Ecommerce businesses pour time and money into attracting prospects and turning them into new customers. But as acquisition costs skyrocket due to increased competition and rising ad prices, attracting new customers isn’t enough — especially if you can’t keep them around.

Today, ecommerce brands must prioritize customer satisfaction and retaining existing customers. If you can’t retain customers, you’ll never get out from under high marketing costs and grow your brand in a sustainable way. Plus, if you can’t offer a customer experience that generates brand loyalty, poor word of mouth will chip away at your brand’s reputation and make it hard to get new customers at all.

Fortunately, more tools and resources than ever exist to help you develop a good customer retention strategy by improving the on-site experience, customer support, and all the other elements of a great customer experience.

Below, we'll cover the importance of customer retention, how to calculate your customer retention rate, and share ways to improve your customer retention rate and reduce customer churn.

What is ecommerce retention rate?

Customer retention rate is the percentage of existing customers that continue buying from your brand over a given period of time. 

If your organization sees many repeat customers and — if applicable — keeps customers subscribed, you’ll end up with a good customer retention rate. However, if your company seldom does business with a customer after the initial order, you have an opportunity to improve your retention rate.

Customer retention rate is the inverse of ecommerce churn rate. Check out our guide on churn if you want to learn more about that side of the coin.

Retention rate for subscription-based businesses

Retention rate is most applicable to businesses that sell subscription-based products or services, like software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies or ecommerce brands that sell subscription boxes.

For these companies, measuring and understanding retention rate is straightforward. As long as a customer has an active subscription, they’re retained. The total number of customers who remain active subscribers each month (compared to the previous month’s number) is the brand’s retention rate.

Retention rate for non-subscription businesses

For customers that don’t sell subscription-based products, retention rate is a bit of a square peg in a round hole. Retention rate becomes more of a proxy to understand customer loyalty and the rate of returning customers, which are a little less concrete. It’s difficult to anticipate a customer’s future purchases because they don’t have a clear subscription status. 

Is a customer retained if they buy a product every week? Month? Quarter? What if they don’t buy from your store for half the year, then re-engage for Black Friday — were they retained, or won back? These questions are why retention rate isn’t a perfect metric for the typical ecommerce business.

For these types of companies, we recommend tracking repeat customer rate as well as other leading indicators for repeat shopping, like customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS) rather than customer retention metrics.

Why is customer retention rate an important metric?

Your customer retention rate is a valuable measure that gives you important insight into your ability to sustain customer relationships (and turn them into repeat business). It's easier and cheaper to keep a customer than it is to go out and find new customers. According to Hubspot, a mere 5% increase in customer retention can increase the company's revenue by a whopping 25%-95%.

According to Gorgias data, repeat customers make up only 21% of the average brand’s customer base but generate 44% of that brand’s revenue because they shop more often and place higher-value orders.

If your strategy over-relies on winning new customers, you’re missing out. Due to high customer acquisition cost and low returns from first-time shoppers, you’ll overspend on low-return customer relationships, taking your ROI. Of course, acquiring customers is important — but their value is only truly realized if you can keep them around. 

Customer retention rate calculation

There's a simple formula for calculating your customer retention rate. It contains three elements:

• Number of customers at the beginning of a time period
• Number of customers at the end of the same time period
• New customers acquired during the given period

Customer retention rate = [(Number of customers at the end of time period - Number of customers acquired during time period) / Number of customers at the beginning of time period] x 100

Customer retention rate example

Company A had 100 customers at the beginning of the year and 80 customers at the end of the year. During the year, they acquired 45 new customers. The customer retention rate calculation for Company A would be as follows:

Customer retention rate = [(80 - 45) / 100] x 100

Customer retention rate = 35%

What is the average customer retention rate for ecommerce stores?

The widely accepted customer retention rate for the ecommerce industry is 31%, according to Omniconvert. Depending on how well they handle their customer base and their effort in building customer loyalty, some companies may enjoy a considerably higher customer retention rate. Those who only gear their resources toward finding and selling first-time customers may have a lower retention rate.

Of course, the most important thing is consistent improvement, regardless of your brand’s current customer retention metrics. Customer retention is an ongoing process, and there's always room to improve — which will benefit your customer service ROI and your bottom line.

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7 ways to improve ecommerce customer retention rate

Ecommerce brands should keep a razor-sharp eye on their ecommerce retention rate and churn rate, just like they need to look at customer lifetime value (CLV) and average order value. These benchmarks are metrics that help measure a business's health and identify opportunities to benefit the bottom line. You can put actions in place that help you keep current customers with you instead of your competition.

Let's dive into six tried-and-true customer retention strategies you can use to increase your ecommerce brand's customer retention rate.

1) Provide a fantastic customer experience

We can't say enough about the importance of a positive and pleasant user experience. According to a 2019 research study by Oracle and Jeanne Bliss, 43% of customers will stop doing business with a brand over a single bad experience. In addition, 59% of them will tell their friends and family about the negative experience.

Evaluate your customer service program with metrics like resolution time, net promoter score, and customer satisfaction, and work on improving essential elements of customer experience like:

• Hiring and training high-quality, well-trained talent understands your customer and delivers top-tier support every time
• Self-service resources to help customers find instant answers when they run into problems
• Automation to help your customer success team perform their jobs faster and more efficiently
• Mobile optimization: According to Statista, smartphone orders generated 46% of revenue for retail ecommerce websites
• Omnichannel support so customers can get ahold of you wherever they are, like social media, text messaging, or live chat support

For more tips on the essential elements of a great customer service experience, check out our post on customer service best practices.

2) Introduce a clear post-purchase experience

One of the most important moments of the customer life cycle is immediately after their first purchase. Think of the post-purchase email campaign as your onboarding flow for repeat customers. You need to set customer expectations with clear, proactive communication or else they’ll be less likely to return to your store.

Here are some examples of the consequences of poor post-purchase experiences:

• If a customer places an order and doesn’t get a follow-up email, they start to doubt whether their order went through
• If a customer doesn’t get an order tracking number after a purchase, they may stress about the shipping time frame
• If a customer doesn’t get set-up instructions, they may think the product doesn’t work and ask for a return

Pay special attention to the communication a customer receives after their first purchase. A lack of communication is fatal, and the right combination of confirmations and email marketing can quickly get customers interested in buying additional products. If you nail it, you give the customer a clear, easy path to long-term customer loyalty.

A great example of clear, post-purchase emails is Princess Polly, an apparel brand. They give customers simple but visually informative confirmation emails that communicate the status of the customer’s order at a glance:

3) Build a rewarding customer loyalty program

Loyal customers come back to your brand over and over, making them a profitable addition to your business. According to a 2020 survey by Yotpo, 68% of customers will join a loyalty program if one is available. Cultivate your customers into raving fans and increase their purchase frequency by employing a customer rewards marketing strategy.

To create a successful rewards program, consider looking into tools like LoyaltyLion. They help you determine the rewards that repeat customers will get for important customer engagement behaviors like mentioning you on social media (which is great for word-of-mouth exposure), purchasing a new product, or generating referrals. Consider offering freebies, deep discounts, and early access to new product launches. 

Parade, an apparel ecommerce brand, offers its loyal customers (called Parade Friends) free, early-access items. This supports customer engagement and brand loyalty, and usually leads to a wave of user-generated content (UGC) on social media that promote the brand:

If you use Gorgias, you can also integrate with LoyaltyLion to see customer rewards within the helpdesk so you can see which customers are superfans, prioritize their tickets, and offer personalized service.

Learn more about the Gorgias and LoyaltyLion integration.

4) Offer customers discounts and deals

Everyone likes to feel special. Score some big points with your current customer base by offering them exclusive incentives. This could include letting loyalty program members order new products before the general public, offering them member-only discounts, offering free shipping, and sending a free gift with their purchase. These extra touches will increase your customer's satisfaction and keep them loyal to your brand.

Amazon is a great example of a company that uses deals and discounts to get people to shop on their site. When you sign up for Amazon Prime, you get free shipping, an enormous library of original movies and TV titles, and so many other perks to incentivize you to keep shopping at Amazon.

Of course, this strategy isn’t feasible for small stores running on Shopify, BigCommerce, and other ecommerce platforms. But, if it makes sense for your products, consider replicating the strategy with a Subscribe and Save option. By signing up for automatic repeat purchases, customers get a discount. This is great for customers because they save on the purchase and don’t have to remember to restock. It’s also great for your company: You retain more existing customers, driving revenue.

Here’s an example of how OLIPOP, a beverage brand, advertises their subscribe and save option on product pages:

5) Conduct surveys and learn from customer data

Don't assume you know what your customers want — ask them! Retaining customers takes continuous communication, as their interests and preferences can change over time. It's necessary to periodically survey them to ensure you're hitting the mark with your retention efforts. Gather and review customer feedback, looking for trends to use to elevate your buyer's experience.

These surveys don't have to be long or time-consuming. A question or two during checkout or a marketing email asking for two minutes of their time is enough to give you valuable intel.

Learn more about gathering customer feedback with CSAT surveys or NPS surveys.

6) Improve your ecommerce store’s marketing with segmentation

Consistently improve and optimize your store to keep it functioning quickly and efficiently. Segment your customers for more personalized, impactful messaging. For ecommerce brands, the best tool around is Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you segment your customer base and send highly targeted SMS and email marketing campaigns.

Plus, if you use Gorgias, you can integrate with Klaviyo to bring you SMS marketing and support into one tool:

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On top of segmentation, continue making your website as seamless and low-effort as possible. Check your load times for your web pages, measure the success of your calls to action (CTAs), and cut down on the number of required clicks where you can. Remember, the best way to delight customers (and keep them coming back) is a low-effort experience.

7) Utilize cross-selling and upselling strategies

Upselling and cross-selling are the most effective strategies to maximize the lifetime values of repeat customers by driving higher order values. While you never want to be too pushy, you can employ retention marketing strategies to suggest new, exciting products to existing customers to bring them back to your store and spend more.

Check out our guide to ecommerce upselling strategies for:

• A list of tools to support your upselling efforts
• Tips to turn customer support interactions into upsell opportunities
• Tips to proactively reach out to customers as an upsell strategy (which has been shown to lift revenue)
• Tips to reduce returns and get more exchanges instead, which reduces lost revenue and still gives you a chance to wow customers

Alternatively, learn how Ohh Deer, a stationery brand, partnered with Gorgias to revamp their customer support and upselling strategy and lift quarterly revenue by $12,500.

Increase your ecommerce retention rate with Gorgias

By focusing on providing a wonderful customer experience at every touch, creating customer loyalty, and cross-selling at the right moments, you can increase your ecommerce company's retention rate and enjoy more profit from your existing customer base.

Ready to improve your customer service? Gorgias, the helpdesk built exclusively for ecommerce, helps ecommerce businesses enhance, automate, and increase the speed of their customer support, improving customer experience and, by extension, customer retention. Brands that switch to Gorgias see an average of 5% higher gross merchandise volume (GMV). 

We also help you monitor performance with features like our support performance dashboard and live statistics about agent performance. 

Book a demo today to learn how you can increase your customer retention rate with exemplary customer service.

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Every customer service interaction is a representation of your brand, and the words you use when communicating with customers matter. The right customer service phrases could make the difference between:

• A high-effort vs. a low-effort customer experience
• A high CSAT score vs. a low one
• An escalated customer vs. a quick resolution
• A one-time buyer vs. a repeat customer

Whether your goal is to update your customer service templates, improve customer service training, or just raise CSAT, have your customer support team members use these 15 phrases made up of customer service power words (and avoid the 5 harmful ones) to cultivate better conversations. 

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15 useful phrases for customer service

The following customer service lines can be used on phone calls, emails, live chats, or any other channel.

If you use a helpdesk, you can incorporate them into your library of templates (or Macros, if you use Gorgias). to scale the quality of your support and make sure all agents are using the best language possible:

Greeting customers

Customer service representatives can make a good first impression with customers by using positive language right out of the gate. Here are some common customer service phrases for greeting shoppers:

"How are you doing today?"

Asking someone how they’re doing adds a personal touch that makes customers feel valued. It's a great ice-breaker and provides a more natural transition into addressing the customer's problem.

“Nice to meet you” 

Similarly, if your customer service team starts out a chat by saying that it’s nice to meet the customer, it adds a more personal feel to the entire conversation. 

“Happy to help!”

Positive words are a key part of great customer service, and this phrase lets customers know that your service reps are excited and ready to resolve an issue or answer a question. 

When to use customer greetings 

Use a cheerful greeting to set a positive, warm mood for the forthcoming conversation. For example: “It’s so nice to meet you! Thanks for reaching out today.” Or, “How has your day been so far?” Or, “I’m more than happy to help in any way I can!”

Follow up with a greeting at the end of a conversation, once you’ve answered a shopper’s questions or resolved their issue. For example: “It’s been so nice to chat with you! Thank you for reaching out to us.” Or, “I’m happy to help. Reach out again any time.” 

Solve customer issues

Once a customer explains their problem, validate their concerns and transition into offering solutions. A few great customer phrases to help your support team make this transition include:

"Excellent question. I'll find out for you."

Complimenting a customer for asking a great question (even if it's a question your team members hear a thousand times a day) makes customers feel validated. It also ensures that you’ll get to the bottom of the customer's request and figure out the right answer.

Examples of when to use this phrase

On social media, when answering product questions to help shoppers make a purchase decision. 

“That’s an excellent question! Let me see if we can make that ring in a brushed finish for you.” 

When providing a status update on an order. 

“Great question—I’m seeing the same thing on my end: Your order has been stuck in the same location for a few days. Let me check in with our shipping team to see why.”

If a customer asks about a price match or adjustment. 

“Good question! Let me find out if we do offer price matching.” Or, “Great question, we can adjust the cost of your order if an item goes on sale within two weeks of its purchase date.”

📚Recommended reading: Tips and Templates for Customer Service Messaging on SMS + Conversational Channels

"Thanks for bringing this to our attention!"

