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.
Access Auto QA right within the ticket view. Find it on the right-hand side of customer conversations.
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?
Improve Auto QA scoring by clicking the triangle to expand each category and entering feedback into the textbox.
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.
Monitor the number of tickets Auto QA has reviewed, your average resolution completeness rate, and your communication score.
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.
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.
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.
70% of CX teams use AI and automation to handle support inquiries during the holiday season. Gorgias
Resolution time should be your main focus for 2025
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.
71% of CX teams used resolution time to measure success during the holiday season in 2024. Gorgias Customer Expectations Survey
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:
AI Agent helped Glamnetic reduce first response time by tackling repetitive tickets like change of address requests. Gorgias
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
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.
AI Agent supports pre-sales questions by offering detailed responses, like which glasses would work best for a customer’s 8 year old son. Gorgias
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.
Review AI Agent’s performance within the Statistics view. Gorgias If you’d like to change the metrics you see here, select “Edit Columns.”
Navigate to the ‘Performance’ section to switch out the metrics you track for AI Agent. Gorgias
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.
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.
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.
AI Agent is context-aware and uses information from its knowledge sources to respond to customers in real time.
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.
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.
Onboard, Automate, Observe, and Coach AI Agent to flawlessly integrate it into your team.
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.
The AI Library recommends pre-written articles based on what your customers ask you.
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.
Access premade Guidance templates or make your own customer Guidance for AI Agent.
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.
AI Agent’s tone of voice can be altered with preset voices or custom instructions.
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.
Test AI Agent’s responses to ensure accurate answers.
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.
AI Agent’s answers improve as you provide feedback.
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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See how Gorgias’s Shopify integration makes customer support easier—fewer tabs, faster replies, happier customers, and more revenue.
By Holly Stanley
0 min read . By Holly Stanley
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.
Customer order data, including their shipping address and product details, can be found directly in the ticket.
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.
Agents can perform Shopify Actions like duplicate an order directly from Gorgias.
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.
Shopify data lets agents create Macros, templated responses with personalized data.
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.
Rules let you identify VIP customers using Shopify variables.
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.
Revenue Statistics highlight which support channels and agents are best at generating sales.
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.
Using Gorgias’s AI Agent you can customize multiple Shopify actions with Gorgias.
"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.
AI Agent can autonomously respond to customers on email and chat.
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.
AI Agent can perform actions on ecommerce apps, right from the Gorgias platform.
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.
Receive automatic QA checks on all customer conversations with Auto QA.
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
Monitor AI Agent’s performance with a glimpse into metrics like automation rate, closed tickets, and customer satisfaction.
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.
Find out which areas of your support workflow could benefit from automation with AI Insights.
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.
AI Agent for Sales is coming to chat soon.
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.
Help your CX team deliver better service with AI quality assurance for fair feedback and consistent customer support.
By Christelle Agustin
0 min read . By Christelle Agustin
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.
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.
Manual QA is prone to inconsistent checks and fewer tickets reviewed compared to AI-powered QA.
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.
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:
Feature
AI QA
Manual QA
Number of Tickets Reviewed
All tickets are reviewed automatically.
Only a small sample of tickets can be reviewed.
Speed of Reviews
Reviews are completed instantly after responses.
Reviews are time-consuming and delayed.
Consistency
Feedback is consistent and unbiased across all tickets.
Feedback varies depending on the reviewer.
Scalability
Scales, regardless of ticket volume.
Struggles to keep up with high ticket volumes.
Agent Feedback
Provides instant, actionable feedback for every resolved ticket.
Feedback is delayed and limited to a few cases.
Leader Advantage
Frees up leaders to train the team and improve workflows.
Disadvantageous, as leaders spend most time manually reviewing tickets.
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.
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.
Gorgias’s Auto QA scores agent responses based on communication and completeness.
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.
The buyer’s journey is full of questions: When will this arrive? Is this ethically made? Will I be able to return it if I don’t love it?
Pre-sales support grows your business by proactively answering these questions to help customers make more confident buying decisions. According to a study by Harvard Business Review, businesses with solid pre-sales strategies convert 40-50% of new customers.
Whether you’re aware or not, most shoppers need a lot of information before they trust you with their credit card number: information about sizing, shipping costs, production materials, and so on. And if they can’t find an answer, they might venture to Amazon or another store that provides this information upfront.
Below, learn how to structure a more effective pre-sales strategy that bolsters customer satisfaction and supports a healthy sales cycle.
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What is pre-sales support?
Pre-sales support is the process of providing shoppers with the answers they need to feel confident in making a purchase.
Especially as the shopping experience moves online, customers have new questions (e.g. “Is expedited shipping available?”) and more suspicion (e.g. “Does this product really show the accurate color of the product?”). The ability to answer pre-sales questions is an important factor in your online store’s conversion rate.
Example of pre-sales questions that impact customer sales
A lack of pre-sales questions is a major pain point for shoppers, resulting in lost sales. While your store’s complete list of pre-sales questions will depend on your unique product and industry, use the list below as a starting point that covers most ecommerce fundamentals. Below are some common questions that your support team should be prepared to answer.
Product details
What size should I get?
How does this product work?
Who is this product for?
When trying to identify the best product for their needs, customers typically ask questions about size, color, durability, warranty, user-friendliness, safety, and so on. Another common question is how the product compares to its competitors.
For example, tech accessory brand Native Union’s product pages include quite a lot of information to proactively answer pre-sales questions about this product. On top of a detailed description, the page includes tech specs, compatibility, a section on “Why we designed this,” and products that work well with this one:
Native Union
Your agents must answer these questions and point out how each product feature will add value to the customer’s life. If necessary, the agent can recommend other available products that might be a better fit for the customer’s budget or other requirements.
Inventory details
When will you get this item back in stock?
Does this include refills?
Does this come in any other colors?
On top of questions about specific products, customers may have pre-sales questions about inventory levels and product availability. Think of this as the equivalent of asking the clerk whether they have any additional sizes in the back.
For example, ABLE responds to inventory-related questions on its Instagram posts:
ABLE
Shipping questions
How long do items process before they ship?
Do you ship to my location?
How much does shipping cost?
How long will shipping take?
Shipping-related concerns are common among pre-sales shoppers. Including a robust shipping FAQ page and self-service order tracking once orders ship can go a long way toward quelling those concerns.
For example, Vancouver-based dress shop Park & Fifth has a detailed FAQ page that lists out answers to many shipping questions. To help brides understand how long they need to order a wedding dress from their white collection, they even specify how long those dresses take to ship.
Park & Fifth
Technical support
Will this item fit in my space?
How will I know how to install it once it arrives?
Will this be compatible with my other devices?
Technical questions often require detailed measurement guides or a human touch so that shoppers can ensure they make the right choice.
For example, car accessory brand GOBI shares installation guides and product specs within every product page. Since the brand creates roof racks for many different car models, customers need to ensure they’re purchasing the right one.
Gobi
Sourcing, ethical concerns, and brand values
Do you use fairtrade and sustainably sourced materials?
Are your operations eco-friendly?
Are your sheets OEKO-TEX certified?
More and more customers prefer getting their goods and services from socially responsible companies. Pointing out that your company adheres to ethical practices can convince shoppers with those concerns to make a purchase.
For example, fashion brand ALOHAS makes its sustainability practices well known across its website.
ALOHAS
Pricing frustration or confusion
Can I get a discount?
Do you have any upcoming sales?
Most customers are looking for a bargain, so it’s not unusual to hear questions like the above. If a customer complains about prices or missing sales, you can offer a coupon to help get the customer to make a purchase. If giving a coupon is not feasible, inform the customer about upcoming sales.
If your brand doesn’t do sales, let shoppers know why your products are worth the price by explaining your unique selling points (USPs). You can also sway undecided prospects by offering free returns if the product falls short of their expectations.
For example, jewelry brand Jaxxon’s chat widget includes a button labeled, “Do you have any current promotions?” This way, customers can quickly find any promotions without having to leave your website or wait for an agent’s response (both of which would delay, or even derail, the purchase):
Jaxxon
Doubts about product efficacy
Will this help my hair grow back?
Are these vitamins really effective?
When a potential customer doubts a product’s efficacy, telling them the product works is not enough to clear their doubts.
On your website, make sure to list the product’s ingredients or qualities and explain why each one can deliver the results the prospect seeks. Case studies, positive reviews, and science-backed research that showcases the product’s effectiveness also go a long way in the battle for customer trust.
For example, vitamin brand Ritual shares information about the research team who formulated its vitamins and where it sources its ingredients on its website.
Ritual
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7 ways boost revenue with pre-sales support
Pre-sales support helps to stop shoppers from leaving your page to research products on other sites, and provides crucial objection handling that can make or break sales. In fact, Harvard Business Review found that optimized pre-sales processes converted 80 to 90% of repeat customers.
Your support team must also act as sales reps in order to answer any questions, handle objections, or provide the assistance shoppers need to make a purchase.
1) Make your website informative and easy-to-navigate
Shoppers won’t make purchases if they get confused on your website, or if it doesn't provide the information prospects need to confidently place an order. Your website’s browsing experience is your first line of defense against pre-sales questions that could block a sale.
There’s no limit to the ways you could optimize your website, but here are some of the best opportunities:
Provide delivery estimates early in the checkout process
Use banners to notify customers about temporary announcements (like delivery delays or new promotions)
Make your shipping and return policy easily clickable from any page
Create detailed product descriptions that provide information about the products production, compatibility, use cases, sizing, and more
Create detailed sizing guides or a sizing questionnaire
Use product quizzes to help customers find the right product for their needs
Provide multiple product photos (or even videos and 360-degree images) on each product page
You can also do market research to figure out what kinds of websites are easiest to navigate or for tips and tricks you can adopt to improve your website’s functionality.
You can also look at your website traffic and perform data analysis to figure out what’s working and where you could use some optimization. For example, if you have incredible shipping and return policies that barely get any traffic, you may want to make links to those pages more prominent.
On top of information dispersed across your site, you can also centralize answers to pre-sales questions in a self-service resource (like an FAQ page or Help Center knowledge base).
If customers with questions are directed straight to your email, that’s a problem. You want to create a path to these answers (and the purchases that follow) that doesn't require leaving your website or shopping app — especially before an order is placed when leaving your site means abandoning a cart.
A detailed, organized resource will quickly become your shoppers’ first stop for all questions and issues before reaching out to support.
Once you build an FAQ page or Help Center, link it prominently on your website (like Jaxxon, who put a link in their website’s top navigation).
Once customers land on this resource, make navigation as easy as possible so customers can quickly answer their questions. A search bar is your best friend here. Your next best? Clear categorization, titles, and headers so customers can find exactly what they’re looking for.
For example, furniture brand Branch offers an FAQ page and Help Center organized to answer common pre-sales questions from shoppers:
3) Provide self-service answers to the most common questions in your chat widget
If your customers can’t find help on your website or help center, they’ll likely open up your live chat widget to ask a question. Fortunately, you have one more line of defense: Pre-loaded FAQs in your live chat.
To save both your support team and your shoppers time, you can use a feature like Gorgias’ Quick Response Flows. These add interactive buttons to your chat widget that customers can click for an instant answer.
Take a look at ALOHAS’ Quick Response Flows to get the idea:
ALOHAS
Quick Response Flows are a great match for pre-sales questions because your customers don’t have to leave your website (or wait for an agent’s follow-up response) to get the information they’re looking for.
Plus, Quick Response Flows don’t mimic or replace human agents — if customers aren’t satisfied with an answer, they don’t have to fight with a frustrating chatbot or open up an email to contact your team. They can easily click “I need more help” to be connected with a customer support agent or salesperson.
How did Jaxxon Increased Revenue by 46% with Quick Response Flows? With Gorgias, Jaxxon is able to automate responses to common pre-sales questions and give customers instant answers around the clock, leading to happier customers, 46% more revenue, and time saved for the team to handle higher-impact conversations.
4) Automatically answer common pre-sales questions your support team gets asked
If customers end up asking a question to your support team, you still have an opportunity to provide an answer with the help of automation. We recommend using a helpdesk that leverages omnichannel communication to receive and send messages via email, live chat, SMS, or any other channel.
With help from Gorgias, you can automatically detect common customer questions and fire an instant response based on a pre-written Macro template.
Gorgias’ Intent Detection capabilities can understand when customers are looking for specific information, so you can provide a helpful response without waiting for an agent.
Setting up automated responses provides instant, helpful responses while improving project management for agents (they won’t have to answer as many questions) and create better workflows for them.
Save your time for better things
Unlock your customer support with Automate in Gorgias. Leverage tools designed to resolve common customer inquiries so you can focus on conversations that no robot can answer.
5) Use chat campaigns to reach out to live shoppers in real time
Chat campaigns are automated outreach to customers via your site’s chat widget — kind of like an in-store sales team member approaching a shopper to see if they need help and know about the latest products and promotions.
Chat campaigns can offer updates, news like product launches or recent collabs, or ask shoppers if they have any questions they need answered.
