ready for the big push. They can use them as general guidelines to follow when communicating with shoppers.
Script #1. Simple greeting
Hello there, I’m happy to help with whatever it is you need. Before we get started, did you know that we’re celebrating shopper appreciation week? To say thank you for your patronage, I’d like to offer you some exclusive perks. Some of them are super cool. Are you interested in hearing more?
Script #2. Pitch a newsletter signup
Hi! I see that you haven’t signed up for our newsletter yet [Make sure this is true.]. As a way to say thank you, we post regular articles that can help you understand how to better understand your [Insert Product or Product Category] and other relevant [Insert Main Blog Theme] tips and advice.
Right now, we’re offering [Insert Gift or Discount Offering] to anyone who signs up with their email address. Would you like me to subscribe you to our newsletter and show you how to redeem your reward?
Script #3. Propose a contest entry
Hey there, thank you for reaching out/ stopping in! As a way to give back to you and our other shoppers, we’re running a contest right now. All you have to do is [Insert Customer Action(s)], and you’ll have a chance to win [Insert Prize]. And, just for playing, you’ll get [Insert Gift or Discount Offering]. Would you like to play?
Script #4. Solve a general problem
[After the problem is solved...] I’m so happy I could help you, today! I sincerely appreciate your patronage. Before I let you go, I want to say ‘thank you,’ and let you know about a promotion we’re running to show that we appreciate you for being a part of our family.
Today/ This week only, we’re offering [Insert Gift or Discount Offering] to anyone who [Insert Customer Action(s)]. Would you like me to send you more information?
Script #5. Solve a problem for an unhappy customer
[After the problem is solved...] Whew, I know that was frustrating for you. I want to say that I’m grateful for your patience while we sorted through that mess. Your business is important to us.
As a thank you, I’d like to offer you [Insert Gift or Discount Offering]. If you’re interested, all you would need to do is [Insert Customer Action(s)]. Would you like to proceed?
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The above scripts can be modified to suit your customer needs, brand voice, the skill level of your customer support team, and the nature of your promotion. The examples should be used as a starting point to get everyone’s wheels turning and the creative juices flowing. You might also like these customer service quotes to help keep your support agents motivated throughout the year.
Final thoughts
When it comes to shopper appreciation, the bottom line is to make sure you find a way to show your gratitude to the people who matter most. You want to satisfy your customers and you wan to increase your sales. In the end, what matters most is the relationships you build. So, if you focus on that, you will certainly be successful.
Remember to be authentic, transparent, and open in all of your ecommerce marketing campaigns. If you’re not, your brand will stick out like a sore thumb. There’s nothing people hate more in this day and age than a phony, especially when it comes to where they spend their money. What tactics have you used to show your appreciation for the people who visit your online store?
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