This phrase lets customers know that you’re committed to offering good customer service and are willing to listen to customer feedback. It's a phrase that reassures shoppers that the customer service agent takes their issue seriously.

Examples of when to use this expression

When a shopper points out an issue with the checkout or shopping process. 

“Thanks for letting us know that the discount code we provided didn’t work for you! This affects all of our customers and we’re grateful you caught it before we did. It should be fixed now!” 

If a customer receives a defective or damaged item. 

“Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. This item does not represent the quality that we strive for with our products, and we’d like to send you a replacement ASAP.”

When a customer’s order hasn’t shipped after the allotted processing time. 

“Thank you for bringing this to my attention! We’re experiencing an unprecedented amount of orders due to our feature in a recent magazine.”

📚 Recommended reading: 20 Ecommerce Customer Service Best Practices to Help You Level Up

De-escalating angry customers

Dealing with upset customers is a challenging aspect of customer service, and the way your reps diffuse the situation is critical to success. 

"Please let me clarify, and correct me if I got anything wrong."

Miscommunication or misunderstandings are common reasons why customers get upset. This phrase provides customer support agents with the opportunity to fully understand what happened and why the customer is angry. 

Examples of when to use it 

After a customer tells you what they’re upset about. 

“To clarify, the order arrived a week after we had quoted you and you no longer need the item. Is that correct?” 

To confirm that you’re offering the resolution that they’re looking for. 

“Let me clarify to make sure that we’ve resolved this for you. Is there anything else that I can help you with, besides sending you a replacement for the item that arrived damaged?” 

To clarify what’s wrong with the item they received. 

“Are you able to send in a photo of the item you received? It sounds like we sent you the navy sneakers, rather than the black sneakers, by accident!” 

"I understand how __ that must be."

"Frustrating," "difficult," and "disappointing" are all words that you can use to fill in the blank in this phrase, and they all accomplish the same purpose. The best customer service is empathetic and seeks to solve customer complaints quickly and with compassion. 

Examples of when to use it 

When a frustrated customer finishes explaining their problem. 

“I understand why you’re upset, and I would be too! Let’s figure out a solution that makes you happy and that fully resolves this issue.”

If a package they were waiting on gets lost in the mail. 

“I understand how frustrating this must be, especially since it sounds like we really missed the mark on getting the item to you in time for your son’s birthday.”

If the color of an item looks different in person than it did online. 

“I can understand why you’re frustrated—what shows up as light blue online looks to be more of a dove gray in person.”

Apologizing for order issues

Even if your company is not entirely at fault for a customer's issue, it's still essential to validate their concerns and apologize for the inconvenience. When it comes time to apologize for a problem that a customer is experiencing, here are a few great phrases to try.

“I'm sorry to hear that you haven't gotten your order yet. Let me check on the status for you.”

Inquiring about order status is a very common reason why customers contact customer support, so it's an issue that your support team needs to be ready to address. Apologizing for the delay and offering to check the order's location and status is the most effective way to resolve this common issue.

Examples of when to use it

When an order is delayed. 

“I'm sorry to hear that you haven't gotten your order yet. Let me check on the status for you. With the storm on the east coast, we’ve been having some shipping issues with items coming from our New Jersey warehouse.”

If an order is lost or hasn’t moved in a week. 

“I'm sorry to hear that you haven't gotten your order yet. Let me reach out to our warehouse team, as they’re on the ground and can give us the best idea of when your order will get to you.”

For pre-ordered items that haven’t shipped by the expected release date. 

“I'm sorry to hear that you haven't gotten your order yet! Let me check on the status of that item for you. Last I heard, the pre-ordered items were running behind on their shipping dates.”

💡Tip: Use a customer service platform that automatically displays the shipping status of each order next to the customer ticket, so your agents don’t have to waste time chasing (and copy/pasting) information from other apps. Here’s what a ticket in Gorgias looks like, with information from Shopify displayed next to the customer message:

“I apologize for the inconvenience you are experiencing. I'll look into it right now and get back to you with more details.”

This is a versatile phrase that your support team can use to address a wide range of customer issues, from wrong or incomplete orders to credit card issues and beyond.

If you can’t solve something right away, letting customers know that they can expect a follow up can help build a more positive customer experience, rather than just leaving them hanging. 

Examples of when to use it

To validate a customer’s feelings about a frustrating order issue. 

“I apologize for the inconvenience you’re experiencing! This is not how we want our customers to feel when shopping with us. Let me look into what happened so that I can make this right for you.”

To look into alternative solutions for a missing order that’s now sold out. 

“I apologize for the inconvenience, especially since you were so excited about this item and now it’s sold out. Let me check in with my team to figure out when the item will come back in stock, or if we will be stocking something similar in the meantime.”

When you can’t figure out where an order is right away. 

“I apologize for the inconvenience here! I’ll look into this with our shipping and processing team and get back to you with more details. Is the email we have on file for you the best way to get back in contact?”

📚 Recommended Reading: 30+ email templates to improve your customer support responses.

Putting customers on hold

A HubSpot survey finds that waiting on hold is the most frustrating part of the customer service experience for 33% of respondents. Of course, sometimes there is no other option but for a call center support agent to place a customer on hold. To soften the blow and help prevent frustrated customers, here are two phrases to use when you need to place a customer on hold.

"I'll forward this to our __ specialist. Just a moment."

If you have to forward a customer to another agent, this is a great phrase to use since it lets the customer know that you are passing them off to an expert who can better address their needs. 

Examples of when to use it

When their question requires information you don’t have access to. 

“I’ll forward this to our warehouse team, who will be able to let me know if your order has reached the warehouse yet. That will give us a better idea of when it will reach you. Just a moment.”

If there’s a different department that is better equipped to answer the question. 

“Let me connect you with our product specialists, who can better answer your questions about the installation of our roof racks onto your car.”

If your support agents specialize in different business areas. 

“I’ll forward this to our damaged orders specialist, who will look into what happened and get this sorted out for you. Just a moment.”

💡Tip: Read our guide on automatically prioritizing and routing tickets in Gorgias to minimize handoffs by putting customers in touch with the right person from the jump. For example, here’s a Gorgias Rule that automatically tags VIP customers (who have spent more than $100) so a dedicated high-touch agent can jump on the request:

"I can certainly check that for you. May I put you on a brief hold?"

Asking for a customer's permission before you put them on hold is a polite way of validating the inconvenience and giving the customer a sense of control over the interaction. Highlighting the word “brief” assures customers that they won't have to wait on hold for long.

Examples of when to use it

When you need a moment to look deeper into a customer account. 

“Let me look into this for you! Is it alright if I put you on a brief hold while I take a look?”

If you need to check in with a lead or manager for approval. 

“Let me look into this for you. Is it okay if I put you on a brief hold so that I can check in with my team?”

To get guidance or more information from a different team. 

“Let me check in with my team about that. Is it alright if I put you on a quick hold? It should only take a minute.” 

💡Tip: Use a helpdesk that displays customer information from your ecommerce platform (like Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento) and other tools (like Klaviyo, AfterShip, and Yotpo) to get all the customer information upfront. This will help you avoid asking customers for skippable follow-up information or pausing the conversation to check another tool.

Thanking customers

Thanking customers for their feedback and continued business is an important part of customer service interactions. If you would like to let your customers know that you are truly grateful for their call, here are a few excellent phrases to try.

"Thank you for your feedback."

Thanking customers for their feedback assures them that your company is open to constructive criticism. Customer feedback of any variety is a gift to your company, and it's important that customers don't feel guilty about raising issues. You can also use words like insight, comments, and suggestions — all of which can sometimes sound a little less robotic.

Examples of when to use it

Use this phrase anytime a customer offers any kind of comments about your company, its product, or its services. Remember, all feedback is good feedback, whether it’s positive or negative, so be sure to have a system in place for tracking it and acting upon it when possible.

"Thank you for being our customer."

Every customer needs to know that they’re valued, and this versatile phrase can be used at just about any point in a customer service interaction to show customers that you appreciate them.

Examples of when to use it

As part of wishing a customer well at the end of a conversation. 

“Thank you for being our customer! We so appreciate you.”

"Thank you for contacting us for help. If this problem arises again, don't hesitate to reach out to us."

For various reasons, many customers hesitate to contact customer support when a problem occurs. But having a customer contact your support team is always better than having them leave your company for another without giving you a chance to make it right.

Examples of when to use it

To conclude a conversation after solving an issue or answering a question. 

"Thanks for reaching out to us! If you have any other problems or have any questions, don’t hesitate to write in again.”

Providing proactive support 

Offering proactive customer service can take your support to the next level by giving customers the tools to answer their own questions before they need to reach out to you. 

“If you have any further questions and we’re not online, you can always check out our extensive help center.”

Providing self-service resources can supplement product guides or tutorials, give deeper information about returns and shipping policies, and offers information for shoppers to answer their own questions and avoid the hassle of reaching out to your team. 

You can share these resources at the end of a conversation, or as an automated pop up when someone visits your website. 

As a supplement to great support, to look up any details about their product.  

“This handy FAQ article should answer any further questions you might have about how to use your new product, especially if we’re not online to help right away!”

To share more info about returns, orders, shipping, etc.  

“If you have any other questions about our returns process and you’d rather not have to chat with us (we get it, it takes time!), you can always check out our Help Center.”

💡Tip: Here’s an example of a Gorgias Help Center, where customers can read help articles about the product, shipping and return policies, and more. With Gorgias Automate, you can also empower customers to track, cancel, and modify orders without waiting on an agent:

To share support even when agents aren’t online.  

“We’re not online right now, but we’d love to help! We’ll send you an email answering your question. In the meantime, check out our handy Help Center to see if you can find an answer to your question there.”

💡Tip: You can set up a Rule in Gorgias that automatically lets the customer know you’re offline, plus an estimate on when you’ll be back. Here’s what this kind of Rule looks like:

"Can I help you with anything else?"

This phrase is a great way to make sure that a customer's concerns have been fully addressed before ending a conversation with them. However, it's important to use this phrase carefully. If a customer doesn't feel that their initial problem has been resolved yet, asking if you can help them with anything else is likely to only make them more frustrated. 

Examples of when to use it

At the end of a conversation to make sure you answered all of their questions. 

“Do you have any other questions, or can I help with anything else before we end our chat?”

As a way to upsell happy customers. 

“Can I help you find anything else for your holiday celebration?”

5 customer service words and phrases to avoid

In many ways, knowing what not to say is just as important as knowing what to say. Avoid these five phrases to lessen the possibility of frustrating customers further and painting your brand in a negative light.

“I don't understand.”

You never want to tell a customer that you don't understand their problem. In situations where an agent is having trouble following a customer's concerns, asking for clarification is always better.

What to say instead

• “Let me see if I'm understanding your issue, and correct me if I get anything wrong…”
• “Can you walk me through the problem again?”
• “If I'm not mistaken, the problem seems to be that…”

“Calm down.”

Telling an upset customer to calm down is likely to have the exact opposite effect. While it's sometimes necessary to calm a customer down before an interaction can continue, there are better ways to go about it.

What to say instead

• “I understand your frustration, and I'm happy to help.”
• “I'm sorry that you are experiencing this issue. Let me fix this for you right away.”

“That's impossible.”

While there are certainly cases where it isn't possible to fulfill a customer's request, it's important to approach these instances carefully. You don't want to make customers feel that you are unwilling to help, which is what telling them that something is impossible often conveys.

What to say instead

• “I'm afraid this issue might be out of my control, but let me double-check on…”
• “I'm really sorry about this, and I wish that we could solve this for you. Instead, let’s…”
• “This is a peculiar problem that you're describing. Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions about it?”

“I guess…”

Your demeanor should come across as prepared and confident, and language like“I guess,” “I suppose,” and “I'm not sure” doesn’t show customers that they’re in good hands.

What to say instead

• “I believe that what we are dealing with is…”
• “Based on what you've told me, the problem most likely is…”

“I can't help you.”

Similar to “that's impossible,” telling a customer that you can't help them can make shoppers feel like you’re unwilling to help rather than unable.

What to say instead

• “I understand your frustration, but I'm sorry to say that my hands are tied on this issue."
• “I'm really sorry about this, and I wish that we could solve this for you. Perhaps you could try…”

Gorgias analyzes each customer question, so you can use the right phrases

Knowing why customers contact you (and how they're feeling) is essential to understand how to communicate back to them. And thanks to the power of Gorgias AI, getting inside your customers’ minds to understand exactly what they want to hear is now easier than ever before.

With Gorgias' revolutionary sentiment detection, your support agents get invaluable insights into a customer's sentiments and intentions that they can use to guide the interaction. 

Learn more about how sentiment detection can help you improve your customer support, generate more happy customers, and boost revenue.

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Some hold up the net promoter score (NPS) as the holy grail of KPIs. While we won’t go so far as to declare it the most important metric of all, we will say that it is one of a few that is absolutely crucial to your brand and customer success.

That’s because you can learn a lot about customers when you dig into NPS feedback. What keeps customers happy, what upsets them, how you can boost retention, how to slow down churn — you name it, NPS can become a valuable feedback loop that reveals insights into all of these things and more.

That’s why we’ve created this guide. Read below to learn how to improve response rates to create a better, more accurate net promoter score.

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NPS formula and calculations

If you’re unfamiliar with net promoter scores, we have a detailed explainer on how to calculate NPS that will tell you everything you need to know. But for now, let’s have a quick refresher. 

It all starts with asking your customers a simple question: On a scale of 0-10, how likely are they to recommend your offerings to a friend?

From there, collect these numbers:

• Promoters: People with scores of 9 and 10 who are likely to recommend you.
• Passives: People who gave 7 and 8 scores — not necessarily unhappy, just not happy enough to actively promote for you.
• Detractors: People who gave answers between 0 and 6. These people range from those unlikely to recommend you to those who will actively detract from you via word of mouth, bad reviews, or negative social media posts.