For example, if you use Gorgias, you can set up a prompt for users who have been on the site for a while:
While the above example is a welcome message for all website visitors, you can get much more specific. For example, you can create chat campaigns for:
Premium product pages to offer high-touch support
Shipping pages to remind customers about your free shipping eligibility
Checkout pages to offer a discount to get shoppers over the finish line
In Gorgias, you can set up views and create tags and rules within those views so that agents can filter for only pre-sales questions. If you do this, be sure to clearly define to agents what qualifies as a pre-sales question. It’s anything that a shopper needs answered in order to justify a purchase.
7) Monitor social media for pre-sales questions (and answer them publicly)
Help potential customers learn more about your products without ever leaving the social app they’re using.
Because social media comments and direct messages come in across apps and usually in large quantities, this task should never fall on your marketing team. Instead, set support agents up with the information they need to answer customer questions on social media. These questions can often remove the barrier a shopper needs to make a purchase.
For example, fine jewelry brand Fewer Finer often answers questions via Instagram Stories to help sell different pieces in its vintage and signature collections.
Fewer Finer
How to measure pre-sales support
Most brands don’t think customer support teams offer much in the way of lead generation or sales. This couldn’t be farther from the truth: Pre-sales customer support teams can be a huge facilitator of sales — it’s just a matter of proving so.
Here are three ways to measure revenue that comes in through support.
1) Use a revenue generated by support dashboard
Create or monitor a dashboard that shows all revenue that your support team generates. If you use Gorgias, you can see this in the Revenue Statistics part of your account. Gorgias attributes revenue to a conversation with an agent within the last 5 days before a sale.
Source: Gorgias
2. Track traffic coming into your help center
The traffic you get to your help center can also be another great indicator of pre-sales questions answered, an indicator of revenue generated by support.
If a shopper visits your help center before making a purchase — especially an article containing pre-sales questions — it’s most likely because they’re interested in your brand, have questions, and are actively interested in learning more.
Keep an eye on traffic here to prove your impact as well as understand how you could better organize and link your knowledge base to improve discoverability.
3. Track the automation rate of pre-sales Quick Response Flows
If you automate responses in chat for common questions (called Quick Response Flows if you use Gorgias), you can measure their traffic.
For example, if you see that 200% more people click the response for “Do you have new products,” that’s a good sign your pre-sales support is funneling traffic to product pages. If you see a spike in purchases following that, count that as a win. If you use Gorgias, you can find these stats in the Revenue Statistics Dashboard.
Post-sales support
Post-sales support is an effective tool for supporting existing customers, encouraging exchanges over returns, and creating repeat business.
The difference between pre-sales and post-sales support
Pre-sales support means answering the questions customers ask before making a purchase plus leading customers through the sales process and closing deals. Support agents turn into sales representatives to guide a customer from being a prospect to becoming a satisfied shopper.
Customer support team members handle post-sales support as well — and this activity impacts your brand’s bottom line as well. By creating a good impression and meeting customer needs through quality post-sales, customers are more likely to become return shoppers, boosting customer retention and lifetime value.
Proactive post-sales strategies
After a customer places an order, keep them at ease but eager to keep shopping by sending:
Detailed order confirmations: Share order confirmation emails that include a link to a customer’s order portal where they can find status updates like shipping times or return information. This helps to reduce WISMO (where is my order) requests.
A thank you note: Appreciating a customer goes a long way in showing that you value their patronage.
Review request: Asking for feedback shows clients that their opinions matter to your company, and can help you make necessary improvements to the post-sales process.
Product suggestions: Product suggestions are a great way to keep customers engaged while awaiting their orders. Sending them product suggestions that match their searches also increases the chances of the customer making more purchases.
Shipping updates: Send shoppers shipment updates until their order arrives. The updates can contain personalized alerts about ongoing discount offers, upcoming promotions, and more, to bring customers back to your store.
Marketing communications: Send out email newsletters or nurture campaigns to re-engage shoppers and encourage repeat purchases.
Offer fast customer support wherever your customers are: According to a study by AMA, you can use live chat to improve post-sales customer support by 39%. Lowering your average response time can also help meet customer expectations.
Take an omnichannel approach: Customers expect to get support on their preferred channel, whether that's SMS or Facebook Messenger. Make that a reality for them by employing omnichannel customer service.
Strengthen your pre-sales activities with Gorgias
Gorgias can support your support agents and your customers as they embark on a pre-sales journey. While most customer support teams and tools focus on troubleshooting issues, Gorgias focuses on generating more qualified leads and improving conversion rates for online stores.
If you’re using a live chat for your ecommerce business — to support customers, drive sales, or both — you already know it’s a powerful tool.
That tool is made even mightier with analytics and reporting. Stores that don’t track support metrics for live can only take educated guesses to answer questions like:
When should we staff live chat? How many agents do we need at any given time?
How does live chat compare to other pop-ups in terms of conversion rates?
Below, we’ll cover key live chat metrics that go beyond your response and resolution times. You’ll also get finer insights about how your chat strategy boosts your bottom line.
Before you look into analytics and reporting for your live chat operations, it’s good to get a baseline of how customers expect live chat to fit into the customer experience.
Here are some statistics that highlight what your shoppers expect from your live chat support operations.
42% of customers want a response within 60 minutes on social media (Convince & Convert).
Customers expect a response within 45 seconds for live chat (Com100).
53% of customers are willing to wait only three minutes to talk to an agent on the phone (BizFluent).
People want to get things done as quickly as possible. Ultimately, it’s best to start where you are and work on improving internally. But, when you know how you stack up to the competition, it can help.
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Next, take a look at the key performance indicators (KPIs) you should follow.
To get a complete understanding of where you stand and where your customer support team can improve live chat efforts, here are the metrics you should follow (in no particular order).
1) Contact rate
Your contact rate is the percentage of active customers that reach out to you via your chat strategy on any given day, month, year, or other period of time.
Contact rate is tricky: If customers are messaging you with pre-sales questions, that’s a good thing. They’re deep in the consideration phase and need information about sizing, returns, or shipping to make a purchase.
But if people are messaging you with post-sales questions (like “Where is my order?” or WISMO) then you have a problem. A high number of these chats indicates some part of your customer support information is unclear or confusing.
Remember that avoidable customer support interactions — not counting pre-sales interactions, which are more like a sales consult — are actually 4x more likely to drive customer disloyalty than customer loyalty. A low rate indicates that customers are able to find everything they need without your help.
The formula for determining your contact rate is to divide the number of customers who reach out via live chat in a time period, such as month, by the total number of customers. Then multiply by 100.
For example, if you had 500 customers in December, and 153 of them reached out for help via live chat, your contact rate would be 30.6%.
If you use a helpdesk like Gorgias, you can see contact rate broken down by channel, agent, and more right within the platform.
Tips to improve contact rate
Analyzing why customers contact you via live chat will help you reduce your contact rate.
For example, most customer inquiries tend to be about shipping and tracking. If you’re getting many questions about your shipping policies, that indicates you haven’t made this information clear and easy to find on your website.
Another solution is to add self-service options to your chat widget for frequently asked questions, such as shipping info, parcel tracking, and order cancellation. You can add these as buttons or as automated chatbot replies.
Your first-response time (FRT) is also called your average wait time — essentially how long it takes to reply to a new chat from a customer. Specifically, it’s the response to the very first chat message from a customer.
Customers have high expectations when using a chat widget. According to Klipfolio, users expect a response via chat within 90 seconds, compared to 24 hours for email. That’s fast! But that’s why customers prefer chat when it’s available.
Your first interaction with a customer is a crucial time to secure their trust and loyalty with a fast response. Faster responses mean a higher customer satisfaction (CSAT) score, which we’ll discuss further in depth later on.
Your first-response time should become shorter over time. When you see a decrease in first-response time without a spike in website traffic, it is a cause for concern and should be looked into.
How to measure FRT
Your first-response time can be calculated by determining how long it took to respond to every first chat message within a time period, then dividing by the number of messages.
For example, if it took 74,000 seconds to respond to 800 tickets in September, the first-time response rate was 92.5 seconds, on average.
Thankfully, a helpdesk such as Gorgias can provide this number to you.
Tips to improve first-response time
Improving your first-response time requires you to have support agents available if your live chat is set to active.
Make sure to set your business hours in your chat widget. This way, after-hours customer inquiries will be converted to an emailed ticket. Appearing offline also sets customer expectations, letting them know a response won’t come until the next day.
Keep an eye on those metrics to determine if there are particular days, hours, or seasons when incoming chats rise and more support employees need to be on hand.
3) Average response time
While the first-response time is all about that initial chat message, your average response time is how long it takes to respond to any and all incoming chat messages.
That first-response time benchmark of 90 seconds still applies here — you don’t want your customer to get a quick first response and then grow frustrated as responses take longer.
How to measure average response time
To calculate this, add up the total time your team has taken to respond to requests during a specific time period, then divide by the number of responses sent during that same time period.
For example, if your team spent 72,800 seconds responding to 800 messages, that’s an average chat response time of 91 seconds.
Again, Gorgias’ metrics can provide this number for you.
Tips to improve average response time
This is another opportunity for self-service options and chatbots to shine.
Gorgias’ Automation Add-on allows you to add self-service order management options and quick response flows to your chat widget, giving customers instant answers to their questions or options for tracking or canceling orders.
4) Resolution Time
The resolution time is how long it takes for a customer’s issue to be resolved after they first reach out via chat. This is also called the average resolution time (ART) or average handle time.
This includes the entire chat duration, starting when they send that first message, and ending when they’re satisfied their concern is addressed.
Use this metric to determine how long it typically takes to solve your customers’ problems. Like first-responses, they want a resolution as quickly as possible.
Similar to first-response time, customers expect a quicker resolution when they start a chat session then when they reach out via email.
How to measure resolution time
The average resolution time is calculated by dividing the total duration of all chat conversations in a given time period, divided by the number of customers.
You can also see this number in your Gorgias help desk metrics.
Historical view of average resolution time
Tips to improve resolution time
You can use automation to speed response and therefore resolution times.
Study your incoming messages to determine frequently asked questions and create templated responses (or Macros, in Gorgias) and then create automated Rules to respond to tickets.
In Gorgias, these templated responses can be sent quickly and efficiently, and can even pull in personalized customer information like names, order numbers, and tracking info.
5) First-contact resolution rate
Also called the first-contact resolution (FCR) rate looks at how many incoming chat sessions are resolved with a single reply. These are also called one-touch tickets.
Solving issues with a single reply is the best-case scenario with incoming chat requests. As we mentioned earlier, high-effort customer support interactions drive disloyalty, so keeping these interactions short and sweet will increase customer satisfaction.
The FCR rate is calculated by finding the total number of chats resolved with a single reply, and dividing it by the total number of incoming chats that were eligible to be resolved with a single reply.
Tips to improve first contact resolution
In addition to automation and self-service options we’ve already discussed, this is a KPI where it’s worth digging into your chat history.
If a chat session took more than one response to be resolved, ask yourself:
Is there a way you can speed up the process for next time?
Is there a new automation you can add?
Could you practice forward-resolution by proactively answering common follow-up questions in the first response?
Complex issues will inevitably take several responses to solve, but aim to streamline as many common chat requests as possible.
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6) Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score
While a little more complicated to calculate, your customer satisfaction (CSAT) score is the ultimate measure of the impact your customer service is having.
The customer satisfaction score measures how a customer feels about your store’s customer support. Was it quick? Was it low-effort? Was your customer service team helpful? It’s estimated that businesses lose $75 million every year due to poor customer service, so keeping customers satisfied is no longer optional.
By contrast, happy customers lead to conversions and repeat business. Gorgias analyzed over 10,000 businesses and found that raising CSAT score by just one point — from 4 to 4.9 — lifts overall revenue by 4%.
According to Retently, the average CSAT score for ecommerce businesses is 75. Customer satisfaction rate can also be expressed as a number from 1 to 5, 5 being the best.
How to measure CSAT
To get your CSAT score, you need to survey customers who have interacted with you via chat. This can be done with a survey tool, or with Gorgias.
Ask customers who used your chat: “On a scale from 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with your experience today?” Then, add up how many gave a rating of 4/5 or 5/5 and divide that by the total number of responses. Multiply by 100 to get your CSAT score.
Using Gorgias, customers are asked to rate their experience, showing you a CSAT store in your dashboard out of five. We recommend our customers, all of whom are ecommerce merchants, aim for a CSAT score of 4.8.
Using Gorgias, you can review all chat ratings as all customers are given a post-chat survey. You can use this to examine common themes for any interactions scored below 4 stars. What issues keep coming up? Do particular products result in lower scores than others?
You can also follow-up with customers who gave a low score to further investigate what went wrong with these detractors.
Issues that can impact your CSAT score — and that you can work on improving — include:
This is a complement to your CSAT as well as NPS (net promoter scores). The customer effort score measures how much effort a customer felt like they had to put in to resolve their issue.
This score should be as low as possible. Ideally, you want customers to find your customer service to be effortless, breezy, and efficient. High effort interactions will in turn hurt your CSAT and your revenue.
According to The Effortless Experience, 96% of customers who had a high-effort customer service experience feel disloyal to the company after.
Similar to your CSAT score, customer effort can be measured with a survey that asks customers to rate how easy their experience was on a scale of 1 to 5.
Find the percentage that said “very easy” and then subtract the percentage that said “very hard.” This will give you a score of between -100 and 100.
Tips to improve customer effort score
The more messages a customer has to send via your live chat, the more effort it will take on their part to resolve the issue.