Calculating your NPS is easy. Determine the percentage of promoters and detractors from the total number of responses. Then, subtract the detractor percentage from the promoter percentage for your score. So if you have 70% promoters minus 10% detractors, your NPS is 60.

11 best practices to improve response rates in NPS surveys

Before making business decisions based on your NPS, you need the best possible dataset to work with. That means improving response rates to NPS survey questions creates a larger sample size — and below, we’ll show you the best ways to do that.

1) Choose when to send surveys: Lifecycle-based, transaction-based, and pulse checks

There are three great cadences to send out your NPS surveys:

Lifecycle-based surveys

These should trigger at certain moments of the customer’s lifecycle. They’re a great way to get customer feedback at key points of the customer journey. 

This way, you can easily triangulate high-impact changes — for example, if NPS goes way up after customers receive an email with set-up instructions, consider making that information available earlier. 

Other examples include:

• 30 days after signing up
• A year after signing up
• After a certain onboarding step 

Transactional NPS surveys

A transactional NPS survey gets triggered by set customer interactions. Much like the lifecycle surveys above, this helps you collect customer feedback and take a temperature check where it matters most. In this case, after key customer touchpoints:

• In ecommerce, this will most likely be after a purchase or a subscription renewal 
• In the SaaS world, it could trigger after a customer installs a new feature 

Pulse-check surveys

Pulse checks are a bit different in that they survey your whole customer base all at once. You can use NPS surveys to gauge customer sentiment following a company rebrand, after a push to get new customer referrals, and so on. 

Especially while conducting lots of customer research to ensure product-market fit, conduct pulse-check surveys with some level of regularity to maintain a healthy feedback look. Many companies do pulse checks twice yearly just to get a sense of customer sentiment across the entire customer base.

2) Only ask one question in NPS surveys (most of the time)

Where NPS surveys are concerned, less is more. The longer your survey, the lower the chances are that people will hang around to finish it. Sticking to one question can improve your response rate — and you want a great response rate because larger sample sizes will create a more accurate NPS.

So, what's a good survey response rate? There is no one clear answer because response rates can differ between channels (email surveys versus telephone or in-app surveys, for example) or based on how engaged your customers are with your brand.

However, good response rates can generally vary between 5% and 30%. If your response rate shoots up to 50% or more, you’re doing extremely well — and your customers are highly engaged.

While you want to keep your surveys brief, nothing says you can’t follow up with particular customers individually. In fact, you absolutely should follow up with customers who offer particularly interesting responses in your survey’s feedback section. Send out a more in-depth survey or schedule a 1:1 interview to discover the reasons behind their responses.

Here’s a great example of a one-question survey sent with NPS survey tool Delighted, plus a follow-up question made possible by Delighted’s integration with Gorgias:

When to use multi-question surveys

There are a couple of limited cases when you can send out multi-question surveys:

• When you need deeper feedback on specific new products
• To get in-depth feedback from loyal customers who are willing to spend more time answering questions

Use these longer surveys judiciously to collect highly targeted information — and strive to keep them as brief as possible.

3) Always, always, always A/B test your surveys

A/B testing is a common marketing technique that has users compare multiple pieces of content to determine which pieces perform best. You can — and absolutely should — use A/B tests for your surveys, too. Doing so will help you optimize surveys to get the best response rate.

When you’re designing an A/B test, consider testing for the following:

• Email subject lines: (“Let us know what you think!” vs. “We want to hear from you!”)
• Number of questions (single-question vs. multi-question surveys)
• Delivery channel (email, in-app, after-purchase pop-up, etc.)
• Best time of day (morning, end of day, etc.)
• Best stage of the customer lifecycle (one day, week, or month after purchase)
• Testing by customer segments (repeat customers vs. first-time shoppers)
• Best time to test after an interaction (so the interaction still feels fresh)

Those tests will get you started, but feel free to add more as you spot areas to potentially improve.

4) Make your NPS surveys visual and brand-friendly

The first step to creating an attractive survey is to add visuals. Don’t rely on people typing in answers to questions. Use graphical buttons instead. Be sure to use your company’s logo in the design, and introduce your brand’s colors through borders and other elements.

Make it brand-friendly, too — whatever that means for your brand. If your brand gives off a sleek, posh vibe, then your net promoter score survey should do the same.

Rather than building these emails from scratch, consider using an NPS survey software with convenient templates. There are many great options, but we recommend Delighted — especially given its integration with Gorgias:

Delighted does a great job of letting you brand the survey (using your logo and colors) without over-crowding the email and distracting the survey-taker from the main purpose of the email: Choosing an NPS score. 

5) Consider offering a reward for filling out NPS surveys

Free swag is an excellent motivator, and so are discounts. Offer a little something extra in exchange for NPS survey responses, and you’ll likely see your response rate shoot up dramatically.

What can you offer? The sky's the limit. Create swag bags to send out to respondents or offer a limited-time promotional item. You can also offer digital gift cards or discounts, too.

The only issue with offering rewards is that it may not be sustainable. One great way to work around this is to set up a drawing or raffle, so that survey respondents have a chance at winning something awesome. It’ll be more affordable for your brand — and an attractive enough offer that more customers will leave feedback in exchange for a chance at the prize.

6) Add a comment box for customers to explain their numerical answer

NPS survey best practices include always making sure there is a comment box below the numerical survey question. Some customers won’t leave a comment, but some will. Use these comments to understand why your happy customers are so delighted with your offerings and why unhappy customers are less than thrilled with the experience you’ve offered.

If you use an NPS tool like Delighted, you can opt in to include an optional “Tell us more” box:

7) Look deeper into your NPS and customer data to get the most valuable insights

Your NPS score is a valuable tool, but it will only get you so far. It’s essentially a measurement of how “loud” your promoters are compared to the detractors. Focusing too much on the relative volume of each group can be misleading.

For example, you may be tempted to invest a lot of time into rescuing your detractors, but think about this: Maybe the problem isn’t that your detractors are unhappy. Maybe they were never the right target market in the first place.

That’s why you need to dig deeper into the data behind your NPS score. You might find interesting patterns, like nearly all of your detractors live abroad or a huge percentage of your promoters bought the same product. That suggests perhaps you need an audience from closer to home.

• Dive into demographic patterns on Shopify or whatever ecommerce platform you use to learn about the characteristics that make up promoter, passive, and detractor groups.
• Keep track of feedback from comment boxes. Do detractors routinely mention shipping delays? Now you know where to start on improvements.
• Send out follow-ups to members of each group to see if you can learn more about the factors that drove their initial response.

8) Always send a follow-up message to thank customers who filled out the survey

Thank-yous are a fantastic way to build goodwill and customer loyalty. This step doesn’t have to be anything complicated, either. In fact, the CRM tools or survey templates you use to generate surveys should automate the thank-you process — either as a final screen of the survey or a separate email.

Ideally, your survey should pop up with a quick statement of thanks once the survey has been completed. Make sure to personalize the message — but keep it brief to ensure that it’s both seen and appreciated.

This is how a thank you message will appear if sent with Delighted:

Less ideal — but still acceptable — is to send a follow-up email to say thank you. The problem with this method is that people aren’t always appreciative of inbox clutter — plus, there’s a chance customers may delete the email unread.

9) Just get started and aim for statistically significant sample sizes later on

Worried that your survey isn’t optimized to its fullest? Or that your customer base is too small to generate meaningful results? Set those fears aside and launch your NPS survey anyway.

The truth is, even small brands can get a lot out of comparatively few NPS responses. A/B testing your survey to optimize it is important — and it’s also something you can do to improve as you work through the process.

Now, if you’re a super small B2B brand with only a handful of customers, or a brand that is just starting, NPS scores may not be all that worthwhile. Instead, you may need to roll up your sleeves and dive in to ask for feedback the old-fashioned way: with phone calls or messages directly to your point of contact.

10) Test your survey before sending it to customers

We’ve talked about the importance of A/B testing — but what about regular beta testing? It’s an easy and crucial step that ensures an easy-to-use survey tool for your customers. 

Just have a handful of people at your company so they can click all the buttons and check various features. Request feedback on the design, and be sure to load the survey on mobile and desktop platforms, too.

Testing the technical aspects of your survey is especially important if you have any sort of automatic personalization. If you use a tool like Retently, for example, send a few test emails to different recipients to make sure the personalization is accurate:

💡Tip: If you use Retnetly, you can integrate with Gorgias to follow up with customers — like winning back unhappy customers or inviting happy customers to a referral or loyalty program. 

11) Think beyond the surface of the results

Up above, we mentioned that sometimes you learn important things about your target market based on your detractors — and that’s why you should always look beyond the NPS score itself. Do a deep dive on your detractors to really analyze what is happening. Examine demographic information and pay close attention to any comments they leave.

For example, do you have a large group of detractors who love your product but are unhappy with customer support or your website experience? This might indicate that your customer service team needs additional training or managerial support, which is a straightforward fix to raise your score. Or what if all of your detractors share certain characteristics, like age, income level, and geographical region? It could mean that this subset isn’t your product’s target market, and you’ll be better off re-targeting your product.

Find out how Gorgias helps ecommerce brands increase their KPIs

Ready to boost your NPS? Gorgias makes it easy. It’s customer support software specifically designed for ecommerce, built to integrate with the ecommerce tools (like NPS email software) you already use. 

On top of NPS, you can facilitate follow-up questions, automate thank-you emails, and get a real-time view of other statistics like customer satisfaction (CSAT), average response times, and resolution times.

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To learn more, sign up here and check out everything Gorgias offers.

When a shopper places an order, the second phase of customer acquisition begins: Turning new customers into repeat customers. Return customers generate 300% more revenue over first time buyers on average, according to data from 10,000 ecommerce brands. 

So, what kind of post-purchase behavior leads to long-term loyalty? Ideally, your customers follow up purchases with: 

• Leaving positive reviews and CSAT scores
• Signing up for a customer community or participating on social channels 
• Introducing friends and social followers to your brand and products
• Engaging with follow-up marketing email campaigns
• Making repeat purchases with the help of product recommendations or a generous loyalty program

Below, learn more about the psychology of your shoppers once they place an order, and get tactics to improve your brand's post-purchase experience.

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What is post-purchase behavior?

Post-purchase behavior is the set of actions customers take after purchasing an item. Post-purchase behavior can be positive (repeat purchases, raving fans), negative (poor reviews, excessive returns), or neutral (transactional purchases, simply using the product).

Why is it important to understand post-purchase behavior?

Post-purchase behavior matters because making the first sale isn’t the finish line. It’s the beginning of a race to win long-term, loyal customers: people who repeatedly return to your store, have a high customer lifetime value, buy more from you (increasing cart size and transaction value), and send new customers your way.

Gorgias’s data shows that while repeat customers make up 21% of all customers, they bring in 44% of revenue. 

What is post purchase dissonance?

Post-purchase dissonance, or what’s also known as “buyer’s remorse,” is when an otherwise positive purchase experience creates cognitive dissonance in the form of discomfort or other negative feelings. 

Usually, customers experience post-purchase dissonance when you don’t give enough information about:

• Order confirmation: “Did it go through?”
• Shipping: “When it arrive on time?”
• The product: “How do I set this up?”
• Returns: “Am I stuck with it?”

This often, understandably, dampens positive post-purchase behavior. On the other hand, a great post-purchase experience and strong customer service and support can drive positive post-purchase behavior, including brand loyalty.

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13 ways to provide a pleasant post-purchase experience that leads to more sales

Happy customers tend to become repeat customers. Focusing on creating a positive post-checkout process can increase customer satisfaction, bolster your repeat customer rate, and build customer loyalty.

Here are 13 ways to anticipate what your customers may think after clicking “Confirm order” and how  steer your customer’s post-purchase behavior. 

1) Do some audience research before getting started 

Consider: What metrics are we optimizing for?

The first step in encouraging positive consumer behavior through a thoughtful post-purchase experience is understanding what you want your customers to do. Then, take a look at who they are, what they care about, and how they behave. The key is to fully understand your brand’s customer journey. This will help you craft a better experience for them that’s based on real learnings about your business. 

“The first question brands should ask is, what kind of post purchase activities do you want to drive differently,” Bri Christiano, Director of Support at Gorgias, says. “And, who are you really targeting? That's going to dictate what your main metric is, and it’ll determine where you focus.” 

After you have a top-level understanding of the kinds of results you want to see overall, you can drill down into the specific activities that will be effective, like timely email sends. 

2) Immediately send an order confirmation email

Customer sentiment: “Did my purchase go through?”

In order to ensure a stress-free purchase process for your online store, send shoppers a confirmation email so they can confirm that their transaction went through. 

Include details like their order number, the shipping destination address, payment method, product details (in case of an order mistake), and the total cost including any promotional discounts. 

Caption: Gorgias customer Printfresh sends a thorough post-purchase email that includes all important order details.

💡Tip: Bri recommends sending timely emails that “catch customers when they're interacting with your brand. Don't send random emails at times when you’re likely not top of mind. Then, add personalization when you can for goals that they have, if your brand aligns with that.”

Even better if your order confirmation email links to a clear and helpful order management portal where customers can track their order, report issues, and modify the order.

3) Set up self-service order management

Customer sentiment: “Shoot, I messed up my order. I need to change it, fast!”

Sometimes a customer realizes that they didn’t make the right decision about an order, or legitimately made a mistake. 

Giving customers the opportunity to cancel an order themselves before it ships gives them peace of mind and allows them to correct their mistake in time without having to wait to send in a return. Using a helpdesk like Gorgias, customers can use self-service order management in chat or in the Help Center to cancel a recent order. 

If you do require customers to write into support (or if customers bypass your self-service options), set up a ticket prioritization system to surface those urgent tickets before it’s too late. Ensure that your support reps can do a quick information search to find the order and change or cancel it quickly. 

Here’s an example of a Gorgias Rule that automatically tags tickets about order cancellation requests from orders within the last two days, so your agents can confirm the cancellation before the order is shipped:

4) Be transparent about shipping times, carrier information, and customer service information

Customer sentiment: “When will it get here?”

Retail disruptions have reached 59% or higher over the past couple of years. With supply chain issues and shipping delays, giving people as much information as possible about how and when their purchase will reach them helps better meet customer expectations. 

Plus, questions about order status make up a large chunk of customer service requests. So, preemptively providing this information can help reduce the number of those repetitive tickets that don’t actually require a human touch. 

Offering real time order tracking information (ideally, without making customers jump through hopes) provides transparency, sets expectations, and allows customers to stay up to date with any order delays or changes without having to reach out to customer support.  

📚Recommended reading: Check out our post on how to offer real-time order tracking for more strategies.

5) Enhance the “unboxing” experience

Customer sentiment: “A package! I hope I love it.” 

Every moment, from the moment a shopper makes a purchase to when they unwrap your product for the first time, should build anticipation. Creating a fun and creative unboxing experience will help. 

Stationary brand Ohh Deer and its subscription program Papergang sends visually stunning packaging, especially for its monthly boxes. These fun, “keepable” boxes spark joy, can be reused or gifted, and create an overall positive experience that customers can look forward to. 

To get started, take a look at brands like Arka or Fantastapack, which provide custom options for enhancing your packaging.  

6) Have an honest and forgiving return/refund policy

Customer sentiment: “What if I don’t like it?”

When customers inevitably experience hiccups in the order process, the goal is that their behavior is constructive and positive, rather than angry and combative. To get that kind of post-purchase behavior, you need to offer easy paths to contact customer support and a smooth return or exchange process. 

Customers love the peace of mind of knowing that they can return something without hassle, even if they never have the need. Communicating that returns are easy (and free, if you can manage it) upfront can even encourage shoppers to convert. 

Still, solely-online retailers can be tricky for consumers. Many are hesitant to make a purchase decision on items that they can’t see in person first. To address that concern, share your returns process and policy in every order confirmation email and in FAQs and the Help Center on your website. 

Mattress company Casper created an easy and generous return policy that’s a gold standard for ecommerce: If you don’t like your mattress, tell them within 30 days, and they’ll cover shipping for a free return. With something as bulky as a mattress, free return shipping can eliminate any concerns about not liking such a big investment. 

A returns tool like Loop can really help you optimize the product so customers don’t have to jump through hoops to return a product:

7) Encourage exchanges over refunds

Customer sentiment: “I don’t love it. Should I get my money back?”

Encouraging shoppers to make an exchange keeps them around as a customer and also allows you to keep the revenue from the sale, which will help with your bottom line. According to returns tool Loop, “Turning refunds into exchanges is 10x more impactful than reducing return costs.”

Loop incentivizes returns by offering customers slightly more in-store credit than they would get for a refund: 

Shopify stores that use Loop for their returns see a 15% reduction in returns on average.  If you use Shopify or Gorgias, it’s easy to integrate Loop as an impactful return/exchange tool. 

💡Learn how Loop integrates with Gorgias to improve the customer experience of your returns even further.

8) Provide detailed instructions on how to use the product or service

Customer sentiment: “It’s here! How do I set it up?”

Devices or tools that arrive with no or unclear instructions, DIY furniture assembly that seems nearly impossible, or even complex software tools with poor onboarding can cause a less than positive experience, even if the end product is great. 

Create a simple YouTube video, send clear step-by-step instructions with images, or share a live chat hotline customers can reach out to if they get stuck. These options make it easy for people to get all of the information they need to set up or use the product or service they just purchased successfully. 

For example, GEN3 e-bikes come with a paper manual for assembly, but they also send a QR code (using a QR code generator like Beaconstac) that takes shoppers to a short, high-quality how-to video that’s less than 5 minutes long.

9) Send a CSAT survey and request product reviews from high scorers

Customer sentiment: “This is seriously (un)cool.”

Brands usually send a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score after a customer has interacted with customer support. Consider only asking for product reviews from people who score 4 or 5 on CSAT and leave positive feedback about their interaction with support. 

If you use a helpdesk like Gorgias, you can likely send these kinds of CSAT surveys automatically after conversations, purchases, and other kinds of transactions:

📚Recommended reading: Our Director of Support’s guide to improving CSAT score and survey response rate

10) Include relevant product recommendations

Customer sentiment: “Loved it! What else do they have?”

The time when shoppers are still deciding on a purchase is a prime opportunity for your support team to cross-sell or upsell them on additional items. 

For example, a customer might have trouble finding an item on your website that they saw on social media. Or, they might ask for recommendations for what to purchase or for items that will go best with the item that they already bought from you.

After a purchase is complete, consider surfacing additional product recommendations for customers via email. Even if these don’t result in an immediate second sale, you keep customers engaged and thinking about how that recommended item would improve their lives or enhance the use of the current item they have. 

11) Incentivize customers to show off their purchases on social media

Customer sentiment: “This product’s the best — everyone needs it.”

Providing discounts or other perks in exchange for social media shares and reviews brings more exposure to your brand and enhances the post-purchase experience for your fans. 

Underwear brand Parade runs a program like this called Parade Friends. Existing customers apply for the program, and once accepted, post pictures of themselves wearing Parade items on social media. Their followers can then use their Instagram handle as a discount code, incentivixzing future purchases (with a discount for customer delight). 

That means that both parties benefit, which makes them happy, and you benefit by bringing in new customers and more revenue.

12) Build a community for your customers

Customer sentiment: “I love this brand! Where can I find more?”

For many brands, community drives customer perception of the brand — and drives future sales. Brands have leveraged Facebook groups, Reddit forums, Instagram Live, and more to encourage community among their customers and fans. 

For example, soap shop Dr. Squatch hosts its community on Discord, a community-based social and chat platform, so its customers can hang out with each other and chat about the brand.

Creating a community can increase customer engagement and satisfaction, generate trustworthy, quality customer feedback about your products, and make more opportunities for cross selling and upselling. 

📚Recommended reading: What is Ecommerce Community Management and Why Does it Matter?

13) Follow up with special offers and marketing sequences

Customer sentiment: “Which brand was that again?”

Inevitably, your brand won’t always be top of mind for customers, even if they absolutely love it and your products. This is where a thoughtful marketing strategy comes in, and where email automation can be really effective. 

Set up automated flows that offer personalized product offerings, discount emails based on customer behavior, target returning customers, and ask for feedback. 

📚Recommended reading: 8 Ecommerce Email Automation Series for Online Stores

Encourage great post-purchase behavior with Gorgias

Turning first-time customers into repeat, loyal, raving-fan customers takes meticulous attention to the customer experience, especially in the post-purchase window. This is where Gorgias shines.

Ultimately, getting the ideal post-purchase behavior starts — and ends — with delivering a great customer experience, especially in the post-purchase evaluation phase. Gorgias delivers a powerful platform for your customer service helpdesk, tailored to the needs of ecommerce businesses who want to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Gorgias offers powerful features that drive ecommerce success, including:

• Ticketing system
• Live chat
• Self-service order management
• Intent and sentiment detection
• Data analytics
• Powerful macros and automations

See how Gorgias can transform your customer service efforts. Sign up now!

Did you know that 80% of companies base annual pay increases on performance? Doing so may seem like a no-brainer, especially since other studies like Lattice’s State of People Strategy show effective pay-for-performance strategies are indicators of individual and company performance.

But despite this evidence, we at Gorgias believe compensation shouldn't only be based on performance. The right combination of performance, behavior, and business needs will lead people to a promotion, but we don't provide individual salary raises (that aren’t tied to promotions) based only on performance.

You might be raising an eyebrow, but don’t click away. Removing performance-based compensation helps us reduce bias and focus on long-term growth.

Here’s our compensation plan in a nutshell:

• We base compensation on benchmark data and rely on multiple databases to define our compensation grid. (Notice I don't say "compensation bands" because we don't believe in bands. It's one number, period).
• We pay well. This part is extremely important because a company with low base salary and no variable pay will struggle to attract talent. You must pay well, especially if you want to eliminate merit increases.
• Our compensation grid, aka "Salary calculator," is transparent and accessible to everyone at Gorgias, as well as externally. Check out our salary calculator to get a better sense of our compensation system.
• We don't negotiate offers. I know, it's hard to believe. But it's true! We have our grid, we're confident in what we offer, and we stick to it.

Why compensation shouldn’t only be based on performance

First, let’s define what we mean by compensation here. In this post, I discuss the total package offered upon hiring and the so-called “merit cycle” which gives financial rewards to “top performers.”

I won’t open the topic of commissions, which is a slightly different pay structure. It’s also an interesting topic — maybe a future post?

Regardless, here are the main reasons we don’t believe in compensation models that reward individual performance.

Biases are lurking everywhere (yes, even if you're a great manager)

Startups move fast, and managers do too. Even managers who are aware of bias are still susceptible to them. And evaluations of employee performance are very hard to rid of bias.

Let me ask you this: Would all employees have the same salary today if they had different managers? At most organizations, the answer is no. When one manager decides yearly compensation of their direct reports, those direct reports end up with subjective, bias-ridden compensation. That’s no good.

You're probably well aware of biases, so let's skip the usual suspects like affinity bias (which makes you like more people who are similar to you) and focus on others.

Pressure bias

Pressure bias occurs when an employee constantly talks about money and puts pressure on you to give them more. A common response is to compromise, just to end the uncomfortable pressure: "Alright, I'll give them at least a 3% raise so they won't complain forever."

You might be thinking, "I'm experienced and wouldn't do that." That might be true. But a more junior manager might reward employees who apply this kind of pressure, and that's a problem.

Visibility bias

Visibility bias is the phenomenon of noticing (and rewarding) an employee just because of visibility. Perhaps they had a very visible project, or are vocal in meetings and on Slack. Or, perhaps they work in the same office as their manager and get more one-on-one time than remote teammates.

Just because you — or even the CEO — see more of one person or their projects doesn’t mean that person had the strongest impact. And it definitely doesn’t mean they deserve more compensation than teammates with less visibility.

Person's presence

Ah, my favorite topic. Let me illustrate with an example.

Imagine you have three employees. The first one has been here the whole year. The latter two have been absent for a few months due to illness and maternity leave. They've only been present for two or three quarters out of the four.

If you pay based on performance, you should reward the employee who had a greater impact by simply being present and shipping projects — right? But if this is the case, the employees would be punished simply for taking time off (which is a legal right).

Women are still paid 16% less than men in the US and 18% less in Europe. The same issue applies to people with disabilities. Compensation-based performance perpetuates these unfortunate statistics.

"But wait," you might argue, "performance should be assessed when the employee is here. If someone is absent for several months, you evaluate their performance and increase based on the period of presence."

This compensation strategy makes sense in theory but introduces room for interpretation and “gaming the system.” Now, employees have to strategically plan their absences around the annual performance appraisal to ensure they don't miss out.

What about a mother who is having her third pregnancy and is entitled to a one-year leave in many countries and companies? Would you truly base her performance increase on her performance from a year ago?

By penalizing employees for being away for a few months, you're creating unnecessary complexity and potential discrimination.

Performance is unlikely to remain stable over time

You may excel in one project, perform slightly below par in the next, and then shine again in another.

Let’s say your scope switches a bit and suddenly you’re not as great at keeping up with everything, you’re just good. However, your compensation is still higher — even if a colleague is now performing at a higher level.

It's the famous Peter Principle in action: People end up in positions where they perform at their worst because when they're great, they keep getting promoted.

By paying based on performance you apply the Peter Principle on compensation: You will ultimately pay employees more than the level of their performance.

For the same reason, we don’t believe compensation should be based on tenure. If you are rewarded for your tenure, over the years, you’ll become isolated at a very high level of compensation and misaligned with the market.

As the years pass, it will become extremely hard for you to find a job that pays what you expect and ultimately you can become unemployable. As a consequence, you’ll be very likely to stay but not for good reasons.

You might create tension within the team

"But if you don't pay based on performance,” you say. “How is it fair that a high performer makes the same as an average performer?"

My answer is simple: As a human resources leader or a Manager, you must work tirelessly to avoid having average team players. You don't want average; you want excellence. A+ players only, period.

"This is unrealistic," you say. "You'll definitely have average employees, even poor ones."

I agree. But not for long. If you set high expectations and transparently communicate this at a company level, there are no surprises. If someone misses their performance goals too many quarters in a row and becomes a low performer, we trigger a performance improvement plan (PIP).

At Gorgias, our ultimate goal is to have the absolute best versions of ourselves in every corner of the company. Pay-for-performance programs force people to constantly strive to be "better" than others, which directly contradicts our company's vision of fostering high talent density. We believe this model leads to better employee engagement and company culture.

And ultimately, pay-for-performance doesn't work for top performers. When someone sees themselves as a rockstar and expects a 20% increase, but only receives 5%, it creates a misalignment between their beliefs and reality. With performance-based compensation as an option, it’s hard to make top performers (or anyone, really) satisfied.

But what if a candidate wants more? Should we make performance-based pay exceptions to keep them?

Well, dear hiring manager, I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but no.

We share our compensation package with candidates right at the beginning of the hiring process (they can even check our salary calculator). If they say they're good with it, they're good with it. No surprises at the end, we offer exactly what we've shared from the start.

Being absolutely inflexible on this matter has made my life (and the lives of everyone involved in the hiring process) so much easier. No need to negotiate with HR when sending an offer. No need to get finance involved to revalidate the budget. It's smooth sailing.

Will this scale (and is it right for everyone)?

I'm not saying that paying for performance is inherently bad. Obviously, if 80% of companies do it, there must be advantages like boosting retention of top talent.

I'm also aware that my vision may seem utopian. Maybe it's not entirely scalable, and perhaps we'll have to revisit our principles at some point.

But I've been told so many times that many things were not scalable and proved the opposite.

Not yielding is hard. Sticking to your principles is challenging. But adhering to your core principles is what creates wonderfully exciting machines like Stripe, Netflix, Apple, and Amazon.