Using automation, increasing response times, and aiming for one-ticket resolutions will improve your customer effort score.
Is your customer service chat tool actually leading to more sales, also known as conversions? Are you successfully turning chat requests into sales?
Chat is a great way to contribute to your conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy since you talk with customers while they’re still on your store (and hopefully contemplating a purchase).
Pre-sale information given via chat, like finding the right size or inquiring about your return policy, have a high chance of leading to a sale.
How to measure conversion rate
The conversion rate is calculated by total sales after a customer support interaction divided by total number of tickets.
The Gorgias dashboard shows you how many tickets led to sales within five days, which reveals your conversion ratio. Apply a channel filter for live chat to show how many of these were the result of a live chat session,
As well, Gorgias shows you the hard numbers of your total sales numbers that came from a support interaction.
The best way to improve conversion rate from chat is to reach out to more customer shopping in real-time with chat campaigns. These automated pop-up conversations can be used to ask whether website visitors need help, know how to qualify for free shipping, or offer a discount.
Research shows that people who use live chat are 3X more likely to complete their purchase before leaving a website.
9)Total sales
How much money is being generated via live chat support? This is simply your total sales made from customers who used your live chat.
How to measure total sales
While you could calculate this manually, in Gorgias statistics you can filter your sales by channel, segmenting only those sales made after a customer used live chat.
Tips to improve total sales
Like your CSAT score, your total sales are a reflection of your overall ability to quickly meet customers’ needs via chat.
Compare individual sales with either very high or very low totals and look for patterns. Do more responses lead to a higher or lower total? Does answering FAQs have an impact? These are important questions that become much easier to answer when you can see the total sales over a given period, agent, channel, request type, and so on.
These can be created in the Gorgias chat widget by adding buttons for customers to get information like tracking, or answers to FAQs, without a live agent needing to respond.
Gorgias Statistics lets you see how many customers use the automated options you have set up in the chat service.
Tips to improve automation rate
Set your chat widget up for success by reviewing incoming tickets to determine which common inquiries can be satisfied with either self-service order management or quick answer flows.
11) Template usage
Templated responses in live chat save your support agents time and, of course, give quicker responses to customers.
At Gorgias, these pre-written responses are called Macros. They are similar to custom fields and they can help automate some of your communication within your live chat support operations.
Preparing Marcos for use in live chat will improve your average response time, resolution time, and lead to more one-touch tickets.
How to measure template usage
In Gorgias Statistics, you can see how often Macros are used in responses to customers.
Tips to improve template usage
Monitoring which types of responses take the most amount of time for agents to resolve will help you create new templates for them to use. On the flip side, seeing a template is used very frequently could point to shortcomings elsewhere.
For example, if you notice that the shipping macro seems to be over-used, you can link out to shipping details and/or update your shipping policy page to make the information easier for customers to find. Then, you may not need to reply to as many tickets in the future.
12) Chat campaign responses
Your chat widget can do so much more than track orders. With Gorgias’ live chat, you can set up campaigns that deliver customized messages for different scenarios.
It’s great to try new things with your chat widget but you should always be mindful to measure and evaluate their results.
How to measure chat campaign responses
The best way to track responses to your campaigns is to set up an auto-tag in the Gorgias help desk to see how many people respond when prompted with a campaign message.
Here’s how Jaxxon could set up auto-tagging for the above campaign:
Tips to improve campaign responses
All chat campaigns should be tracked with performance metrics to determine if they were successful, how they can be improved on next time, and if you need to do further A/B testing.
In the Gorgias dashboard, you can:
Track overall revenue generated by a campaign
Measure increase in sales for products targeted with a chat campaign
The whole point of live chat is to provide immediate customer service in real-time. Missing a chat has a deep impact on that customers’ satisfaction so you need to keep a keen eye on missed messages in the chat queue and use them to inform your customer service strategy.
How to measure missed chats
Simply review your incoming chats on a regular basis, even daily, to see if any incoming chat sessions didn’t receive a response. Keep track of this number and see if you can get it to the ideal number: zero.
Tips to improve missed messages
As we discussed before, it’s vital to set your business hours in your live chat. For after-hours, include a contact form so that even if you’re not online at the time, a ticket is created.
If you notice you’re missing a lot of chat messages at a particular time of day, or day of the week, that’s an indication to rethink your live chat agent staffing schedule.
You should also pay attention to each individual agent and if they’re missing tickets. That could mean there’s a need for additional training to improve agent performance.
Never stop optimizing
What’s up with your ecommerce live chat support operations? If you don’t know, you can never optimize your processes.
A live chat will only drive sales if it’s being used in a way that best supports both your business and your customers. Keeping a close eye on all the above data will allow you to finetune your live chat performance.
Remember, satisfied customers are loyal customers, and loyal customers are ones that will come back again and again.
Gorgias puts this important data at your fingertips. Our customers can see everything they need to nurture outstanding customer support strategies. Sign up for your free trial today and experience the difference.
From providing you with powerful marketing tools to automating time-consuming processes that are clogging up your schedule, choosing the right extensions to integrate into your Magento store can offer a wide range of benefits.
If you already use Magento (also called Adobe Commerce), you’re probably familiar with Magento Extensions and how they work. If you’re currently considering Magento, consider taking a look at our comparison post of Magento and Shopify, another leading ecommerce platform.
Let's take a look at the top 19 best Magento extensions available today, including their standout features and common user reviews.
What Magento extensions are and how they work
Unlike plug-n-play ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce, Magento does not come equipped with many pre-built solutions for marketing, sales, customer support, and inventory management. Fortunately, Magento and Magento 2 do offer a large number of downloadable extensions available on the Magento Marketplace.
These Magento extensions offer many powerful benefits, spanning from:
Take a look at our list to improve the user experience on your online store and ultimately help you generate more sales.
Best Magento extensions for marketing
Creating effective marketing campaigns for your online products isn't always a straightforward task.
By providing a range of marketing capabilities and automating much of the campaign creation process, these Magento extensions for marketing can go a long way toward making your marketing efforts more profitable.
1) Klaviyo
Klaviyo is an email marketing solution that provides several convenient tools designed to improve the results of your email campaigns. The tool also makes the process of managing those campaigns more efficient.
With Klaviyo, you can look forward to tools such as automated email and SMS marketing flows, list segmentation tools, and a user-friendly dashboard that provides an abundance of helpful analytics and insights about your email marketing campaigns.
Unique features
Includes a number of triggers such as cart abandonment triggers, price drop triggers, and back-in-stock triggers for automatically launching email flows
Provides a wide variety of customizable email templates
Powerful segmentation filters for segmenting your email and SMS lists
What users think of this app
User-friendly and easy to set up
A wide selection of pre-built triggers to choose from
A capable email builder that makes it easy to create branded emails
Yotpo is an ecommerce marketing platform that provides Magento store owners with unified, data-driven solutions for SMS marketing, loyalty and referrals, reviews, and more.
With Yotpo, you can create custom loyalty programs, send high-converting text messages shoppers actually want to read, and collect authentic customer feedback — all in one place.
Unique features
A library of SMS flows and campaign templates paired with powerful segmentation capabilities
Enriched data across all Yotpo products, granular performance metrics, and customer-level insights
The ability to use SMS to send mobile-optimized review requests or notify loyal customers about their VIP status and reward points
What users think of this app
Provides plenty of features for managing loyalty and referral programs
Useful segmentation and targeting features
Review request templates and flows lead to a boost in product reviews
With roughly a billion monthly active users, Instagram is a social media platform that offers a wealth of marketing opportunities.
The Magento 2 Instagram Connect extension allows store owners to automatically sync products from their Magento store to their Instagram account and provides a number of other Instagram marketing tools and features such as CTA buttons for Instagram photos and an Instagram widget that lets you display your Instagram feed on your website.
Unique features
Allows you to add a CTA button that appears when someone hovers over one of your Instagram photos
A performance report to showcase which photos are generating the most orders
The ability to fetch photos using hashtags from Instagram to your Magento 2 store
What users think of this app
Great for improving the visual appeal of a Magento store
Plenty of customization options
Data from the performance report is very helpful for optimizing Instagram marketing campaigns
4) MageWorx SEO Suite Ultimate
Boosting organic traffic with great SEO is one of the most reliable long-term ecommerce marketing strategies. With MageWorx SEO Suite Ultimate, store owners are able to access numerous SEO tools and features, including XML & HTML sitemaps, automatic cross-linking, advanced rich snippets, layered navigation, and many more.
Unique features
Built-in SEO reports allow you to detect and resolve SEO issues
Canonical URLs to eliminate duplicate content
Extended breadcrumbs provide enhanced on-site navigation
What users think of this app
Product SEO templates are great for optimizing the metadata of product listings
Compatible with both Magento 2 Venia PWA theme and Hyva theme
In 2020, ecommerce sales accounted for 14% of all retail sales, up 9.5% compared to 2011. If you would like to take a large bite out of this ever-growing ecommerce pie, here are three feature-rich Magento sales extensions worth checking out.
5) CedCommerce HubSpot Integration
CedCommerce HubSpot Integration is an app that allows you to sync your Magento store with HubSpot, providing tools such as marketing automation workflows, a camping ROI tracker, and abandoned cart recovery tools.
Unique features
Syncs data between HubSpot and Magento in a single click
Sends out automated reminder emails to customers who have abandoned their cart
Provides a variety of automated marketing flows based on RFM segmentation
What users think of this app
Saves time integrating customer data from a Magento store to Hubspot
Provides a convenient dashboard for managing marketing and sales from a single platform
Great list segmentation features
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6) Magenest Zoho CRM Extension
Zoho CRM is a CRM service designed to help ecommerce store owners store and segment customer data in order to better target their marketing campaigns and see upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
With Magenest Zoho CRM Extension, you can automatically sync data straight from your Magento store to your CRM, putting the capabilities of Zoho CRM at your fingertips without the need to spend hours syncing data manually.
Unique features
Can automatically sync customer data, promotion data, product data, and more from Magento 2 stores to Zoho CRM in real time
Lets you control how often data syncs to avoid straining your server
Has a no-code setup experience thanks to the API-based connector
What users think of this app
Open source and customizable
Easy to set up and use
Great customer support
7) Magediary Product Scheduler
Magediary Product Scheduler is an extension that offers useful countdown timer widgets such as product launch timers and promotional timers. This extension also allows you to send automated email notifications to customers who subscribe for scheduled products.
Unique features
Provides email notification templates for letting customers know about new product launches and promotions
Allows you to create both "coming soon" and "ends soon" countdown timers
Allows customers to sign up to be notified when a product is back in stock
What users think of this app
Email notification templates and countdown timer widgets are both highly customizable
Countdown timers boost conversion rates during promotions
Responsive customer support
Best Magento extensions for customer support
According to data from Invesp, investing in new customers is between 5-25 times more expensive than retaining existing customers. By helping you provide exceptional customer support, these customer support Magento extensions will help you keep your retention rates as high as possible while at the same time minimizing your customer support team's workload.
8) Gorgias
Gorgias is a customer support platform that provides everything you need to improve the quality of your customer service while also reducing the burden of your customer support team.
With Gorgias, Magento store owners are able to access powerful tools and features such as live chat support, a centralized dashboard for support agents to work from, self-service options for reducing support ticket volume, and a wide range of Rules and Macros for automating tasks such as ticket generation and prioritization. If you are looking for an all-in-one solution to customer support, be sure to check out Gorgias today.
Unique features
Fast-loading live chat widgets that won't slow down your website
Allows support agents to manage customer support tickets from a single, convenient dashboard
Capable of automating a wide variety of tedious customer support tasks
What users think of this app
Automation features allow store owners to reduce the size of their customer support staff
Great for prioritizing customer inquiries to ensure that the most important inquiries receive the fastest possible response
Great for revenue generation from conversions and long-term loyalty
9) Sparsh Technologies WhatsApp Chat
With 1.6 billion users across the globe, WhatsApp is by far the most popular messaging app in the world today. The WhatsApp Chat extension by Sparsh Technologies allows Magento store owners to create a customizable plug-in that lets customers contact the store's support team via WhatsApp directly from the website. Best of all, this extension is completely free to download and use.
Unique features
Admin is able to change the default WhatsApp mobile number and push message from backend
Customizable contact button
Free to download and use
What users think of this app
Easy to set up and use
Store owners can enable and disable the plug-in with a single click
Plenty of customization options
10) Amnesty FAQ and Product Questions
One of the best ways to reduce your customer support ticket volume is to provide customers with plenty of resources for finding the answers to common issues on their own. With the Amnesty FAQ and Product Questions extension, you can easily create FAQ pages and product questions designed to provide customers the answers they need without them having to contact your customer support team.
Unique features
FAQ pages are SEO-optimized
Built-in GDPR consent, reCaptcha, and Search Terms Report functionality
Social sharing buttons and product question ratings for encouraging audience involvement
What users think of this app
Plenty of customization options
FAQ widgets and tabs provide customers with convenient access to self-service resources
Provides valuable insights about the questions that customers are asking most commonly
Best Magento extensions for payment & security
Making it as easy as possible for customers to pay for their purchases is a vital objective if you want to optimize the conversion rate of your ecommerce website. With Magento extensions for payment and security, you can provide your customers with convenient payment options while also ensuring that their sensitive financial data is kept secure.