You might think, "When people join a 20-person company, they know they're expected to work hard and strive for excellence. But when they join a 250-person company like Gorgias, they're not looking to work hard without direct compensation increases."

Maybe that’s true for some employees. As for me, I've worked just as hard in my previous 400,000-person company as I do in my current 250-person company.

And for those who desire something different, that’s okay. We just have to make our stance and policies clear and transparent in the interview process.

Yes, Gorgias is not for everyone. It's for people who thrive in a fast-paced environment, possess a growth mindset, and want to advance their careers. It's completely fine if it's not for you.

As long as we're aligned and embrace this statement, I sincerely believe we can continue scaling by paying people with the same job title and seniority level the same salary.

Quick summary: 

• Shopify Core plans are ideal for small and midsize businesses, while Shopify Plus caters to larger enterprises with around $1 million in gross merchandise value (GMV).
• The primary difference between Shopify and Shopify Plus is pricing. Shopify Core plans range from $5–$399/month while Shopify Plus starts at $2,000/month.
• Shopify Plus provides more storefront functionality, unlimited staff accounts, merchant support, lower transaction fees, B2B selling capabilities, and more overall features.

Choosing the right ecommerce platform to host your online store is no small decision, but sometimes it's hard to know which option is right for your business. Shopify and Shopify Plus are two platforms that get a lot of buzz within the ecommerce community, and many store owners give them rave reviews. 

What’s the difference between the two, and which plan is best for your ecommerce store? The main difference is that Shopify is for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), while Shopify Plus is for larger, or even enterprise-level businesses.

Below, we’ll discuss what each plan offers before diving into pricing structures and key differences between Shopify and Shopify Plus. Whether you’re considering upgrading to Shopify Plus from the regular Shopify plan or migrating from another ecommerce platform (like BigCommerce or Magento), read on to understand which option is right for you.

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What is Shopify?

Shopify is an ecommerce platform that offers businesses a way to promote, sell, and ship their products. It’s widely recognized as being great for beginners, meaning that the learning curve for new ecommerce store owners is minimal, and provides a level of customization that most small businesses find attractive.

Key features of Shopify

• Shopify point of sale (POS)
• Online sales channels
• Security features
• Mobile functionality

What is Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus is a Shopify upgrade designed for large enterprises making high-volume sales that total around $1 million in gross merchandise value (GMV). The higher price tag unlocks more storefront functionality, automations, support, and integrations than core Shopify plans.

Key features of Shopify Plus

• Allows up to nine storefronts
• Customizable checkout
• Unlimited staff accounts
• Access to a merchant support manager and 24/7 support
• Lower transaction fees
• Allows B2B selling

Pricing: Shopify vs. Shopify Plus

The main difference between Shopify and Shopify Plus lies in pricing, which is tailored to accommodate the unique needs and budgets of merchants.

Core Shopify plans cater to small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and has fixed pricing plans with the cheapest starting at $5/month. In comparison, Shopify Plus is made for larger enterprise businesses, starting at $2,000 per month and is customized to each merchant via quote.

Let’s take a closer look at the breakdown for each plan within Shopify and Shopify Plus.

Shopify pricing

Shopify has five plans depending on your online store requirements and the size of your team.

• Starter: $5 per month
• Basic: $39 per month
• Retail: $89 per month
• Shopify: $105 per month
• Advanced: $399 per month

It’s important to note that all standard Shopify plans are subject to online and in-store transaction fees, as well as non-Shopify payment fees.

Related: Our comparison of Magento and Shopify for ecommerce merchants

Shopify Plus pricing

Shopify Plus pricing plans can only be determined via quote but start at $2,000 per month, plus a percentage of your store’s monthly sales volume. This enterprise-level commitment comes with additional transaction fees, online store development, site launch, third-party services, and add-ons.

Shopify Plus doesn’t provide flat pricing plans. Instead, you will need to contact a Shopify Plus sales representative to receive your quote.

9 key differences between Shopify & Shopify Plus 

Understanding the main differences in the two options is essential to make the best choice for your ecommerce store.

Below, we’ve identified nine ways Shopify and Shopify Plus differ from each other, and what these differences mean for your business.

1) Shopify Plus gives you access to merchant success managers

One of the benefits of Shopify Plus is that users have access to the merchant success program. This exclusive program lets Plus users connect with merchant success managers (MSMs) to optimize their Shopify Plus experience. 

Here are a handful of ways MSMs support merchants:

• Assist you through the setup process, including domain setup, building product collections, redirects, and more
• Suggest industry best practices and tools to streamline your operations
• Quickly redirect technical issues to other Shopify teams
• Provide ongoing support

Note: Plus users do not get a dedicated account manager, but they have direct access to a team of MSMs who are available to solve their business needs.

2) Shopify Plus unlocks access to Shopify Plus Academy

Shopify Academy is an educational resource hub full of advanced resources — like courses and webinars — that helps merchants improve their store’s design, marketing, operations, and more.

For merchants interested in self-guided education, the information on Shopify Academy’s information serves as a supplement to your merchant success manager to gain the knowledge you need to grow your store.

Here are a few titles you’ll find in Shopify Academy:

• How to Drive Sales with your Customer Support Team with Gorgias: Explore strategies for enhancing conversion rates by using the ecommerce helpdesk Gorgias.
• Sell in China with Social Media: Great for merchants pursuing internationalization
• How to Optimize your Page and Site Speed: Great for merchants who want to improve load speeds through backend optimization
• Shopify Tools to Accelerate Your Social Commerce: Great for merchants looking to drive sales and reduce shopping cart abandonment while selling on social media

Related: Our list of the best customer service courses and certifications

3) Shopify Plus gives you in-depth control over your checkout

Between Shopify and Shopify Plus, there is one major difference concerning checkout: The checkout page is customizable on Shopify Plus via checkout extensibility, while the checkout page on core Shopify plans are limited to their selected Shopify theme with no additional customization options.

Exclusive to Shopify Plus merchants, checkout extensibility is a code-free feature that allows checkout pages to have completely custom UI and content. This ability to personalize the checkout experience gives online businesses the power to greatly reduce cart abandonment and transform hesitant shoppers into customers.

On core Shopify plans except Shopify Starter, merchants can use Shopify apps to give their checkout page minor modifications to the backend logic and post-purchase experience.

Related: Our Shopify SEO guide to standing out amongst the competition

4) Shopify Plus offers unlimited staff accounts

Depending on which pricing option you choose, you can add between two and 15 users to your standard Shopify dashboard (in addition to your owner profile). Stores on the Starter plan are allowed two staff accounts.

On the other hand, Shopify Plus offers unlimited staff accounts, allowing large teams access to their online store dashboard. This inclusivity allows effortless collaboration within the team when integrating order management and helpdesk tools like Gorgias. When teams combine Shopify Plus with Gorgias, they get:

• Streamlined customer interactions: Gorgias helps Shopify Plus users enhance customer service by consolidating all support requests, order details, and customer data in one platform.
• Improved order management: Shopify Plus users can efficiently find all relevant order information in the Customer Sidebar, automate responses with Macros, and speed up workflows with Rules. 
• Scalability: Shopify Plus's unlimited user accounts combined with Gorgias's robust automation features make this combination ideal for rapidly growing businesses.

5) Shopify Plus allows more API integrations

The App Store is one of Shopify’s most enticing features. There are well over 8,000 paid and free Shopify apps in the new app store. Shopify itself is responsible for creating only 34 of them to date, but there are hundreds of other third-party app solutions from everything including marketing, order management, store design and customer support.

Notably, this enables easy integration with ecommerce apps like Gorgias, an excellent Shopify app for customer service and order management. You can elevate customer support with Macros, streamline order processes, and enhance the overall efficiency of your store on both a standard Shopify plan or a Shopify Plus plan.

However, Shopify Plus merchants have much more flexibility when it comes to API integrations. These users can integrate their ecommerce store with their existing ERP or CRM systems, which standard Shopify stores cannot.

A few examples of Shopify Plus API solutions include:

• Gift Card: Create unique gift cards that work in the Shopify POS
• Multipass: Unite customer logins for your forum, website, and online store
• User: Retrieve information about staff permissions on Shopify

Related: The best 40+ Shopify apps to optimize your ecommerce store 

6) Shopify Plus has lower transaction fees

Shopify payments are straightforward. Transaction fees are laid out as percentages of the total order volume. The Shopify POS includes a free credit card reader, which conveniently integrates your online and offline sales, no matter which plan you are on. But, what are the differences between Shopify and Shopify Plus’ payment processing and transaction fees?

Standard Shopify Transaction Fees

For businesses using Shopify’s integrated payment system, Shopify Payments, there is no transaction fee as of May 2022. If your business uses an external payment gateway, transaction fees are as follows:

• Shopify Starter: 2%
• Shopify Basic: 2.9% + 30 cents
• Shopify: 2.6% + 30 cents
• Advanced Shopify: 2.4% + 30 cents
• Shopify Retail: 2.7% + 30 cents

Shopify Plus Transaction Fees

Like core Shopify plans, transaction fees are waived if your business uses Shopify Payments. However, for external payment gateways, transaction fees are as follows:

• Domestic: 2.15% + 30 cents
• International/Amex: 3.15% + 30 cents

7) Shopify and Shopify Plus have different promotional discounts

Shopify is designed to set ecommerce merchants up for success. During the checkout process, your page needs to be optimized for high conversion rates. Luckily, promotional discounts can help you achieve just that. Want to run flash sales and seasonal price reductions? Here’s how your ecommerce business can make it happen with Shopify and Shopify Plus.

Standard Shopify Plans’ promotional discount options

There are probably hundreds of apps in Shopify’s add-on marketplace that can help you create discounts to entice your shoppers. Standard plans include the ability to easily create discounts from inside your dashboard. In addition, you can enable shoppers to redeem in-store discounts if you use Shopify’s integrated POS system.

What type of discounts can you create with a standard Shopify plan?

• Fixed-Value: Enable customers to redeem coupons with purchases, such as $5 off an order of $25 or more.
• Percentage: Provide shoppers with discount codes that give them a percentage off of their purchase.
• Shipping: Offer free or reduced shipping on certain orders.
• Buy X Get Y: Give a bonus or gift with specific purchases (available for online sales only).

After you run a promotional discount campaign, you can track its progress using the “Sales by Discount” report. Regular reports provide you with insights about which campaigns are working and which ones aren’t. Use real data to power your marketing campaigns.

Children’s vitamins brand, Hiya, takes advantage of the discount options available with Shopify by doubling-down. First, they offer 50% off first order then follow it up with free shipping. Both promotion types are executable via the discount portal.

Shopify Plus’ advanced promotional discount options

Take your promotions a step further with Shopify Plus. You can increase your cart value with Launchpad, exclusive to the Plus platform. The system automates most aspects of promotional campaigns, discounts, flash sales, and product releases.

Planning and executing an online sale usually involves tedious manual processes. When running a campaign this way, it’s difficult to make real-time optimizations to your campaigns. The add-on makes it much easier, reducing the amount of time spent launching a campaign and the risk for human error.

Here’s what you can expect Launchpad to automate for you:

• Schedule new products and omnichannel campaigns to launch across multiple sales channels
• Generate predetermined discounts for specific products or entire collections
• Stack multiple discounts
• Create and update campaign themes
• Return pricing to normal on campaign end dates

Simba runs percentage discount campaigns for their online store. From a customer perspective, their campaign execution is comparable to that of Hiya above. But, as a Shopify Plus user, you can wager that they use Launchpad to automate the process rather than manually perform the tedious work.

Source: Simba

8) Shopify Plus offers more features for B2B selling

The regular Shopify plan comes with plenty of features that are sufficient for most small businesses and single-store organizations. But larger stores may find the following features and apps, which are only available for Shopify Plus subscribers, worth the higher price tag:

• Shopify organization admin: Manage multiple stores under one organization from a single login
• B2B on Shopify: Create a separate (but unified) Shopify storefront from wholesale customers
• Overview: Get top-level analytics for all the stores under your organization
• Users: Add additional users and manage login and editing permissions for your store
• Launchpad: Schedule and roll out events like promotions, restocks, and product drops
• Script Editor: Create personalized experiences with code that changes your store for certain customer segments
• Bulk Account Inviter: Ask large groups of users to activate accounts on your store (great after migration)
• Transporter app: Ingest customer, product, and other data into your store
• Shopify POS Pro: Sync your POS with your brick-and-mortar store and other stores under your organization

If you’re a Shopify store interested in expanding to B2B selling, you will need to contact a Shopify sales representative to upgrade your Shopify account.

9) Shopify Plus allows you to build custom storefronts with headless commerce

Shopify Plus offers access to headless commerce features not found in Shopify Core plans. With headless commerce, online stores can separate the frontend customer touchpoints from the backend, allowing custom storefronts and immersive shopping experiences. "Going headless" is an excellent choice for enterprise-level businesses aiming to scale, especially with dedicated developers on the team.

On the other hand, standard Shopify plans don't have access to headless commerce and rely on templates and themes for their online store designs. This limitation can be limiting for businesses in the midst of expansion as it restricts them from fully scaling their online presence.

Use Gorgias to grow your Shopify (Plus) store with great customer experience

Shopify and Shopify Plus both have tools to help you reach a bigger audience, scale your business, automate your processes, and stay competitive. If you're trying to decide which one will work best for you, think about the pricing structure that works best for your business, the customization and customer support you need, and the areas of the world you want to reach.

Regardless of your choice, consider how you’ll provide fast, helpful customer service to visitors of your store. Gorgias integrates with Shopify and Shopify Plus and is the only customer service platforms to receive the distinction of being a Shopify Plus Partner. 

Want to know more about Gorgias’s centralized, automation-powered, and revenue-generating customer service solution? Yes, book my demo.

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61% of consumers define an excellent customer support interaction as one with a quick resolution, according to a 2021 study. Your overall customer experience depends on how fast you can provide answers that fully solve a customer’s problem and lets them get on with their day—without too much effort.

Average resolution time is the metric businesses use to measure how quickly their customer support teams completely close an open customer issue. It’s not the only customer support metric that matters, and I don’t recommend holding it up as the holy grail of your team’s success. But it’s certainly worth measuring (and, usually, lowering) because it can make or break the customer experience — especially for urgent issues like lost packages, billing issues, or outages and bugs.

Learn all about average resolution time below, including what it is, how to measure and interpret your average resolution time, and how to lower your brand’s resolution time and make customers happy.

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What is resolution time?

Resolution time, also called time to resolution or mean time to resolution (MTTR), is the average amount of time a customer spends interacting with a business’s customer support, helpdesk, or customer service team before their issue is solved. 

The clock starts ticking the moment a customer writes or calls your support team. It includes the amount of time customers wait before getting a first response and any additional wait time between conversations. The clock stops ticking when the question is resolved and the support interaction is complete.

Average resolution time formula

Most brands don’t measure resolution time for individual tickets; they measure resolution time across all tickets — average resolution time. Apply a formula like this one to measure your business’s average resolution time:

Average resolution time = Total resolution time in a defined period / Total number of customer interactions resolved in that period

If you conduct customer support directly on email and social media, you’ll have to calculate the total resolution time for all tickets by hand. This is tedious: You’ll have to subtract the difference between the timestamp of the last message in an interaction from the timestamp of the first message. 

However, if you use a helpdesk for customer service, you’ll likely have access to a dashboard that reports on your resolution times. Here’s what average resolution time looks like in Gorgias, which you can view by agent, channel, time frame, and more:

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Orange represents average resolution time, while red represents the resolution time of the 10% of tickets that took the longest to resolve.

What is a good average resolution time for ecommerce?

Ecommerce businesses work especially hard to reduce their average resolution time because of the high customer expectations: 63% of customers will leave a brand after a single bad customer service experience. The stakes for fast, helpful customer service are high.

But defining a good resolution time is difficult because of a variety of factors:

• Each channel has its own resolution time frame: Customers expect an email conversation to take at least a few hours, but will rarely spend hours on your site’s live chat
• Your product’s complexity: If you sell highly configurable or complex products, your inquiries will probably take more time to resolve — and that’s okay
• Your customer service team’s maturity and tech stack will impact resolution time: A small team managing customer support on Gmail won’t achieve the same resolution time as a large team with a centralized and automated helpdesk 

But perhaps the most important “it depends” for resolution time is the type of ticket in question. At Gorgias, we encourage you to categorize every ticket into one of two categories: simple requests, which you can automate entirely, and complex requests, which will (and should) have higher resolution times.

Rather than trying to drive a variety of tickets to an arbitrary benchmark, you can clear your queue of repetitive, tedious tickets so you actually have time to handle and more efficiently resolve more complex ones.

Here’s what we mean:

Aim to automate empty-calorie customer service requests…

Questions like “Where is my order?” or “What’s your return policy?” or “Where do you ship?” might not take long to resolve individually, but they tend to take up a lot of time because customers ask them at such a high volume. We call them “empty calorie” tickets. You could try and resolve these tickets one by one, but it’s much faster (for both customers and agents) to provide helpful, automated answers.

Here’s how you can provide instant answers to these types of questions:

• Create a list of your most frequently asked questions based on the last few months of tickets
• Create Macros (or templated responses) to those questions, including variables like [customer name] or [tracking number of last order] to personalize the message
• Set up automated Rules to instantly fire the personalized message (based on the ticket’s Intent)

This way, when customers ask these FAQs, they’ll immediately get a resolution-worthy response — assuming the templated response is helpful — without any agent effort.

Even better, you can set up self-service resources like FAQ pages, knowledge bases, or Quick Response Flows like the one pictured below:

Again, the goal is to deflect empty-calorie tickets from your queue so agents don’t have to rush through complex, escalated, or high-impact questions. And don’t worry: Customers always have a clear path to a human agent if they need extra support.

Spend more time resolving complex and high-impact inquiries

Once you automate simple tickets, your helpdesk will have a higher ratio of questions that actually need human attention. This way, your customer service agents won’t have to rush through a mountain-high pile of tickets each day.

It may sound counterintuitive, but slowing down is often the best way to lower resolution time for these types of tickets. They need some extra research, personalization, problem-solving, and empathy to fully resolve. And taking a few extra minutes to resolve these issues won’t be an issue because you don’t have a queue overflowing with easy tickets waiting for an available agent. 

These types of questions include:

• Angry customers threatening to leave a bad review
• VIP customers asking for exceptions to policies
• Pre-sales questions (like “Which color do you recommend to match bright red shoes?”)
• Unique questions (like “I’m looking for the bike you posted on Instagram this morning, can you help me find it?”) 
• Questions that require cross-functional support, like website issues that need engineering support

Now, we’re not saying resolution time doesn’t matter here. It does. But it’s a mistake to expect these tickets to match the resolution time of the first category, and lumping them all together in terms of metrics will paint an unclear picture of the problem.

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Ideal average resolution times by channel

Now that you’ve separated simple and complex tickets, consider each channel your customers use: email, DMs, live chat, and so on. Customers have expectations for each support channel, and I recommend building your service-level agreements (SLAs) for each channel’s resolution time around those expectations. 

Below, I recommend some rough benchmarks for major support channels. That said, the time frames listed below are ambitious, so aim for gradual improvements based on your current average resolution times rather than matching my suggestions exactly.

Email: Same-day resolution

Email isn’t an instant messaging channel, so customers don’t expect instant responses. Ideally, you should respond within the same day — within a few hours is even better. Email works well for complex issues, where customers may need to explain an issue in detail or send a picture of their purchase. 

SMS: 10-minute resolution

As a live messaging channel, SMS resolution time should ideally be less than 10 minutes. SMS texting usually involves shorter messages than email, so it’s best to funnel quick, simple interactions to SMS. That said, one benefit of SMS is that customers can start a conversation and text you throughout the day, so the channel’s resolution time might be a bit longer than other live channels like live chat.

Learn more about offering SMS customer service with Gorgias.

Live chat: <10-minute resolution

Live chat is the most immediate channel because customers are usually sitting by their computers for the entire conversation. With that in mind, aim for an average resolution time of under 10 minutes, too. 

Live chat is great for real-time conversations and can be combined with chatbots or other self-service features for automating the simplest queries. One downside is that impatient users may switch tabs and forget about the conversation, driving up your resolution time metrics. But Gorgias features like our in-message product cards are great at keeping customers engaged until a resolution:

Some brands are worried about high resolution times from live chat if messages come in outside of business hours. Check out our post on how Gorgias helps small teams manage live chat if you have this same concern.

Check out our post on live chat support for more information about this support channel.

Phone: One-call resolution

Phone calls are one of the quickest paths to a resolution since you can collect details, offer multiple tactics to solve the issue, and stay on the line until the customer is completely satisfied — no back and forth necessary. Gorgias customers improve ticket resolution by 34% by adding phone support.) 

Aim for resolution time under 10 minutes for the simple tickets, but also leave the door open for longer phone calls as a great strategy to handle complex issues. You don’t want to rush through a phone call with frustrated or VIP customers for the sake of hitting a resolution metric. 

Read more about the benefits of phone support for your brand.

Social media: Same-day resolution for comments, 10-minute resolution for DMs

Your customers will think of social messaging as nearly the same as live chat, so treat it the same: resolution time within minutes (certainly under 10 minutes). When they get what they want, customers love social because it feels like a shortcut compared to phone or email. But, like SMS and live chat, social media can be a difficult channel in which to solve complex issues.

Check out our guide to social media and customer service.

What is the best channel for solving customer issues efficiently?

Each channel has its strengths and weaknesses in terms of helping the customer solve their issue. Some are better for solving issues quickly, while others excel at solving them thoroughly.

There is no single best channel. The real goal should be solving the customer’s issue efficiently and completely. For that matter, ecommerce businesses can’t directly control which support channel customers will choose, so the best approach is to provide omnichannel communication that focuses on meeting the customer where they’re at and using a customer service platform that reduces platform-switching for customer service agents.

Resolution time vs. first-reply time: Which metric is more important?

One important distinction in this discussion is the difference between resolution time and first reply time (FRT).

First reply time measures how long a customer has to wait before getting a response from your support team. Obviously, a customer who's been on hold for an hour will be in a certain frame of mind when they finally get a hold of a team member — and it isn’t a good one.

Across all live channels (on-site live chat and SMS, for example), a reply time under two minutes is a good target. Email, on the other hand, can usually have a longer first reply time — up to a few hours is acceptable.

While keeping first reply time low is important, relying solely on this customer service metric is a mistake. For example, if your team’s only goal is to keep first reply time below two minutes, they may do a great job at making that initial contact — at the cost of actually solving people’s problems promptly. This scenario will also correlate to lower customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, even when your team hits its KPI for reply time.

In reality, both resolution time and first reply time are important, in nearly equal proportion. Placing more emphasis on one than the other can lead to problematic interactions with customers, so ecommerce companies should take a balanced approach.

Gorgias’ solution: Support performance score

Within Gorgias, users can see their unique support performance score. This powerful metric combines three customer support metrics (first reply time, resolution time, and CSAT score) into a single metric to give you a more well-rounded view of your support team’s performance.

7 key strategies to reduce resolution time

Now that we’ve formed a framework for categorizing and thinking about support tickets, it’s time to work on reducing resolution time — intelligently and carefully, so you don’t run into the pitfalls we’ve mentioned.

Here are seven strategies.

1) Create a knowledge base or FAQ page

First up, the best support ticket is the one that never exists because the customer solved their own problem. The next-best? One that you can close out almost immediately by pointing the customer to an existing resource.

FAQ pages provide value to you and your customers:

• Customers can get answers to questions without any wait time.
• The customer support team can filter out or effortlessly resolve simple queries, leading to fewer “empty calories tickets” (tedious, repetitive, and brainless CS requests).

2) Automate processes wherever possible

Process automation can significantly reduce first response time using automated responses (macros and rules) and self-service automation. Getting through initial triage via automation frees up your customer support agents to do the harder work. Chatbots can even solve simple tickets on their own, and your human team will get to ticket resolution faster when they aren’t swamped with empty-calorie tickets.

3) Direct customers to faster resolution channels

If most of your customers contact you on slower channels (like email), consider reminding them about faster channels like live chat and SMS. Point out that live chat customers get an answer in three minutes on average, and users with simple questions may decide to hop over.

Berkey Filters, a Gorgias customer, did just that after launching an SMS support channel. They implemented several tactics like:

• Putting a banner at the top of the website to announce the new channel
• Announcing the new channel in all customer support emails
• Mentioned the channel’s quick response times in all announcements

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Check out Berkey Filters’ customer playbook to see how they lowered resolution time by funneling customers to SMS.

4) Prioritize customer service tickets and triage tickets

Your business should prioritize certain ticket types — the highest-value tickets might include VIP customers, customers about to make a purchase, and escalated customers. I recommend focusing on decreasing resolution times for these high-value tickets first and foremost, regardless of your overall metric. (Again, automating simple requests makes prioritizing these tickets even easier.)

Gorgias can use Shopify or BigCommerce data to tag customers who have spent over a certain amount as VIPs, pushing them to the front of the queue. Likewise, Gorgias’s sentiment detection can flag escalated customers. 

Learn more about triaging and prioritizing customer service tickets using Shopify data.

5) Tag customer types to route tickets to specialized teams

If your brand sells vastly different products — or sells to vastly different types of customers — one way to prioritize tickets is to create specialized teams. This way, you don’t need to waste any time playing hot potato with the customer query. You simply auto-assign tickets to the appropriate team.

For example, say you sell desks to individuals as well as offices. More than likely, someone buying a single desk for their house will have different needs and questions than someone buying 100 desks for the business’s office. Using Gorgias, you can auto-assign tickets to a specialized team based on channel, language, or a myriad of other qualities with the support of auto-tagging. 

6) Create an effective escalation strategy for technical issues

Technical issues can increase resolution time; sometimes, the answer lies elsewhere, outside your support team. Make sure you create clear escalation workflows so that, when these kinds of issues arrive, your team knows where to send them (and those other resources know the importance of responding promptly).

For example, if a customer had trouble with a missing package, they might need to speak directly to your fulfillment team. Likewise, if a customer has an issue with the functionality of your website, you may need to rope in your software engineers. Don’t wait until an issue arises to try and chase down these other teams — that’s a surefire path to a long resolution time.

7) Use the right tools such as templates and historical data

The more manual your processes and the less connected to what you already know about customers, the longer it takes to close tickets and the more frustration you’ll likely create with customers.

So use the tools you already have (like historical data and perhaps templates) and leverage new, powerful tools like Gorgias’ ticketing system to expand your capabilities.

Improve your company’s revenue by up to 2% by lowering the average resolution time to under 6 hours

In 2022, we studied the data from over 10,000 ecommerce brands and sat down with 25+ ecommerce brands to understand the connection between customer experience and growth. We found that when brands lower their average email response time to under six hours, they lift overall revenue by about 2%.

Ready to learn more? Check out our ultimate CX playbook for 18 tactics to boost revenue through CX.

Want to lower your resolution time? Gorgias can help. Gorgias is customer support and helpdesk software that can help ecommerce support teams become more efficient, improve customer experience, and drive revenue.

Shopify comes equipped with everything you need to get your ecommerce store up and running, but if you really want to optimize it for time-saving efficiency and maximized sales, you are going to need to rely on some third-party apps from the Shopify app store. 

From automating your email marketing campaigns to helping you better manage your inventory and much, much more, there is a large number of capabilities offered by the best Shopify apps. To help you decide which of these apps is the best choice for your ecommerce business, we'll take a look at the most important qualities to look for in a Shopify app before diving into the 40+ best Shopify apps available today.

For easy skimming, we've pulled out the top 10 Shopify apps for ecommerce stores below.