With this extension, you are able to create and manage subscriptions for your products and easily accept recurring payments from customers who sign up for a subscription.
Unique features
Makes it easy to manage subscriptions from a single dashboard
Allows you to create custom billing frequencies
Automates subscription renewals and recurring charges
What users think of this app
Unlimited customization options
Provides a simple checkout experience for both normal and recurring orders
Sends out helpful automated notifications to both customers and merchants
12) Stripe Payments
Stripe Payments is one of the most popular payment processing solutions for ecommerce store owners.
With Stripe Payments, merchants are able to provide customers with convenient and secure payment options that support almost every currency and payment method in existence today.
Unique features
Supports 135+ currencies and payment methods
Provides checkout flows for optimizing the checkout experience on your website
Promises 99.99%+ uptime
What users think of this app
Great for detecting and preventing fraudulent payments
Frequently updated with new features
Makes it easy to issue both virtual and physical gift cards
Streamlining the checkout process as much as possible is a vital goal for merchants that want to reduce their abandoned cart rate. With Smart One Step Checkout from Aheadworks, store owners are able to provide customers with an Amazon-like, one-click checkout experience by easily adding or removing predefined fields on the checkout page.
Unique features
Allows you to track the conversion rate and performance of each checkout field
Makes it easy to edit every aspect of Magento's default checkout process
Supports a wide range of payment methods
What users think of this app
Insightful built-in reports for highlighting checkout process bottlenecks
Also available for Magento 1 stores
Automated address suggestion further speeds up the checkout process
Best Magento extensions for shipping & fulfillment
According to data from eFulfillment Service, the average cost to fulfill an order for online retailers is 70% of the order value.
In order to keep your shipping and fulfillment costs as low as possible while also providing a great customer experience, it is essential to create an optimized shipping and fulfillment process, which is something that these Magento extensions for shipping and fulfillment are sure to help with.
14) ShipStation
ShipStation is an extension that provides a number of tools and features designed to help store owners streamline their order fulfillment process, including the ability to:
Import orders from multiple stores and channels
Perform bulk updates
Automation processes for quickly processing and fulfilling orders
Compare rates across carriers and print shipping labels
Having products go out of stock is something that can often lead to lost business. With Amasty Pre Order, though, merchants can enable customers to easily pre-order products that are out-of-stock or products that have yet to be released.
Unique features
Customizable pre-order buttons and notes
Module is read-compatible with GraphQL
Enables pre-order functionality for all types of products
What users think of this app
Provides valuable insights on customer preferences and product demand for improved inventory management
Allows you to set discounts on pre-order products via rules
Fully-optimized for mobile devices
Best Magento extensions for data & reporting
Quality data is the fuel that powers successful ecommerce stores. With these Magento extensions for data and reporting, you can leverage a variety of tools for collecting and analyzing customer data, providing you with the insights you need to optimize the customer experience on your online store.
16) WeltPixel Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce
WeltPixel Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce is a solution that automatically syncs data from your Magento store to your Google Analytics account, allowing you to easily track and analyze an incredibly wide range of data regarding your customers and website visitors.
Unique features
Google Ads conversion tracking
Provides data on product impressions and product clicks based on a variety of criteria
Tracks stock status, product review count, product review status, and much more
What users think of this app
The free version of the extension includes an impressive offering of features
Full-page cache and varnish cache ready
Paid version includes one-minute installation GUI and one month of free support
17) Mopinion Feedback Surveys
Customer surveys are one of the most effective tools for gathering zero-party customer data. With Mopinion Feedback Surveys, you are able to embed customizable survey forms on your Magento website. Mopinion Feedback Surveys also allows you to create email surveys and app-based mobile surveys as well.
Unique features
Allows you to integrate feedback forms into your email campaigns
Provides a variety of customizable feedback form templates
Easy-to-install SDKs for iOS and Android allow you to integrate feedback forms into your native mobile apps
What users think of this app
Feedback form templates offer a broad range of customization options
Easy to set up and use
Lots of useful integrations
Best Magento extensions for finance & accounting
Keeping up with the finances and accounting for your ecommerce store can often be a complex and time-consuming process. Thankfully, these Magento extensions for finance and accounting provide plenty of helpful tools for keeping you organized and automating a lot of tedious accounting tasks.
18) Magenest QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online is arguably the most comprehensive ecommerce finance and accounting solution on the market today.
With the Magenest Quickbooks Online extension, you can automatically sync data from your Magento store to QuickBooks Online, making it easy for you to utilize QuickBooks' many tools and features for more accurate and efficient accounting.
Unique features
Magento 2 data changes are automatically updated to QuickBooks Online
Allows you to map payment methods to deposit accounts
Syncs sales orders, invoices, credit memos, customer data, tax rates, and more from Magento 2 to QuickBooks Online
What users think of this app
Allows you to connect multiple sales channels to a single account
Easy to set up and use
Provides the option to sync and edit data manually
19) TaxJar Sales Tax Automation
With sales tax rates differing from state to state, county to county, and city to city, keeping up with how much sales tax you owe for each purchase can quickly become dizzying.
TaxJar Sales Tax Automation, however, is able to automate the entire sales tax life cycle across multiple sales channels, including sales tax calculations, nexus tracking, and reporting/filing.
Unique features
Automates sales tax compliance across 11,000 different jurisdictions
Automatically calculates and collects the appropriate sales tax amount at checkout
Address validation ensures that the correct sales tax amount is collected for the jurisdiction where the customer is located
What users think of this app
Excellent customer support
Provides detailed and easy-to-understand sales tax reports
Allows you to automatically submit returns and remittance to each jurisdiction
Activate better customer service for your Magento store with Gorgias
From a powerful ticketing system and auto-responders to live chat and customer intent detection, Gorgias has what your Magento store needs to provide a top-notch customer experience.
Positive scripting means using polite, pre-written responses to make customers feel acknowledged and taken care of
Benefits: less frustrated customers, better customer satisfaction, and faster first response times
Negatives: can make customer service teams sound overly friendly or robotic and may lead to slower resolution times when agents rely solely on scripts
A great customer experience relies on much more than positivity and kindness — your customers expect personalization at scale, self-service options, and concrete benefits like free shipping. That said, using the right words is an important factor in customer conversations.
Positive scripting is one practice that can help your customer service representative steer customer interactions toward desired outcomes (like upselling shoppers and bringing first-time customers back for a second purchase).
However, over-relying script templates in customer support is a shortcut to unhelpful customer care interactions. Read on to learn how to make the most of positive scripting while also avoiding its pitfalls.
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What is positive scripting? (AKA positive phraseology)
Positive scripting is the practice of creating canned responses for customer service interactions that use positive language to limit customer frustration and promote desired outcomes.
With positive scripting, brands can provide support reps with resources such as scripts and templates that they can use to help ensure positive customer interactions. These scripts and templates can also be used as training resources to provide reps with examples of constructive interactions and positive language.
Goals of positive scripting
There are several goals that brands can accomplish with positive customer service scripts, including:
Promoting constructive customer service experiences that contribute to customer satisfaction
Alleviating customer frustration and de-escalating angry customers
Maintaining a consistent, positive brand voice
Speeding up response times to customer queries
Where can positive scripting be used?
Positive scripting can be used across numerous contact centers and customer support channels.
Like any customer support practice, positive scripting should be tweaked for each channel.
Call centers
Providing support via a phone call requires reps to be quick on their feet, and this is where the practice of positive scripting first originated.
Providing call center scripts to your call center agents can go a long way toward helping agents stay positive and on-brand when there isn't much time for them to formulate a response.
SMS support
Agents have a little more time to think about their SMS responses, but not much. Customers contacting your support team via SMS still expect swift responses, and positive scripting can help ensure that your SMS responses are swift, positive, and on-brand.
Live chat support
Like SMS, live chat conversations tend to be fast-moving — and this is one of the primary reasons why many consumers list live chat as their preferred customer support channel.
With positive scripting and live chat tools like Gorgias live chat, you can provide fast, convenient, and helpful support via this advantageous channel.
📚 Recommended reading: Find out how Gorgias customer Ohh Deer used Gorgias chat to generate $12,500 in revenue — per quarter.
Email support
Support reps can typically put a little more time and thought into their email responses.
Nevertheless, email templates with positive scripting can still help keep these responses positive and consistent while also enabling reps to respond to email queries more efficiently.
Social media support
Providing support via social media is a great way to meet your customers where they're most comfortable — and positive scripting helps keep these responses positive and on-brand.
This is especially important when responding to comments and posts that other potential customers are likely to see.
Scripts and templates
Scripts, templates, and automated responses should all be built using positive scripting.
If you use a helpdesk, chances are you can build a library of templates in the tool for agents to use during customer conversations.
For example, you can use Gorgias Macros to build positive templates and autoresponses. Unlike most templates, Gorgias Macros pull customer information from ecommerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, as well as other ecommerce tools (like Klaviyo and ShipBob) to automatically personalize the response.
Even better? Thanks to automated Rules, Gorgias can automatically send these personalized templates to customers for basic interactions — like WISMO (where is my order), questions about shipping and return policies, and so on.
This way, your customer service team time saves time while still fostering a great, personalized customer experience.
Customer support training programs
You can use positive scripting to guide customer service training by using customer support scripts with positive language as examples of beneficial customer interactions.
This helps new team members get a feel for expectations regarding your company's voice and tone, which they can reflect in their individual customer interactions.
Benefits of effective positive scripting
When used correctly, positive scripting can improve the quality of a brand's customer support services in several key ways, including:
Enhance customer experiences to encourage repeat business
Did you know that 54% of customers say they would stop purchasing from a brand after just a single bad experience? If you want to promote customer loyalty and repeat business, it's vital to provide positive experiences throughout every step of the customer journey.
Likewise, repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time shoppers, according to our data from over 10,000 ecommerce brands. Repeat customers place repeat orders, place larger orders, refer friends to your store, leave product reviews, and more.
Gorgias
While many different elements go into crafting positive customer experiences, facilitating friendly and welcoming customer interactions with positive scripting is one important step.
Avoid or de-escalate angry customers
Using positive words and language may not solve a customer's problem, but it can help ease their frustrations. Positive scripting is an effective way to de-escalate angry customers — and a great way to prevent customers from ever becoming angry in the first place.
Become more consistent with customer communication and policies
Your customer service agents don’t just need to be positive, they need to follow the same policies and procedures, especially for common customer interactions. Using scripting to guide
Of course, you can also specify which policies agents can bend, and when. For example, if repeat customers ask for an extension on refund eligibility, it’s probably in your best interest to permit the return rather than frustrate a repeat customer.
Positive scripting helps you maintain a consistent brand voice, but, just as importantly, it also helps you maintain a positive brand voice. By using positive scripting to guide your brand's messaging, you can carefully (and intentionally) design your language to encourage customer satisfaction and beneficial outcomes.
Examples of positive scripting
A majority of customer interactions can become more pleasant and productive with positive scripting. Here are some scenarios that would benefit from positive scripting:
Greeting: "Good [morning/afternoon/evening], thank you for choosing [Company Name]. How can I help you today?"
Apologizing: "I'm sorry to hear about the inconvenience you've faced. Let me look into this for you."
Offering assistance: "I'd be delighted to assist you with that" or "I'm here to make this right for you."
Expressing appreciation: "Thank you for bringing this to our attention" or "We appreciate your business and your feedback."
Providing assurance: "Rest assured, we'll resolve this for you" or "We'll do everything we can to make this a positive experience."
Suggesting solutions: "Let me find that information for you" or "May I suggest an alternative solution?"
Ending interactions: "Is there anything else I can assist you with today?" or "I hope you have a wonderful day."
The pitfalls of positive scripting
The biggest potential drawback of positive scripting is one that we've already touched on; customers who contact your call center or other customer support channel want to feel as though they are talking to a real human and not a robot regurgitating a script.
It's also vital to remember that customers are ultimately much more interested in resolving their problems quickly than in the language that your reps use. Many times, a simple message with the information they're looking for (such as a tracking number) will suffice with no flair or positivity required.
To prevent positive scripting from harming your customer interactions rather than improving them, here are a few other key mistakes and pitfalls to avoid:
Not giving support team members the freedom to deviate from their script or inject their own flair
Scripting entire customer interactions instead of just using scripts to save time on the most common, process-heavy elements
Focusing too much on positive language and too little on actually solving customer issues as quickly as possible
Writing scripts that sound too robotic or overly-friendly
Using vague empathy statements rather than training your agents to be genuine and sincere
These are all serious mistakes to avoid if you want to make the most of positive scripting. When used appropriately, though, the benefits of this practice far outweigh its cons.
How to use positive scripting for customer service: 7 best practices
Positive scripting is a powerful tool for ecommerce brands to leverage, but it's important to use it correctly. Here are the seven best practices that you should employ to make the most of positive scripting (and avoid its pitfalls).
1) Use scripts as a starting point, not for the entire interaction
The scripts you give your support reps should be used for the most common, predictable part of customer interactions rather than mapping out the entire conversation.
For example, your agents might use a script to greet customers and share information about your shipping policy (in response to a question about shipping). But, the agent should be flexible enough to include unique information or handle follow-up questions that may not be so predictable.