1. Best customer service app: Gorgias
2. Best email marketing app: Klaviyo
3. Best SMS app: Attentive
4. Best sales & conversion app: Recharge
5. Best checkout app: One Click Upsell
6. Best inventory management app: ShipBob
7. Best returns app: Loop Returns
8. Best social media app: Instafeed
9. Best SEO app: SEO Manager
10. Best loyalty and retention app: Yotpo

What to look for in a Shopify app

While the exact features and functions of Shopify apps can vary dramatically from app to app, there are still a few essential qualities that you will want to look for no matter what type of app you are needing. This includes qualities such as:

1) Integrates with your other ecommerce tools and platforms

Like people, Shopify apps work best when they work together. Being able to integrate your email marketing app with your shipment tracking app, for example, means that you'll be able to send automated shipping updates to customers. 

Integrating your customer support platform with your call center app, meanwhile, means that your agents providing phone-based customer support will have a wealth of data on the customers they are speaking with at their fingertips throughout each call. 

These are just two examples of how it can be beneficial to choose apps that can integrate with your other ecommerce tools. Of course, it's also important to choose apps that will integrate with your ecommerce platforms, which is why all of the apps in our list are capable of integrating with Shopify, Shopify Plus, or both.

2) Allows for customizations

Plug-n-play solutions that don't offer much room for customization may seem convenient at first. As your business grows and scales, though, you are likely to find that these solutions no longer meet your needs like they once did. 

While learning how to navigate Shopify apps that offer a wide range of customization options might require a bit of a learning curve, it's almost always worth it in the end.

3) Receives regular updates

Even the most well-polished apps still require regular updates and maintenance to continue functioning correctly. In addition to scheduled updates and maintenance, it is also essential to choose apps whose providers are willing to work with you to quickly correct any bugs or issues that come up while you are using the app. 

This makes great customer support a vital quality to look for in Shopify app providers no matter what type of app you are purchasing.

Best Shopify customer service apps

1) Gorgias

Gorgias is an all-in-one customer support platform (including a helpdesk and live chat support) that provides a centralized help center for your customer support agents to provide great, revenue-generating customer experiences.

Gorgias lets ecommerce brands centralize conversations from every channel, empowered with features including:

• Rules to automatically respond to simple tickets, prioritize customer service requests, and more
• Macro templates to provide personalized customer service at scale
• Self-service features like easy order tracking, FAQs, and help centers
• Detailed analytics to help you evaluate your customer service program and ROI

If you are looking for a tool that will improve the customer experience on your website while at the same time reducing the burden of your customer support team, then Gorgias for Shopify is an excellent app to consider.

Key features

• Streamlines and automates the process of creating, organizing, and assigning customer support tickets
• Live-chat support via a fast-loading chat widget
• Provides a user-friendly dashboard for customer support agents to work from
• Detailed analytics and reporting of customer service data

Pricing

• A Basic plan that costs $60/month and includes 350 tickets/month
• A Pro plan that costs $300/month and includes 2,000 tickets/month plus revenue statistics and a Magento integration
• An Advanced plan that costs $750/month and includes 5,000 tickets/month plus a dedicated Success Manager
• Custom pricing available upon request for companies with larger tickets per month needs and/or the need for custom services

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

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2) Tidio

Tidio is an app that provides both live chat and chatbot capabilities for your Shopify store, with AI-powered chatbots that allow you to automate up to 40% of your customer support conversations.

Key features

• Receive live visitor notifications when someone visits your site
• The ability to easily share pictures, videos, and other files directly within the chat widget
• The ability to program chatbots to showcase promotions and discounts to improve your conversion rate and boost sales

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month
• A Chatbots plan that costs $39/month and includes additional features such as unlimited active chatbots and chatbot templates
• A Communicator plan that costs $15/month per operator and includes additional features such as live typing and the ability to track viewed pages

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

3) HelpCenter

Help Center is a customer support solution that provides tabs for organizing your product descriptions, live chat software, a HelpDesk ticketing system, and an FAQ builder that allows you to create a comprehensive FAQ page in just a matter of minutes.

Key features

• The ability to automatically flag and organize tickets based on priority
• Automated workflows for speeding up time-consuming customer support tasks
• Customers are able to access live chat support on-site or through Facebook Messenger

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month and includes basic features plus 50 tickets/month
• An FAQ plan that costs $3.99/month and includes full FAQ set-up, basic Tabs features, and 3,500 tickets/year
• A Tabs plan that costs $3.99/month and includes unlimited product page tabs, basic FAQ features, and 3,500 tickets/year
• A HelpDesk plan that costs $9.99/month and includes full HelpDesk setup and features, basic Tabs and FAQ features, and 17,000 tickets/year
• A Professional plan that costs $14.92/month and includes full HelpDesk, Tabs, and FAQ features plus 17,000 tickets/year

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

Best email marketing and SMS Shopify apps

According to data from the Content Marketing Institute, 31% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads. With these must-have Shopify apps for email marketing, you can automate your email marketing campaigns, create stunning branded emails, better segment your list for improved targeting, and beyond.

4) Automizely Email Marketing

With Automizely Email Marketing, online store owners are able to create email campaigns that are both personalized and automated in addition to helping them create professional-quality emails using Automizely's drag-and-drop email editor.

Key features

• The ability to add a broad range of features to your emails such as product recommendations and a countdown timer
• The option to filter and segment your subscriber list based on a range of customer behaviors and other criteria
• All email templates are 100% mobile responsive

Pricing

• Automizely Email Marketing offers flexible pricing depending on the size of your contact list and how many emails you send each month. For more information on Automizely Email Marketing pricing, you can check out the app's pricing calculator.

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

5) Omnisend

Omnisend is a highly-popular email marketing tool that provides access to pre-built email and SMS workflows and templates, gives you the ability to segment your subscriber lists based on a wealth of data, and allows you to create automated email marketing campaigns that are sent out based on customer activity triggers.

Key features

• Detailed analytics and reporting that you can use to segment your subscriber lists
• The ability to create a wide range of custom triggers for launching automated email campaigns
• Excellent 24/7 customer support

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month and offers up to 500 emails and 60 SMS messages per month
• A Standard plan that costs $16/month and offers up to 6,000 emails and 60 SMS messages per month
• A Pro plan that costs $59/month and offers unlimited emails and up to 3,933 SMS messages per month

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

See how Omnisend integrates with Gorgias.

6) Klaviyo

With Klaviyo, you are able to easily segment your email list for personalized targeting before creating automated email campaigns that can be sent out based on a variety of custom triggers.

Key features

• Automatically send out emails and SMS messages based on triggers such as cart abandonment triggers, price drop triggers, and back-in-stock triggers
• A centralized analytics dashboard that provides well-organized data regarding all of your SMS and email campaigns
• An extensive library of pre-built templates and workflows that you can use to speed up your campaign creation process

Pricing

• Pricing for Klaviyo depends on how many emails/SMS messages you intend to send each month, but you can check out this link for a Klaviyo pricing calculator.

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes 

See how Klaviyo integrates with Gorgias.

7) Attentive

Attentive is an SMS and email marketing solution that makes it easy to build and optimize campaigns while remaining compliant with SMS and email marketing regulations. This platform is designed to help store owners grow their subscriber lists and engage with these lists more effectively with segmentation and targeting functionality to generate high-impact campaigns.

Key features

• Custom integrations using Attentive's Public APIs and developer resources
• Rewards management
• Design editor to create sign-up forms for your website and social media platforms
• A/B testing
• Audience manager to target customers with personalized messages
• Business intelligence to help measure campaign performance

Pricing

• Attentive’s pricing models aren’t publicly available, but they do offer demos and a free trial.

See how Attentive integrates with Gorgias.

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

Best sales and conversions Shopify apps

Selling more products is the ultimate goal of every Shopify store owner. With these sales and conversions Shopify apps, you can boost your sales with sales enablement tools such as SMS messaging tools, loyalty and referral programs, list segmentation tools, and beyond.

8) Cartloop

Marketed as a conversational text marketing ecommerce platform, Cartloop is designed to help ecommerce brands grow their subscriber base and engage with them on a more personal level. With highly targeted campaigns, Cartloop leverages simple text messages to help Shopify store owners increase revenue.  

Key features

• 24/7 live support 
• ROI tracking
• Campaign segmentation for more effective targeting
• Campaign management and analytics
• Auto-responders and event-triggered actions
• Engagement tracking

Pricing

• A Growth plan that costs $99/month with a 14-day free trial
• A Pro plan that costs $299/month with a 14-day free trial

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

9) Recharge

Recharge is a Shopify app for store owners who sell subscription-based products or services that makes it easy to set up and manage subscription programs in addition to providing your customers with the ability to manage their subscriptions either via SMS or through a user-friendly customer portal.

Key features

• Reduces churn by giving customers the option to pause or alter their subscription rather than canceling it
• Integrates with all popular payment processing solutions to allow subscription-based payments
• Provides a wide range of actionable insights that you can use to optimize your subscription offerings

Pricing

• A Standard plan that includes basic features and costs $0/month plus 1% + 10¢/transaction
• A Pro plan that includes additional features such as a customizable shopper portal and product variants and costs $300/month plus 1% + 19¢/transaction

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

See how Recharge integrates with Gorgias.

10) Postscript

Postscript is an SMS marketing tool that allows you to grow your SMS subscriber list with customizable opt-in tool templates, create hyper-targeted list segments based on your Shopify store data, and easily message customers with both one-on-one and mass messages.

Key features

• Customizable opt-in popups for generating new leads
• Allows you to create an unlimited number of "text to join" keywords
• Allows you to create automated SMS messaging campaigns that are triggered by over 65 different customer events

Pricing

• Pricing for Postscript is dependent on the number of messages you send each month. Check out this link for a Postscript pricing calculator.

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

See how Postscript integrates with Gorgias.

11) Spently

With Spently, Shopify store owners are able to turn their standard Shopify post-purchase notification emails into customizable, branded emails complete with product recommendations, discount codes, and other custom features.

Key features

• Allows you to create automated email campaigns based on triggers such as cart abandonment and back-in-stock alerts
• Provides a drag-and-drop email designer for customizing all 27 Shopify email notification templates
• Access ROI-based reporting and analytics from Spently's in-app dashboard

Pricing

• Pricing for Spently is dependent on the number of orders your store processes each month. Check out this link for a Spently pricing calculator.

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

Best development Shopify apps

Shopify provides all of the tools you need to create a basic online store. If you would like to create new features for your store that are not already supported by Shopify, though, you are sure to find these Shopify development apps highly beneficial.

12) Omega Instant Search

Shopify's default product search function can be somewhat limited. With Omega Instant Search, though, you are able to develop a product search function for your store that is much more powerful thanks to features such as spell correction, fallback search, redirects, and synonyms.

Key features

• The search module requires no preliminary configuration and is ready for your customers to use immediately after it is installed
• The search module allows for customizable configurations
• Provides customers with filters for narrowing down their search

Pricing

• Pricing for Omega Instant Search is only available upon request

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

13) Buddha Mega Menu

A mega menu is a feature that allows you to display multiple menus from a single dropdown in your store's navigation, making it much easier for customers to find the specific products and collections that they are looking for. With Buddha Mega Menu, you can create an attractive and fully-functional mega menu for your Shopify store in a matter of minutes and cross-sell like a pro.

Key features

• Easy to configure and install
• Provides a range of design features such as countdown timers, featured products, and banners to highlight your promotions
• The ability to create a customizable mega menu for your Shopify store

Pricing

• Buddha Mega Menu is free to download and use

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

14) Smart Bar

Smart Bar is an app that allows you to quickly create promotional bars and banners for your online store and populate these promotion bars and banners with conversion-boosting features such as countdown timers and free shipping bars.

Key features

• An impressive library of promotional bar and banner templates that are fully-customizable
• The ability to display multiple promotional bars and banners on one page
• Analytics tools that record clicks, views, click-through-rate, and heatmap

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month that includes basic features and the ability to create up to three promotional bars
• A Premium plan that costs $0/month that includes additional features and the ability to create unlimited promotional bars

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

15) Easy Redirects

404 page errors can potentially cost your store a lot of customers by both encouraging would-be customers to navigate away from your website and harming its SEO. With Easy Redirects, though, you can automatically find and fix all 404 errors on your Shopify store.

Key features

• One-click install with no coding required
• Quickly and easily import bulk URL redirects into Shopify from a CSV file
• Automatic 404 tracking, error reports, and resolution

Pricing

• A Basic plan that costs $0/month and bulk 301 redirects, group redirects, and statistics and analysis
• A Premium plan that costs $10/month and includes everything found in the Basic plan as well as redirect patterns to automate redirects, automatic 404 tracking, and 404 page error alerts and reminders

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

16) Hextom

Hextom is a SaaS company that offers a number of different development solutions for Shopify stores, including a bulk image edit solution, a bulk product edit solution, an email collection bar, a payment processing tool for converting foreign currencies, a countdown timer bar, and more.

Key features

• Offers a total of 13 Shopify store development solutions
• Easily edit your product descriptions and images with bulk image edit and bulk product edit capabilities
• The option to pick and choose the specific solutions you need for your Shopify store

Pricing

• Pricing for Hextom is dependent on the specific solutions that you choose

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

17) Vela

Vela is a solution that provides a centralized dashboard for managing multiple Shopify stores as well as the ability to bulk edit every aspect of your product descriptions.

Key features

• The ability to manage multiple Shopify stores from a single Vela account
• Bulk edit all product attributes including descriptions, photos, variants, and prices
• Optimize your product photos with filters, refinements, and cropping

Pricing

• A Vela Lite plan that costs $5/month and includes basic listing editing features
• A Vela Pro plan that costs $10/month and includes everything in the Vela Lite plan as well as copy and publish functionality, profiles, a photo library and editor, and early access to new integrations and features.