“I like to think of Macros as guidelines. When you open up a Macro, it's not 100% the right thing to say, because you have to match the customer’s tone and specific query. And it's up to the agent to understand that and adjust along the way — but Gorgias gives you the tools to do that.”
If you require your agents to follow a script from start to finish, you risk sounding robotic and not providing agents with the flexibility they need to keep customers happy.
2) Prepare positive responses for common situations
Customers who cannot track their order, received the wrong item, or want to make a return are just a few examples of common situations where customers are sure to welcome a little friendliness and empathy — along with helpful information and clear next steps.
Using positive scripting to create responses to these common situations helps your brand handle these issues consistently and ensure that they are handled with care and positivity.
All you have to do is identify the questions that your support team receives most frequently and then load positive, brand-consistent responses into your helpdesk:
While each brand varies, some of the most common situations include:
3) Encourage customer support to enhance scripts with their own unique flair
Customer service reps should be free to deviate from scripts when needed or inject them with their unique flair. Encouraging your reps to use scripts as a guide rather than a word-for-word requirement ensures that your brand doesn't script away its human touch.
We love this example of an agent bending a policy and sparking up a delightful conversation:
4) Use scripts for training representatives
Along with using customer service scripts to guide customer interactions in the moment, you can also use them as resources for training your representatives. Once again, not everything that your agents say will be scripted, so ensuring they understand the principles behind positive scripting is just as important as providing the scripts themselves.
Using scripts to showcase what positive customer interactions look like will allow your agents to leverage positive language even when they aren't using a script. For example, you can use scripts to demonstrate mock customer service interactions and then dive into the specifics of why the scripted responses you've created work well for those situations.
Several of the tips we've already covered are geared toward preventing support agents from sounding wooden or robotic, and this is an essential consideration when using positive scripting.
By using scripts to initiate an interaction rather than scripting the entire conversation, giving agents the freedom to add their own flair to the scripts, and adding personality to the scripts you create, you can avoid this common pitfall of positive scripting.
It's also vital for your reps to demonstrate genuine empathy throughout customer interactions to avoid sounding uncaring and robotic. This can't be easily scripted, making it important to ensure that your reps know how to adopt an empathetic tone and approach.
Your agent's initial greeting to a customer sets the tone for the rest of the interaction. It's also one of the easiest parts of customer interactions to script since the initial greeting will largely remain the same regardless of the customer's specific issue or sentiment.
Stating the company name and the agent's name, asking the customer's name, telling them good morning/good afternoon, and assuring them that you are happy to assist them are all great elements to consider including in your greeting script.
7) Test, iterate, and refine to perfect your customer service interactions
Like almost every aspect of ecommerce, positive scripting in customer service is something you can continually improve with proper testing. CSAT surveys are one excellent way to gather customer feedback following a customer support interaction. You can use the feedback you gather from these surveys to fine-tune your customer support scripts.
For instance, if many customers complain that your reps sound unempathetic or robotic, you may want to revisit the language of your scripts or encourage your agents to inject more of their own personalities. Throughout testing and refining your scripts, keep in mind that script building should be a collaborative experiment, with customer service teams working alongside reps and using data from past customer service interactions to guide the process.
Offer positive, fast, and helpful customer service with Gorgias
Positive scripting is one effective way to improve the quality of your brand's customer support and encourage more positive customer experiences. However, it's also just one small element of high-quality, revenue-generating customer support.
If you would like to offer the type of fast, positive, and helpful customer service that will set your brand apart from the competition, it's important to use the right customer support tools.
With Gorgias' industry-leading customer support platform, you'll be able to leverage a range of advanced customer support tools and capabilities — all designed to boost customer satisfaction by improving both the speed and helpfulness of your support services.
To get started offering positive, fast, and helpful customer support via the best ecommerce customer support platform on the market, be sure to sign up for Gorgias today!
Maximizing peak season sales isn’t only about driving customers to your website. If website visitors people encounter a slow, unhelpful, or lackluster customer experience, they’ll click away before buying — flushing away all your marketing efforts and dollars.
In a recent webinar, Caela Castillo, Director of Customer Experience at luxury men’s jewelry brand Jaxxon, shared Jaxxon’s strategies for optimizing customer experience to maximize revenue during peak season.
We’ll start with some of the most concrete strategies Jaxxon leverages, and wrap up with some bigger-picture insights on how Caela manages the team.
You can also hear Caela share these tips herself by watching the webinar here.
How Jaxxon manages ticket spikes during peak season
Last year, Jaxxon had what Caela describes as a very successful but challenging peak season, when customer support tickets skyrocketed to three times normal levels. As a result, Jaxxon has stepped up its approach to optimizing customer support for efficiency and self-service during the 2022 peak season.
Here are the tactics and tools Jaxxons used to manage ticket spikes this year:
Provide self-service answers to FAQ in live chat
Jaxxon uses Gorgias Quick Response Flows to answer frequently asked questions during peak season. Caela and her team customize the questions and answers so that customers can get an instant response to common queries.
Jaxxon
“We really noticed that adding automated self-service with Gorgias took part of the load off us. A lot of customers’ questions are answered by self-service, so then they’re happy and we don’t have to do anything further with those tickets,” Caela says.
Automating these responses has two-fold benefits:
Customers get instant answers to questions — no wait time required
Agents actually have time for conversations that need a human touch
“If the customer has additional questions, then our agents have the time to have an authentic conversation with them, and give them a really great experience.”
Regularly review tickets to monitor performance and spot emerging issues
Caela regularly reviews recent customer conversations to monitor individual agent performance and identify areas for improvement or lessons learned. Using Gorgias tags — automatically applied to customer tickets for categorization and filtering — Caela can also get a sense for the most common customer questions and issues.
“If we're noticing a trend with a certain issue, then we want to solve it right away rather than figure it out weeks from now when it’s a bigger issue,” Caela explains. “So we don't want to only review tickets once a month. We want to do it in real time.”
The real opportunity for peak seasons is turning first-time customers into repeat shoppers
Jaxxon realizes that any peak season is a starting line, not a finish line. Providing an awesome first customer experience doesn’t just net a sale. It nurtures longterm relationships and turns happy customers into loyal brand advocates.
“We want to make sure that first shopping experience is really great — everything from the customer support to the shipping to the box it arrives in — so they want to come back and buy again. We listen to our customer reviews and we really want to help people have a great experience.”
Jaxxon invests in ongoing training and support to ensure its customer service agents have the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to do their job confidently and effectively.
“Sometimes customers are a little hesitant about buying something as expensive as solid gold online. And our agents can explain to them the difference between our products, or suggest an upgrade, or say, hey, would you like this bracelet to go with the Cuban link chain you bought last time?” says Caela.
“For our agents to be able to upsell and cross-sell like that is super important for us — and it works.”
Quick Response Flows help Jaxxon open the door to some of these conversions. Providing quick, helpful answers about product restocks, sizing, shipping and more, lays a positive foundation that human agents can easily build on.
How Jaxxon sustains the team during peak seasons
One of the biggest challenges during any peak season is thinking ahead so that your team — not just your customers — succeed.
Plan ahead when it comes to coverage
First off, make sure you have enough customer service agents in place to cope with soaring demand. Jaxxon has increased its customer support team for this year’s peak season.
Caela uses a zoning plan to stagger agents’ shifts across different time zones and locations, so there is always enough coverage for Jaxxon’s 24/7 customer support. She adapts this as peak season unfolds to meet shifting demand.
“Having open communication is essential. We always say there are no stupid questions. We’re here to help each other. Even though we work remotely, we're still able to communicate really well and work as a team.
Once the team is in place, get them ready. “Training your team is really important, and making sure they have the resources and support they need,” Caela says.
“Keeping morale high is so important for peak season, because it’s a busy time in life, not just at work,” Caela says. This is a unique situation in ecommerce — did anyone else have a turkey in the oven while answering support tickets during BFCM?
“Everyone gets stressed; sometimes people get sick. It's hard to sustain motivation sometimes. So we want to make sure everyone's really taken care of and set up for success. And we try to make it fun for the team.”
A culture of mutual support among the Jaxxon customer service team is reinforced by team-based incentives to win gift cards, jewelry and more when certain targets are met.
“A positive attitude goes a long way to keeping people motivated. You get so much farther if you're kind and positive. And I’m very big on looking at difficult situations as learning experiences. And if someone is struggling, other team members will help them so we all rise together.”
Having the right systems in place to manage customer support more efficiently is important at any time of year. But it has the biggest impact during peak periods when demand balloons.
“You have to prepare for the worst, in terms of very high demand. Things just get crazier as peak season progresses! So make sure to have your self-service and automation set up and ready to go,” says Caela. “After last year’s challenges, we've made sure to have stronger systems in place this year.”
Jaxxon now uses Gorgias to manage all customer conversations. This helps the team work more efficiently in several ways:
Seeing all customer conversations across different channels in one place, to avoid tab-shuffling and duplicated responses
Filtering and sorting tickets, for easier prioritization
Deflecting some questions to automated self-service, to free up customer service agents’ time for more complex customer conversations
Bringing together all of a customer’s information, to enable more personalized service
Implementing self-service chat has cut Jaxxon’s live chat volume by 17%, yet increased conversions by 6%. Meanwhile, revenue generated by chat has shot up by an impressive 46%. The overall impact has been positive for customer experience and Jaxxon’s bottom line.
Read more about how Jaxxon uses Gorgias to speed up response times without sacrificing the quality of customer service.
Customer experience is vital to maximize peak season sales
By assembling a larger, well-trained customer service team and putting the right tools in place, Jaxxon is poised to continue delivering high-quality customer service this peak season — even when ticket volumes triple. Caela and her team are excited to dive into the peak season. With Gorgias by their side, they are ready to ride out whatever challenges come their way.
To hear the full story of Caela’s tips, lessons learned, and Jaxxon’s preparations for peak seasons, watch the webinar replay.
Yohan Loyer started his job at Gorgias as the first Customer Success Manager for Europe. His current position is EMEA Partner Manager, with the goal of growing Gorgias’ presence in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The role boils down to building meaningful relationships and being a reliable, trustworthy partner for our agency partners.
In this interview, Yohan tells his story and we learn more about his internal career development and the environment Gorgias provided to nurture it accordingly.
1) What is your role at Gorgias right now and how do you find it?
My role is to help our ecommerce agency partners:
Understand the value of Gorgias
Keep Gorgias top of mind when recommending customer service solutions to their customers
Identify customers that are a good fit for Gorgias
As a social person who likes to interact with other people and has hands-on experience working with Gorgias customers, this role is a great fit for me. There really is no chance to be bored in Partnerships!
2) What did you do before Gorgias? What is your educational and professional background?
I did my undergraduate degree in international business in New York, where I got a scholarship to play for my university’s soccer team. Then, I did my master's in Business Consulting and Information Systems Management in France.
Right after university, I worked as an IT consultant and then moved to Salesforce as part of the EMEA customer success team in Dublin. I worked as a Customer Success Manager (CSM) for 3.5 years, when my main focus was helping the company’s customers get the most out of the Salesforce platform and resources.
Apart from that, I have always been passionate about new technologies and how they impact the world, so continuing to work in tech and ecommerce at Gorgias is not a coincidence.
3) How did you find out about Gorgias and what made you apply to work here?
I was looking for a role in a fast-growing company in the ecommerce space with an innovative product, strong company culture, and competitive package. I did some research online and found out about Gorgias on an ecommerce blog, if I remember correctly.
Gorgias had everything I was looking for. They were also hiring for their first Customer Success Manager in Europe at that time, so it was perfect timing for me to apply!
4) What are the roles you had at Gorgias and how did they change over time?
I was initially recruited as the first Customer Success Manager (CSM) in Europe. We already had one Onboarding Manager in Europe when I joined (Emna Charfi, who is now the manager of our Customer Success team).
She was already working as a CSM with some customers (on top of her main role as Onboarding Manager). Even after I joined as the first full-time CSM in Europe, she continued as the CSM for some of our largest customers while I onboarded.
After a few months, I took over as the Customer Success Manager for our largest European customers for about 1.5 years, before transitioning to the Partnerships team last July.
I worked closely with Louis Lavedan from the Partnership team when I was a CSM, so I got to see what Partnerships was like. When he moved to San Fransico, taking over his role as Partner Manager for EMEA seemed like a logical next step.
5) What training and resources did Gorgias provide to help you in your new roles?
The Gorgias team has always been super helpful and available with me and new team members in general.
Learning directly from colleagues has definitely been one of the highlights of my onboarding and overall experience with Gorgias. Whether it is answering questions on Slack, sharing screens, recording Loom videos, or jumping on a quick call, there is always a Gorgian ready to help!
6) How did your manager (or others at Gorgias) help you upskill and grow yourself?
The two managers I worked with both have hands-on experience with Gorgias customers and partners, and a genuine desire to be helpful and see their team members grow. They are always reliable and helpful when needed, which builds trust and promotes a culture of feedback and transparency.
Gorgias as a company is obsessed with scaling and automating processes, and my managers have definitely lived up to those values and helped me become more efficient and see the big picture when working on projects.
At Gorgias, we are also lucky to have a best-in-class product and grow at a very rapid rate, which comes with a lot of super interesting challenges and opportunities. The company has a really unique positioning with an obsession for customer satisfaction, which all contribute to a great environment to work in.
7) How can you connect your experience with Gorgias's core values?
My experience at Gorgias so far has been very much aligned with our core values, especially “Customer first”, and “Maximize your impact”.
We live and breathe for customers, automate time-consuming tasks, share best practices with the rest of the team, and try out new tools and processes — all with the end goal of providing a better product and experience to merchants who use Gorgias.
Our managers highlight Gorgians who are living up to our core values weekly on our Slack channels, so we get to see first-hand all the great things our team does in accordance with our values.
8) What is your favorite thing about working at Gorgias?
As someone who worked closely with customers for all of my career, I think that my favorite thing at Gorgias is our huge focus on customer experience and satisfaction. Making our customers happy and successful, independent of their size, is our target and biggest investment as a company.
Whether it is reviewing our processes to make sure they benefit our customers, going the extra mile when helping our customers out, finding workarounds, prioritizing product features, or letting our customers get on a call with our highly available success and support teams, we are always doing things with our customers’ interest in mind.
9) If there is one thing you would like to change about the company, what would it be?
I guess it would maybe be the name of the company (haha). Simply because it’s hard to pronounce. Also, people don’t read or hear “Gorgias” for the first time and instantly know what we do.
10) What's next for you at Gorgias (and how is Gorgias helping you get there)?
As I started my new role as EMEA Partner Manager recently, my focus is becoming a great Partner Manager, first and foremost.
We have a pretty good presence and network in Europe, but it’s still in the early stages compared to the US. I am learning and getting a lot of help from our US team who built a very strong market presence and brand in the US, and I am super excited to help develop the Gorgias brand and customer base in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa!
Interested in joining Yohan and the rest of Gorgias team? Check out our jobs page to learn more about our benefits, interview process, and open roles.
Today, a wide range of software solutions exist to help ecommerce business owners better manage every aspect of their online store. However, creating the ideal technology stack for an ecommerce store is often easier said than done. To help you put together a tech stack that’s best suited for your unique business needs, we’ll review some of the top ecommerce tools on the market today, grouped by category.
First, we’ll walk through what you need to know about building a powerful, easy to use ecommerce tech stack — without breaking the bank.
What is an ecommerce tech stack?
An ecommerce tech stack is the collection of digital tools, software applications, and platforms that an online store owner uses to run their business. These tools work together to optimize day-to-day tasks — across sales, marketing, customer service, order fulfillment and returns, payment processing, and other key areas — and reveal customer insights that can fuel growth.
If you’re curious about an ecommerce brands’ tech stack, try searching on builtwith.com, which scans the back-end of any website to see what technology it uses.
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Factors to consider as you build your ecommerce technology stack
Today, ecommerce store owners have a broad range of solutions to choose from when it comes time to build their ecommerce tech stack. However, an abundance of options can also make selecting the best solutions a challenge. Here are the most important factors to consider:
Cost
An ecommerce tech stack can consist of anywhere from 3-5 core tools to more than 20, depending on the size of your operations and how you approach the process. It’s vital to set a budget and keep it in mind as you weigh different solutions and plan tiers. If possible, balance it against the return on investment (ROI) for the particular tool or feature set (more on that later).
Compatibility
Ideally, you’ll create a digital ecosystem of tools that integrate seamlessly and transfer data quickly and reliably. The ecommerce tools you consider should allow you to combine the features of multiple solutions, either through direct integrations or third-party integration tools.
Ease of use
While all ecommerce solutions come with some degree of a learning curve, it's a good idea to prioritize user-friendly tools that are easy to install, set up, and use. Look for a knowledge base with tutorials and FAQs; expert-led training options can also help.
Customer support
Make sure the support solution aligns with your business hours and the channels you prefer, like email, phone, or live chat. Choosing a solution that’s backed by excellent customer support means you’ll have a reliable source of assistance if or when issues arise.
Determining the order of tool additions
Building the right tech stack, complete with all the tools and features your store could possibly need, doesn’t happen overnight. It’s best to focus on testing and approving the tools you truly need for your day-to-day operations. That way, you know that any other software or hardware you’re considering should integrate nicely with your must-have tools.
For starters, an online store hosting platform will be the cornerstone of your ecommerce tech stack. From there, it’s up to you to decide which tools you add next.
We’ve seen that many ecommerce store owners choose to prioritize their sales and marketing tools — after all, many of the other solutions on our list won't offer much value if your online storefront isn't attracting customers or ready to manage payments. Big picture solutions or add-ons, like the top tier of a user analytics tool or premium page themes, can come later on.
Ensuring compatibility between tools
When it comes to building the best possible ecommerce tech stack, integrations are key. Choosing apps that sync with one another allows information to flow seamlessly between them, cutting down on manual labor and user error and letting you get the most out of your stack.
Most software platforms have an integrations or apps page where they list their official integrations. For instance, the Gorgias Apps page has a categorized, searchable database of the 80+ apps that integrate with its platform. For apps that don’t directly integrate, a tool like Zapier lets you easily set up workflows between them and doesn’t require much tech expertise to use.
An email marketing platform that connects with your order fulfillment platform, for example, can enable you to send automated order tracking updates to your customers personalized with their name. A customer service solution that integrates with your social media marketing solution, meanwhile, can allow you to turn your social media channels into customer service channels.
A connected ecosystem provides far more value and functionality in the long run. By looking for compatibility between tools ahead of time, you can build an ecommerce tech stack that’s much more than the sum of its parts.
Balancing your tech stack budget against potential ROI
Fortunately, the money you invest into building tech stack doesn’t disappear into thin air — it will offer real value and unlock revenue opportunities. As you consider the cost of different tools, it’s a good idea to weigh it against the potential ROI of each tool.
At a high level, you can determine the potential ROI of each tool by weighing the expenses for a given time period — such as monthly subscription costs, licensing fees, additional users, and training or setup fees — against the potential gains. It can be tough to put the positive value of using a new tool into figures, however, consider gains like increased sales or reduced labor costs to start.
We recommend creating an optimistic estimate (lowest cost and highest return) and pessimistic estimate (highest cost and lowest return) to get closer to an accurate number. For example, if your optimistic estimate suggests that an email marketing tool will increase your store's cash flow by 10%, then you could factor this estimated ROI into how much of your budget is allotted for this tool.
The first solution that you will need to choose before you can get your ecommerce store up and running is a hosting platform. Hosting platforms allow you to build a custom ecommerce website — regardless of your coding experience — using simple drag-and-drop commands.
Plug-n-play hosting platforms also offer services such as website hosting, website security, and payment processing on your behalf. If you would like to get started building your own ecommerce store using an ecommerce store hosting platform, here are the top platforms to consider:
Shopify
Arguably the most recognizable ecommerce store hosting platform, Shopify has certainly earned its reputation as a go-to choice for e-commerce sites. With Shopify, business owners are able to create attractive online stores in a matter of minutes by choosing from a broad variety of starting templates, then adding additional design elements and features from Shopify's ever-expanding library.
Business owners can also integrate thousands of additional features into their online store by making use of the Shopify App Store — a store that sells thousands of third-party apps designed to integrate with Shopify websites.
Pros
Mobile-ready
Choose from thousands of third-party app integrations on the Shopify App Store
Like Shopify, BigCommerce is a web development solution that allows ecommerce business owners to create their own online stores within a no-code environment before offering a full suite of web hosting services that includes site security and payment processing.
With that said, there are a few features that set BigCommerce and Shopify apart. For one, BigCommerce offers a long list of built-in sales features that don't require any additional installation, ensuring that you are ready to start moving products the moment your store goes live. Another nice feature of BigCommerce is that BigCommerce does not charge any transaction fees regardless of the plan that you choose.
Pros
The ability to add an unlimited number of product variants
Magento differs from Shopify and BigCommerce in the fact that it is an open-source platform that is free to download and use. In order to build a website using Magento, though, you are going to need a certain degree of coding experience. The tradeoff for this steeper learning curve is that Magento allows you to build sites that are much more customized than what you could build using Shopify or BigCommerce. Magento also offers hosting services and a broad range of third-party integrations that can be purchased as add-ons.
Pros
Unlimited customization options providing you know how to code
Comprehensive answers to just about any question can be found on the Magento Forum
Unique features
Detailed analytics and reporting
Enhanced product browsing (i.e. the ability for customers to zoom in on product images, the ability to display stock availability, and the ability to display multiple pricing tiers)
According to data from The Drum, the total amount of money spent on digital ads increased 41% in the first half of 2021. If you want to keep up with econnerce industry competition that is increasingly spending more on advertising, it is essential to develop the right marketing strategy for your online store — and a big part of creating an effective marketing strategy is choosing the right ecommerce marketing tools.
From providing insights about your visitors, to helping you conduct keyword research, to helping you manage your email and PPC campaigns, there are a lot of capabilities that come with developing the right ecommerce marketing tool tech stack.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a SaaS solution that automates the process of creating and managing email and SMS campaigns. With Klaviyo, you start out with pre-built campaign workflows that you can customize into your own email or SMS campaigns. From there, Klaviyo allows you to create automated triggers and segmented lists for your campaigns that will completely automate the process of sending the right messages to the right customers at the right times.
Pros
An incredibly wide range of pre-built email workflows to choose from
A convenient analytics dashboard that displays key campaign data
Unique features
Multiple automation triggers such as cart abandonment, price drop, back-in-stock, and more
A large library of integrations to pull data from other ecommerce tools and platforms into Klaviyo
Postscript is a tool that integrates with Shopify stores in order to provide store owners with the ability to create and manage SMS marketing campaigns from one centralized dashboard.
Given that SMS messages have a 98% open rate according to data from TechJury, SMS can be a powerful medium to manage, and Postscript provides all of the tools you need to develop and oversee effective SMS marketing campaigns: detailed reporting, tools for growing and managing your SMS subscriber list, and beyond.
Pros
Create up to 65 different automation triggers
Segment your subscribers using 40 segmentation filters, including historical Shopify data, SMS activity, data from app integrations, area codes, and more
Unique features
Create multiple "text-to-join" keywords
Create QR codes that can be used to opt-in to your subscriber list
Google Analytics is a free analytics service offered by Google that is designed to provide real-time insights regarding how users find and use your website. With Google Analytics, you can see where your traffic is coming from, the pages that they visit, how much time they spend on each page, detailed demographics of your website visitors, and beyond. This detailed customer data helps you optimize your online store and marketing campaigns alike.
Google Analytics can also connect with any ecommerce platform and offers an incredibly wide range of other integrations as well.
Pros
Excellent data visualization features
Create custom data reports
Unique features
Perform keyword research using Google Analytics's Search Console
Segment your website visitors and leads for more personalized and targeted campaigns
Canve is a simple, powerful design platform where anyone can design marketing assets for their website, social media, and more. While most designers prefer more powerful design tools, Canva’s extensive template library and simple drag-and-drop editing features make it the perfect choice for small business owners and single-person marketing teams.
Pros
Easy to use, regardless of technical or design skills
Great free model
Unique features
A large template library with pre-sized images for Instagram stories, Facebook banners, and so much more
Great collaboration features to help facilitate brainstorming and feedback
With billions of engaged users all over the globe, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are ripe with marketing opportunities. In addition to solutions for marketing to your social media audience, ecommerce social media management tools can also provide benefits such as automating the process of managing your social profiles and enabling you to turn your social media profiles into customer service channels.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool that offers features like social listening tools for gleaning key insights from your social media audiences, automation tools for automatically scheduling and publishing posts, a centralized inbox for responding to comments and direct messages across multiple platforms, and rich analytics for gauging the results of your social media efforts. If you're looking for a single solution to empower your store's social media strategy, Sprout Social is a wonderful option to consider.
Pros
Offers a variety of powerful tools and features in a single solution
Intuitive and easy to use
Unique features
Social listening tools automatically track and extract key insights from social conversations about your brand
Publishing and scheduling tools enable you to schedule posts for automatic publishing across all major social media platforms
Gorgias's comprehensive customer service platform offers powerful social media management features such as the ability to respond to direct messages, comments, and mentions across platforms from a single dashboard, track sales generated by individual support agents via social media app, and create macros that streamline your day-to-day social media interactions.
Pros
Powerful, user-friendly social media features and integrations built specifically for online stores
Offers a broad range of customer support tools to make Instagram, Facebook, and more part of a stellar customer experience
Unique features
A centralized, user-friendly dashboard for managing social interactions across platforms
Customizable rules and macros powered by customer sentiment detection
With over 146 million active users in the United States alone, Facebook Messenger is one of the most popular messaging platforms in existence. With Recart, ecommerce store owners are able to take advantage of this app's popularity by creating automated Facebook Messenger marketing campaigns. Recart also offers tools for helping you grow your Facebook Messenger subscriber list, as well as SMS marketing and list-building features.
Creating an optimized customer experience is a vital goal for all types of retailers, and ecommerce stores are certainly no exception. With ecommerce CRM tools, you can ensure that you are managing your all-important customer relationships in a way that is well-organized and largely automated, freeing you up to focus on other important tasks.
Attentive
Attentive is an SMS and email marketing solution designed to help store owners scale their subscriber lists and engage with those lists in a more personalized manner via enhanced segmentation and targeting. If you would like an all-in-one solution to SMS and email marketing, Attentive can offer everything you need to start building your subscriber lists and generating impactful campaigns.
Pros
Makes it easy to ensure compliance with SMS and email marketing regulations
Strategic guidance and resources designed to help store owners optimize their SMS and email campaigns
Unique features
A design editor that allows you to easily create various sign-up units for your website, social media platforms, emails, and product packaging/in-person marketing initiatives
Build custom integrations using Attentive's Public APIs and developer resources
Ecommerce technologies designed to help you optimize your store's conversion rate and grow its sales can be highly beneficial. Ecommerce sales tools are able to provide a number of capabilities, such as helping you create the ideal sales funnel for your site, helping your sales staff perform customer outreach, and providing you with a wealth of customer data that you can leverage to boost your website's sales.
Certainly
With Certainly, ecommerce store owners can create AI assistants that will guide their site's visitors to recommended products, walk customers through the checkout process, present customers with upsell opportunities, assist with returns, and more. These AI assistants also gather loads of valuable data during their conversations with customers that you can use to optimize the customer experience on your site.
Pros
Create AI-assistant-guided sales funnels for your site
Access much more detailed customer data that is acquired via customer conversations with your AI assistants
Unique features
Certainly Webhook Builder allows you to completely customize your AI assistants
A wide range of pre-made templates to speed up your time to market
Even in today's digital age, contacting customers by phone remains a lucrative sales strategy. With EasyCall, sales teams are able to manage every aspect of phone-based customer outreach from a single centralized dashboard. EasyCall also makes it easy for customers to get in touch with you by making it simple for you to create a business phone number and web-based call center.
Pros
EasyCall can easily integrate with almost any CRM tool
An intuitive call center tool allows for effortless collaboration between your sales and customer support teams
Unique features
Create a web-based call center without the need to purchase any hardware
Make international calls without paying international calling fees
Automating time-consuming tasks such as managing email marketing campaigns or building new features into your website can free you and your team up to focus on other responsibilities. If you would like to leverage the power of automation on your website, here are two great automation e-commerce solutions to consider.
Alloy
Alloy is a no-code automation solution for ecommerce stores that allows you to create triggers and automated flows with ease. Alloy is designed to integrate with a wide range of ecommerce tools and platforms so your system is ready to go when a specific event occurs within your store or one of the apps that you rely on, like a sale, customer message, page view, and more.
Pros
Plenty of customizable triggers, conditions, and executable actions to select from
Capable of integrating with over 100 different ecommerce tools and platforms
Unique features
Offers a variety of pre-built workflows in addition to the ability to create your own, customized workflows
Centralizes data from multiple applications and customer touchpoints
Omnisend is a tool that allows ecommerce store owners to create automated SMS and email marketing campaigns. In addition to templates to help get you started, Omnisdend also offers precision targeting and list segmentation tools, customizable triggers for launching automated campaigns, and in-depth reporting on the results that your SMS and email campaigns generate.
Pros
Easy to set up and use
Affordable pricing plans with a completely free plan that offers up to 500 emails per month
Unique features
A broad range of customizable email and SMS templates to choose from
Automated list segmenting automatically divides your subscriber lists into targeted list segments
Mesa offers a wide range of automation solutions, including automating customer returns, order tracking, creating customer support tickets, and beyond. With Mesa's large library of pre-built automation workflows and its no-code workflow editor, you can build and customize just about any automation you can imagine — regardless of your coding experience.
Pros
Makes it easy to build customized automations using only drag-and-drop commands
A well-regarded support team for helping you make the most of Mesa's many features
Unique features
A no-code workflow editor that allows you to customize Mesa's pre-built automations or create your own automation from scratch
A vast selection of pre-built automation workflows
Once you successfully direct a customer to the checkout page of your online shop, the battle is still far from over. In fact, the average cart abandonment rate across all industries is right at 70% according to data from Baymard Institute. Thankfully, utilizing the right ecommerce shopping cart tools can help you optimize your customers' checkout experience and keep your cart abandonment rate as low as possible.
Shopaccino
One-part shopping cart tool, one-part plug-n-play ecommerce platform, Shopaccino allows you to turn any website into an ecommerce store by providing features such as payment processing, campaign tracking, inventory management, and more. If you are looking for an all-in-one solution for creating and managing your online shop but would rather use your existing website, then Shopaccino is a great option to consider.
Pros
Provides the ability to turn any existing website into a fully functional ecommerce store
Provides APIs for connecting any ERP, accounting system, or other software solution
Unique features
A large selection of free responsive themes to help you get started building your online store
Automatically or manually generate coupon discount codes
Ecwid is a tool that makes it easy to add products and a checkout page to any website or social media profile. Like Shopaccino, Ecwid can be used to turn your existing website into a fully operational online store. Ecwid also makes it easy to sell across multiple sales channels and platforms, including in-person, on your website, or on your social media profiles.
Pros
Easily add products and a checkout page to any existing website or social media profile
Completely free to use
Unique features
In addition to turning any website or social media profile into a point-of-sale, Ecwid also allows you to easily process and manage in-person sales and accept credit/debit card payments on the go or at your brick-and-mortar location
Provides automated marketing features such as automated abandoned cart emails and automated PPC advertising
For brand-new stores, most of the tools listed in other sections will be enough to . However, as you grow, you may need additional web development frameworks to help you customize your store, improve efficiencies, and offer the customer experience your shoppers deserve.
Front-end web development
Front-end web development programming languages help you develop, design, and deploy your ecommerce website. They help make your website more interactive, eye-catching, and user-friendly. The main front-end programming languages are:
JavaScript (JS): Adds more dynamic, interactive elements to your web pages
Back-end web development
If front-end web development is the aesthetics of the house, back-end web development is the plumbing, electricity, and everything else that operates behind the scenes to power the house’s — or your website’s — functionality.
Back-end development is usually custom-built, and requires a few elements:
Operating system: Windows, Linux, or macOS
Web server: Apache, Nginx, Microsoft-IIS
Databases: MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB by Amazon, Firebase database by Google, PostgreSQL
Storage: Amazon Web Services (AQS) S3, Firebase Storage by Google
Scripting language: Ruby on Rails, Java, Python, Scala, PHP, Spring, Groovy on Grails
If you’re interested in learning more about technical stacks for ecommerce, consider reading more about some of the most popular:
And if this section on web development went over your head, don’t be alarmed. Most stores get away with simple no-code tools until they mature enough to hire outsourced or in-house developers to support.
The ability to securely and conveniently accept payments from customers is a vital capability for any online store. Thankfully, these payment processing solutions make it easy for you to provide your customers with multiple payment processing options: Think of them like payment gateways that connect your store to flows of funds.
Shopify POS
Shopify POS is a point-of-sale solution designed specifically for Shopify stores. It boasts a variety of advantages for Shopify users, including the ability to sync inventory, payments, and orders across multiple Shopify stores, create discounts and loyalty programs, and offer customers flexible shopping options like local pickup, local delivery, and ship-to-customer.
Pros
Easy and powerful integration with the Shopify platform
Provides useful inventory management tools in addition to payment processing
Unique features
Allows you to process payments online, in store, or on your social media channels
Lets you create detailed customer profiles for use in loyalty and rewards programs
Once integrated into your online store, PayPal allows you to accept both credit/debit card payments as well as payments that are made using the customer's own PayPal account. PayPal also offers convenient point-of-sale devices that enable you to accept credit, debit, and PayPal payments at your brick-and-mortar location.
Pros
Robust security ensures that your customers' sensitive financial data doesn't fall into the wrong hands
PayPal speeds up the checkout process for customers with an existing PayPal account, making it much easier for your customers to complete their purchase and thus reducing your cart abandonment rate
Unique features
PayPal Checkout allows customers to complete their checkout without having to fill in information such as credit card numbers and shipping addresses
PayPal Marketing Solutions provides insights into how your customers are shopping
Like PayPal, Square offers both ecommerce and in-person payment processing solutions. While Square is best known for its point-of-sale devices that make in-person payment processing secure and convenient, Square can also be integrated with your online store to allow you to easily accept credit/debit card payments.
Pros
Slightly lower fees than PayPal and other payment processing solutions
Exceptional point-of-sale devices for in-person sales, including a free card reader
Unique features
24/7 live chat support
Square offers a feature that allows customers to book appointments with your company through its website
Recharge is a subscription billing platform for Shopify stores that allows store owners to sell subscription-based products and services. If you are selling subscription-based goods such as replenishable goods or subscription boxes, Recharge can help you manage the complex billing in a way that is easy and largely automated.
Pros
Detailed analytics and reporting
ReCharge is the only Shopify Plus partner designed specifically for subscriptions
Unique features
A gifting function that allows customers to gift a subscription to another person
Upsell workflows to help increase your average order value
Excellent customer service is a key pillar of ecommerce success. With these ecommerce customer service software solutions, you can integrate live chat customer support into your website, create automated chatbots for handling common questions and customer support issues, and automate other time-consuming elements of customer support.
Gorgias
Gorgias is an all-in-one customer service solution built specifically for merchants in the ecommerce industry.
The tool provides live chat customer support capabilities and self-service options such as a dedicated help center and knowledge base. This platform also offers a wide range of automations and macros for automating much of your customer service responsibilities. If you are looking for a comprehensive solution to ecommerce customer service that will save your customer support team time and resources and give your customers the help they need, Gorgias is an excellent solution.
Pros
Gorgias centralizes all of your multichannel support tickets in one place, allowing your customer support team to edit orders, modify subscriptions, and refund payments without leaving the helpdesk
Can connect with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento stores to bring your products and shopper history right into the helpdesk
Unique features
Live chat customer support with the ability to automatically message customers first during key events
Macros and rules that allow you to automate customer service tasks such as providing shipment updates or creating customer support tickets
Stella Connect is a tool designed to help business owners manage remote customer support teams. With Stella Connect, you can manage your entire customer support team from one centralized dashboard, or integrate with Gorgias for an even more robust solution for remote teams. You can also schedule one-on-one meetings with customer support agents, provide agents with real-time customer feedback and more, making Stella Connect an excellent choice for business owners who rely on remote workers as their customer support staff.
Pros
Centralizes and streamlines all aspects of remote customer support team management
Provides detailed customer data that you can use to improve your customer support performance
Unique features
Create and implement automated customer support workflows
Create rewards and incentive programs for customer support agents
Installing chat tools on your website is one of the best ways to boost order value while making customer support more convenient for your customers. In fact, nearly 80% of businesses say offering live chat features has positively impacted sales, revenue, and customer loyalty.
Chat solutions for ecommerce stores can come in two different forms: live chat and automated chatbots. Implementing a live chat solution lets customers connect with a live support agent via a chat widget on your website. Chatbots, meanwhile, are AI-powered chat tools that auto-reply to common customer questions and issues according to rules you create and macros and resources you build ahead of time.
In both cases, ecommerce chat tools can be a powerful way to make your support channels more accessible to customers while reducing the workload of your support team. Here are the tools that can help you do it.
Gorgias
Gorgias offers a fast-loading and easy-to-install live chat widget that lets customers easily connect with a support agent any time they visit your website. In addition to live chat widgets built into your ecommerce store, Gorgias also gives you the power of live chat support via Facebook Messenger and SMS. For common questions and issues, Gorgias offers rules and macros that can be used to create automated responses, allowing you to quickly address the questions your brand receives most and turn them into sales opportunities.
Pros
Gorgias's fast-loading live chat widget won't slow down your website
Your live chat support agents can manage conversations across multiple platforms from a single dashboard
Unique features
Provides support agents easy access to key details, like shopper history and inventory levels, during any live chat conversation
Allows you to automatically trigger live chat campaigns based on a variety of events and customer actions
Includes customer sentiment tools to automatically sort chat-based requests by priority and keep tickets organized
Ada is a solution that provides AI-powered chatbots for customer experience, sales, and support purposes. In addition to automated customer support chatbots that are able to address common questions and issues, Ada offers chatbots that will proactively engage customers when they visit your store. These proactive outbound messaging chatbots can be used to automatically deliver timely content to customers that is personalized based on their actions and interests.
Pros
No-code automation and one-click integrations make Ada easy to set up and use
Chatbots deliver personalized responses based on customer data that feel like an interaction with an actual human agent
Unique features
Intent and sentiment detections for delivering relevant, personalized responses
Capable of automatically routing customer inquiries to your sales or customer support team
Managing returns and shipping is a hassle that most online store owners would rather do without. Fortunately, there are high-quality tools available that allow you to automate many of the responsibilities associated with handling shipping and returns. By providing customers with self-service return options, automatically sending out shipping updates, and more, the following two tools can go a long way toward streamlining the logistics side of your business.
ReturnLogic
ReturnLogic is designed to automate the entire returns process by enabling you to create automated return workflows, automatically updating your inventory, and making it easy for you and your customers alike to track the status of returns. ReturnLogic also provides complete visibility to your customer support team, making it easy for them to access a customer's purchase history and issue refunds and returns.
Pros
Creates a completely transparent returns process that is easier for both your customers and support agents to navigate
Provides analytics on your returns that you can use to lower your return rate
Unique features
Barcode scanner functionality that allows you to update the status of a returned item with a simple scan
3PL and ERP integrations that allow you to seamlessly connect ReturnLogic with your existing inventory management systems or logistics provider
Wonderment is an order-tracking platform that seeks to reduce customer support tickets regarding order status by providing customers with automated shipping updates. With Wonderment, you can automate shipping notifications via email or SMS, send internal notifications regarding delayed or lost orders, and create custom, fully-branded shipping alerts.
Pros
Seamless and customizable shipping update automation options
Helps stores be more proactive about resolving issues that could otherwise lead to customer support tickets
Unique features
View the status of all of your shipments from one dashboard
Integrates with Klaviyo, making it easy to send customized and automated shipping update emails
Encouraging exchanges for returned products rather than refunds is a great way to reduce the often substantial impact that product returns have on a store's bottom line. With Loop Returns, online store owners can create a customized product return portal where customers can return their purchases and manage exchanges without needing to contact the support team, among other helpful features.
More of a logistics service provider than an application, ShipBob is a service that allows ecommerce store owners to ship their products in bulk to ShipBob warehouses across the country. Once you've delivered your products, ShipBob then takes over all inventory management and order fulfillment responsibilities on behalf of your online store — picking, packing, and shipping products to customers as they're ordered.
Pros
ShipBob completely eliminates the burden of order fulfillment, including managing product returns
Strategically located warehouses allow you to offer faster shipping to locations across the country
Unique features
Includes built-in reports and analytics that provide a window into product performance
Offers a comprehensive help center that will help you master the platform and resolve any issues that you might experience
Providing customers with the ability to easily track their shipments is one of the most important parts of creating an optimized post-purchase experience. With AfterShip, you can create customized order tracking pages that allow customers to follow the location and status of their orders on your website. AfterShip's user-facing dashboard also enables you and your staff to easily monitor purchases and returns.
Pros
Simplifies the tracking of purchases and returns for both your staff and your customers
Plenty of customization options make it easy to create tracking pages that are on-brand and optimized for your store theme
Unique features
Provides a range of automated post-purchase workflow templates, such as shipping notifications
Provides detailed analytics around your shipping performance and post-purchase experience
Add Gorgias to your ecommerce tech stack to give your customers the top-notch service that keeps them coming back
From boosting your sales to streamlining the customer support process, creating a tech stack for your ecommerce store that is complete with the best ecommerce solutions can offer a wide range of advantages. At Gorgias, we are committed to helping our clients improve the quality of their customer support while at the same time making their entire customer support process more efficient with our industry-leading ecommerce customer support solutions.
See for yourself how Gorgias can help you provide your customers with the service they deserve — try out Gorgias today!
Free shipping has become so ubiquitous in ecommerce that shoppers now expect it.
According to a survey conducted by Forbes, 77% of respondents abandoned their cart because they were unhappy with the shipping options. 84% made a purchase because it qualified for free shipping.
Free shipping isn’t always an option for ecommerce stores though, especially for those with small margins or where shipping is expensive for every order.
These are the best strategies for how to offer free shipping, even if you’re unsure it’s something your business can afford.
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Is offering free shipping in ecommerce worth the cost?
Free shipping has become a key differentiator in a very crowded ecommerce ecosystem, with 75% of customers now expecting it on all orders.
Offering free shipping can drive more revenue for your business, encourage repeat business, decrease cart abandonment, and even pull customers away from your competition.
Let’s be clear: Offering free shipping for all products is not sustainable for most businesses. But free shipping is not all-or-nothing. Below, explore why providing free shipping in some capacity is worth the expense for your business.
Encourage customers to become repeat buyers
One survey found that 90% of consumers consider free shipping to be the primary factor driving them to shop with online retailers more frequently. And, according to Gorgias, repeat shoppers generate 300% more revenue than first-time shoppers, on average.
When customers are online shopping, they remember easy experiences, which includes not having to pay for shipping when they find something they love. A stress-free experience (without unpleasant surprises at checkout) creates loyal customers who want to shop with your business long term.
On top of that, some free shipping models encourage customers to place larger orders, generating more revenue per customer.
Take the minimum order value model (what you might call the Amazon not-Prime model), where shipping only becomes free once the cart reaches a certain subtotal. Depending on which study you prefer, at least 84% — and perhaps as many as 93% of customers — have added items to their cart to qualify for free shipping, increasing average transaction value and potentially total revenue per customer.
Sway customers away from competitors
When you offer free shipping and a competitor doesn’t, that single difference can pull new customers your way — and away from the competition. When 90% of consumers consider free shipping their top incentive and a full 60% of them expect free shipping no matter what, offering it is a huge differentiator for your customer base.
One firm determined the overall rate of cart abandonment in ecommerce stores is north of 75%, and unexpected charges (including shipping charges) at checkout are the top culprit.
In other words, providing free shipping — and keeping other unexpected fees out of the checkout process — will reduce cart abandonment and increase conversion rate for typical ecommerce businesses.
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Is your online store ready to offer free shipping?
Making the decision to implement free shipping isn’t always as simple as flipping a switch. It takes careful planning and even more careful execution. Consider the following factors to help you understand the cost of free shipping for your business and decide if it’s the right move for you.
Understand how much shipping costs your ecommerce business
The demand for free shipping has changed the way that small businesses choose to operate. For example, writer Amanda Mull at The Atlantic reveals how free shipping priorities (and algorithms favoring the vendors who offer it) have hurt numerous small business owners on Etsy.
If you’re operating on razor-thin margins and you’re already struggling to be price-competitive, pivoting to an always-free shipping model might not be feasible. Even if your margins are healthy, for many smaller ecommerce retailers, blanket free shipping isn’t sustainable or feasible—nor are the extra costs that come with it.
Next steps: How to calculate shipping costs for your business
On a spreadsheet, compile the shipping costs for every product you sell — from the smallest and lightest to the largest and bulkiest — to all four corners of the US (if you’re a US-based store) and anywhere you ship internationally.
This cost will differ based on your preferred shipping carrier, too. Compare rates between FedEx, UPS, and USPS to see who has the most affordable option — we’ve linked shipping calculators for each above. Once you have these numbers, calculate your average shipping cost. Then, multiply it by the average number of orders you get in one month.
You’ll also want to look at your best-selling items and calculate how much it costs to ship them, as you’ll likely be sending these out more often than other items in your catalog.
Don’t worry about exact numbers here. The goal is to get a ballpark number to compare with your monthly revenue. If your estimated shipping costs will put you in the red, free shipping may not be the best option (even with the bump in orders). If this is the case, consider qualified or flat-rate shipping instead — more on both below.
Offering a flat-rate shipping charge is one way to give customers a low-cost shipping option without absorbing the entire cost yourself.
Even if you can’t afford free shipping, charging one flat shipping cost for all orders on your site incentivizes larger orders. And, if you can keep the flat rate low, it can convince customers who just want to make a small order to convert.
Set up flat rate shipping in Shopify
Setting up flat rate shipping is quick and easy if you use Shopify: Here’s how to do it.
Determine your free shipping limit
Most brands can’t support universally-free shipping. That’s why a qualified free shipping option based on factors like order size or location is such a good option.
The most straightforward way to offer qualified free shipping is to set a minimum order amount. But in terms of your bottom line, this minimum threshold needs to be high enough that you aren’t losing money on most transactions.
Here’s a formula for calculating your free shipping threshold:
Free shipping threshold = (Average shipping cost per order / gross profit margin percentage as a decimal) + average value of an order
Free shipping threshold = ($10 / .30) + $50
Free shipping threshold = $83.33
The result you get from this formula is the average amount at which free shipping won’t create a loss for you.
Now in some cases that figure will be too high to be all that relevant. “Free shipping on orders $350+” can make sense for some retailers, but not those with an average ticket of $50.
Customers hate paying for return shipping. If you can afford it, letting shoppers return an item for free is a great way to avoid driving them away. It also can create repeat business, low-effort experiences, and encourage loyalty.
Of course, free returns leave you vulnerable to expensive spammers and order spikes. So, tighten up your return policy and try to incentivize exchanges over returns to protect lost revenue.
Find other ecommerce differentiators besides free shipping
Ecommerce is a wide field, and your business is competing for only a small slice of the market. Look for differentiators with lower cost pressures and high levels of impact that may be unique to your industry or market.
Free shipping isn’t the only thing that matters. Fast delivery also makes a difference in many industries and markets. Can you outmaneuver your competition by offering next-day shipping, even at a premium price? Perhaps your customers will be willing to pay for faster service if it isn’t available elsewhere.
Here are a few other areas you might explore in search of other ecommerce differentiators:
Unique services
Ecosystem effects (think Apple: “Our products all work better together, so stick with us across our catalog”)
Value-adds (freebies, discounts on future orders, etc.)
Multiple shipping and delivery options, including fast or flat rate
If you’re ready to put together your free shipping strategy, use these tips to craft a program that’s enticing to online shoppers without destroying your bottom line.
1) Increase product prices to absorb the cost of shipping
According to research from the Baymard Institute, 48% of shoppers abandoned their cart because the extra costs were too high. People like the transparency of seeing one price without getting surprised by additional fees at checkout.
Speaking generally, most customers would prefer to pay $50 for an item that ships free than spend $45 on the same item, only to discover an additional $5 charge for shipping in their shopping carts. Even though you’re passing shipping costs onto the customer in other ways, you still give buyers the perception of lower costs overall.
Consider raising your prices to include shipping costs to limit surprises at checkout and increase transparency.
2) Offer a “free shipping for orders over” model to incentivize higher AOVs
Offering free shipping when a customer reaches a minimum price threshold can be a powerful strategy for raising ticket value.
Customers will frequently add more items to reach that threshold, increasing average order value (AOV), overall revenue, and your business’s order volume as a whole.
To make it easy for customers to see how close they are to free shipping, add an app to your ecommerce store (like the Essential Free Shipping Bar for Shopify stores) that shows progress visually. For example, Gorgias customer OLIPOP makes it easy for folks to see how many more packs of soda they need to purchase to get free shipping.
This is also a great way to build upselling into your strategy. When customers are looking for additional items to meet the free shipping threshold, consider showing items that pair well at checkout. This automation is easy to add via the app store if you’re on Shopify, and you can see how OLIPOP sneaks in suggestions in the screenshot above.
If you’re going to offer completely free shipping, make sure you use it as a marketing tool and make it very clear to shoppers. For example, Woxer uses a banner at the top of its site to announce that it offers free shipping across the US no matter the order total.
3) Offer subscription-based products to increase LTV
In a survey conducted by Salesforce for CFO, more than half of survey respondents said that 40% of their revenue was made up of subscriptions.
A subscription format is powerful because it ensures repeat purchases and raises the overall lifetime value (LTV) of customers who opt in. If you choose to become part of the subscription economy, you could choose to offer free shipping on subscriber orders only. That way you limit the amount of free shipping you give, and further incentivize shoppers to sign up for a subscription.
4) Limit free shipping to certain items, customers, or locations
Stores with wide product catalogs that include many low-dollar items may not be able to offer blanket free shipping. But, you can limit free shipping to certain high-dollar product categories, select items within those categories, people who live within a certain distance, or VIP customers.
Here are a few approaches you can use to limit free shipping:
Shoppers must reach a designated spend threshold
Free shipping is limited to members (like Amazon Prime or Madewell Insider)
Free shipping is limited to shoppers with a certain number of points in a loyalty program (a service like LoyaltyLion can help you manage this)
Shipping costs are location based (For example, US only if your store is located there)
Products that cost over a certain dollar amount automatically qualify
5) Partner with a third-party logistics company to offer free (sometimes two-day) shipping at scale
Partnering with a third-party logistics company allows you to split inventory across multiple fulfillment centers throughout the nation. That means they’ll end up closer to customers’ homes, which reduces shipping costs because of location proximity, and means that you can offer faster shipping for less cost.
ShipBob is a great option for this, as they’re a trusted global fulfillment company.
Take care of your shoppers with the Gorgias + ShipBob integration. Sync shipping data with your helpdesk, reduce tab-shuffling, and help you improve customer experience during fulfillment.
6) Optimize your packaging for cost
Shipping fees are calculated based on item weight, size, speed, and distance to destination. And the size and weight of your packaging contribute to that cost. Cutting down on the dimensions of your packaging where possible and using lighter-weight mailers can lower the cost of each package.
There’s nothing quite as powerful as a ticking timer, whether it’s a 15% off coupon that’s only good for the next hour or a sale that only lasts for the weekend. Discounts are powerful, but free shipping can be just as enticing.
Consider adding free shipping promotions to existing promotional events such as holiday sales, store anniversary sales, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and other seasonal events pertinent to your industry and market.
Time-limited holiday sales can be effective, but they also tend to be some of your busiest sales windows in any given year. If you could use some additional help with your logistics this upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday, check out our complete guide to BFCM logistics.
Free shipping is often one key to a world-class customer experience in ecommerce. But whatever you choose to do with your shipping policies, you absolutely must pair it with world-class customer service and support. Customers will appreciate your free shipping, but they’ll love you (and show it through repeat business) when you outpace the competition in terms of customer service.
Gorgias is an all-in-one customer service and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce businesses like yours. It integrates with a variety of different apps, like LoyaltyLion, Attentive, and Klaviyo. We operate at the speed of ecommerce, empowering you to serve and scale like never before. We also offer support for logistics like free shipping and order management, largely thanks to our many ecommerce integrations.