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

Best checkout Shopify apps

According to data from Baymard Institute, 70% of shopping carts are abandoned before the customer completes their checkout. By enabling you to create fast and optimized checkout pages, these checkout Shopify apps can help you lower your abandoned cart rates and ultimately increase sales.

18) One-Click Checkout

One-Click Checkout is an app that enables you to create "Buy Now" buttons for your products that take customers directly to the checkout page as well as create a checkout popup that shows customers the items in their cart each time they add a new item to the cart.

Key features

• 24/7 customer support via phone, chat, or email
• Provides an Amazon-like one-click checkout experience
• Checkout popup and "Buy Now" buttons are both fully-customizable

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month and includes "leads to checkout" functionality for "Add to Cart" and "Buy Now" buttons
• An Unlimited plan that costs $9.95/month and includes "cart summary popup" functionality for "Add to Cart" and "Buy Now" buttons plus flexible checkout flow management
• A Priority Support plan that costs $18.95/month and includes everything in the Unlimited plan plus up to 3 hours/month of customizations, a dedicated manager, setup assistance, and priority queue for customer support

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

19) Klarna

Integrating payment processing app Klarna into your online store provides your customers with the ability to split the cost of their purchase into four interest-free payments while still ensuring that you get paid upfront and in-full.

Key features

• On-site messaging to let customers know that Klarna financing is available for their purchases
• Allows you to create "try before you buy" promotions by giving customers an extra 30 days to complete their payment
• As a credit service, Klarna pays merchants upfront and in-full even if the customer is financing their purchase

Pricing

• Karina charges a fee of $0.30 per transaction along with a variable fee of up to 5.99% of the purchase total

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

20) Fast Checkout In One Click

Fast Checkout In One Click is an app that allows you to create animated "Buy Now" buttons that direct customers straight to checkout, skipping the cart page and reducing the likelihood of an abandoned cart. Make your sales channels work harder for your brand.

Key features

• The option to add a cart page popup window that is displayed after a customer clicks "Buy Now"
• Animated "Buy Now" buttons to capture customers' attention complete with a variety of animation styles to choose from
• Utilizes native theme style to be compatible with most Shopify store themes but can be customized if needed

Pricing

• Fast Checkout In One Click costs $4.49/month

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

21) Transcy

Transcy is a language and currency conversion app that will automatically translate both the content and USD prices on your online store into the language and currencies of the customer viewing them, making it one of the best apps for stores that sell to a lot of international customers.

Key features

• Detects the customer's location then auto-translates your store into the customer's native currency and language with support for all major currencies and 111 different languages
• Currency exchange rates are updated daily and can be adjusted manually
• Allows you to display separate images for different languages to better target your store to specific demographics

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month and includes translation for one additional language and two additional currencies
• An Economy plan that costs $9.90/month and includes translation for two additional languages and all major currencies as well as additional features such as multilingual SEO
• A Starter plan that costs $19.90/month and includes translation for 111 additional languages and all major currencies as well as additional features such as image replacement options
• An Essential plan that costs $39.90/month and includes translation for 111 additional languages and all major currencies as well as additional features such as a dedicated customer success manager

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

22) Buy Me Button

Buy Me Button is a Shopify checkout solution that offers features such as "Buy Me" buttons that take customers straight to checkout, a cart preview popup that appears when customers add a new item to their cart, and "Quick Buy" buttons that allow customers to purchase products from any page or listing on your website.

Key features

• "Quick Buy" buttons allow customers to purchase products directly from any product listing pages
• All buttons automatically inherit the design of the Shopify store where they are installed and can be further customized upon installation
• Shareable links allow customers to share products on social media

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month for up to 50 "add to carts" per month
• A Small plan that costs $2.95/month for up to 250 "add to carts" per month
• A Medium plan that costs $4.95/month for up to 750 "add to carts" per month
• A Large plan that costs $6.95/month for unlimited "add to carts"

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

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23) One Click Upsell

One Click Upsell is a Shopify app designed to help store owners increase their average order value by presenting customers with upsell opportunities at checkout. With One Click Upsell, you can create one-click upsell options that are shown to customers either before or after checkout that allow them to add additions to their purchase with just a single, convenient click.

Key features

• Upsell offer page templates that have been tested by high-volume Shopify stores
• The option to choose different upsell options for various products, product variants, and collections
• Built-in split testing

Pricing

• A Tier 1 plan that costs $24.99/month for up to $200 in total monthly upsell revenue
• A Tier 2 plan that costs $49.99/month for up to $400 in total monthly upsell revenue
• A Tier 3 plan that costs $59.99/month for up to $500 in total monthly upsell revenue
• A Tier 4 plan that costs $79.99/month for $500+ in total monthly upsell revenue

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

Best inventory management and returns Shopify apps

Keeping track of your inventory and ensuring that you always have the appropriate amount of products in stock to meet customer demand can sometimes be a time-consuming challenge. 

With these inventory management Shopify apps, though, you can streamline and automate your various inventory management processes, freeing you up to focus on bringing in new customers and growing your store's revenue.

24) Katana Manufacturing ERP

Katana Manufacturing ERP is an inventory management solution that allows you to optimize inventory movements by setting up reorder points and prioritizing your sales orders.

Key features

• Manage production, scheduling, and resources from one location
• Omnichannel order management
• End-to-end traceability for tracking batches, materials, expiration dates, and beyond

Pricing

• An Essential plan that supports up to three warehouses and costs $99/month
• A Pro plan that supports unlimited warehouses and costs $299/month

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

25) Stock Sync

With Stock Sync, store owners are able to set up automatic inventory updates, update existing products via over 80 different connection methods, and set quantity rules to avoid overselling.

Key features

• Provides a centralized and easy-to-understand overview of your inventory levels
• Capable of integrating with up to 80 different channels, including Amazon S3, QuickBooks, eBay, Google Drive, Etsy, and OneDrive
• Capable of reading all file formats

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month and supports up to 2,000 SKUs
• A Basic plan that costs $5/month and supports up to 2,000 SKUs and 1 update feed/supplier
• A Pro plan that costs $10/month and supports up to 10,000 SKUs and 2 update feeds/suppliers
• An Enterprise plan that costs $49/month and supports 35,000 SKUs and 5+ update feeds/suppliers

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

26) QuickBooks Commerce

One of the most well-known inventory management solutions, QuickBooks Commerce is a platform that allows you to manage your product listings across multiple channels, track products from inventory to fulfillment, automatically update your inventory levels, and much more.

Key features

• Automatically adjust stock levels for new products, damage, shrinkage, returns, or promotions
• Detailed stock history for all products
• Barcode scanning capabilities for searching for products by barcode and entering product information into sales and purchase orders

Pricing

• QuickBooks Commerce costs $50/month

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

27) Stocky

Stocky is an inventory management solution offered by Shopify that enables Shopify store owners to achieve complete visibility over their inventory through detailed inventory analytics and insights such as demand forecasting. Stocky also makes it easy to create and manage purchase orders from one place.

Key features

• Provides inventory management recommendations based on profitability and rate of sales
• Enables staff to use a barcode scanner to receive and place inventory quickly and accurately
• Provides a user-friendly dashboard for creating and tracking purchase orders

Pricing

• Stocky is free to install with a Shopify POS Pro subscription

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

28) ShipBob 

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. 

ShipBob is a common alternative to Shopify Fulfillment Network. 

Key features

• 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

• 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 

Pricing

• ShopBob is free to install and bills for orders shipped, receiving inventory, warehouse storage, and custom projects. 
• Request pricing for a custom quote or use the U.S. to U.S. shipping calculator to get started. 

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

See how ShipBob integrates with Gorgias. 

29) AfterShip Returns Center

AfterShip Returns Center is a solution for managing customer returns that allows store owners to create a branded and interactive self-service returns page, provide customers with automated real-time updates regarding the status of their orders and returns, and set up smart routing rules to ensure that items are sent back to the right place at minimal cost.

Key features

• Detailed analytics on returned products that you can use to improve both your returns process and your product offerings
• Tools for encouraging customers to exchange their items rather than returning them for a refund
• Offers customers flexible return options such as in-store dropoff or the ability to print prepaid shipping labels

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month and offers up to three returns per month
• An Essentials plan that costs $9/month and offers up to 20 returns per month
• A Pro plan that costs $199/month and offers up to 1,000 returns per month
• An Enterprise plan with custom pricing that offers 3,000+ returns per month

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

See how Aftership integrates with Gorgias.

30) Loop Returns 

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, Shopify store owners can let customers take control of their returns and exchanges and free up their team. 

Key features

• Customizable product return portals allow customers to manage returns themselves and reduce your support team's workload 
• Meaningful metrics provide insight into your returns and refunds and identify supply chain, positioning, and other issues 
• Enables customers to automatically apply the value of their return to any order using the "Shop Now" feature
• Allows you to apply variable bonus credits to customers who choose to exchange their returned product

Pricing

• A Starter plan that costs $59/month and supports up to 1,000 returns/year 
• An Essential plan that costs $200/month and includes automatic return approval, cross-border shipping, and more 
• An Advanced plan that costs $415/month and has unlimited destinations, unlimited return policies, and more 

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes 

See how Loop integreates with Gorgias. 

Best social media marketing Shopify apps

According to a report from eMarketer, the number of US customers who purchased products directly from social media platforms grew to 80.1 million in 2020 and is expected to increase to 96.1 million in 2022. With these social media marketing Shopify apps, you can ensure that you are leveraging the advantages of social media marketing to their full potential.

31) Outfy

With Outfy, Shopify store owners are able to automate the process of promoting their products on social media by creating and scheduling product promotion posts that can be automatically posted across multiple social media channels at once. Outfy also makes it easy to create collages, videos, and GIFs that you can use to make promotional posts really stand out.

Key features

• Capable of auto-generating and publishing product promotion posts that are created based on a range of predefined settings
• Enables you to turn your product pictures into GIFs, videos, and collages
• Provides a variety of promotional post templates to choose from

Pricing

• A Starter plan that costs $15/month and includes basic features and support for one account on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter for a total of five social media accounts
• A Pro plan that costs $30/month and includes additional features such as video posts and support for one account on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter for a total of five social media accounts
• An Ultimate plan that costs $60/month and includes everything in the Pro plan plus support for two accounts on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter for a total of ten social media accounts
• An Enterprise plan that costs $100/month and includes everything in the Pro plan plus support for five accounts on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter for a total of 25 social media accounts

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

32) Zotabox

Zotabox is an all-in-one ecommerce marketing platform that offers over twenty different marketing tools in one package, including tools such as a landing page builder, a Facebook reviews integration, Facebook live chat, and a promo popup.

Key features

• Exit intent tools for reducing your cart abandonment and bounce rates
• Promote customer testimonials with Facebook/Google integration
• Advanced display options available for all tools

Pricing

• A Starter plan that costs $12.99/month for websites with up to 5,000 visits per month
• An Express plan that costs $29.99/month for websites with up to 25,000 visits per month
• A Platinum plan that costs $79.99/month for websites with up to 150,000 visits per month

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

33) Instafeed

With Instafeed, Shopify store owners are able to display content from their Instagram profile on their Shopify store in order to create social proof and expand the reach of their Instagram content.

Key features

• Image and video support
• Fully-customizable Instagram feed that allows you to choose the feed title, the number of rows and columns, and the space between posts
• Tag products in your posts to create shoppable Instagram feeds

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month and includes basic features and one Instagram feed
• A Pro plan that costs $4.99/month and includes additional features such as product tagging and the ability to display likes plus support for up to three Instagram feeds
• A Plus plan that costs $19.99/month and includes the option to filter your posts by hashtag plus support for unlimited Instagram feeds

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

34) Facebook Channel

Facebook Channel is a tool that allows you to sell your Shopify products directly on Instagram and Facebook by making it easy to set up Facebook and Instagram shops.

Key features

• Automatically syncs products from your Shopify store to Facebook and Instagram shops
• Provides free and paid marketing tools such as audience builder Facebook ads and retargeting ads that you can use to promote your products on social media and grow your audience
• Allows you to easily manage all of your Facebook and Instagram stores within the app

Pricing

• Facebook Channel is free to install

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

Best SEO Shopify apps

If a Shopify store has great products but no one ever visits it, does it make a profit? Unlike the well-known "tree falling in a forest" puzzle, there's a simple answer to this question, and the answer is "no.” By utilizing these search engine optimization (SEO) Shopify apps, you can ensure that Google lists your store snippets as high as possible in the results for relevant searches and boost the number of potential customers who find your site.

35) Plug In SEO

Plug In SEO is an app for Shopify stores that automates the tedious SEO process by automatically detecting and resolving a wide range of SEO issues such as broken links and missing metadata.

Key features

• A keyword tool that provides keyword suggestions for your site's content
• Offers templates for adding meta titles and meta descriptions in-bulk, for better search snippets
• Periodic SEO audit reports delivered to your inbox

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month and includes basic features such as SEO checks and broken link checks
• A Plus plan that costs $20/month and includes additional features such as automatic SEO improvements and SEO reports
• A Pro plan that costs $29.99/month and includes additional features such as a homepage speed report and premium support/training videos

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

36) SEO Manager

SEO Manager is an app that provides a range of features for boosting your website's SEO, including features such as detecting and automatically fixing broken links, JSON-LD data support, automated title, description, and image alt text templating, Google sitemap submission, and much more.

Key features

• 404 error logging and real-time 404 repairs
• A keyword suggestion tool
• Reconfigures your website with SEO-boosting JSON-LD data

Pricing

• SEO Manager costs $20/month

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

37) TinyIMG SEO & Image Optimizer

If the images in your Shopify store are not optimized, they could slow down your loading speeds and thus harm your site's SEO. With TinyIMG SEO & Image Optimizer, you can automatically compress all of your site's images without reducing their quality, speeding up your loading times and boosting your SEO. TinyIMG SEO & Image Optimizer also provides a range of other SEO features such as broken link detection and redirect and metadata optimization.

Key features

• Provides the option to optimize images automatically or manually
• Provides SEO and page speed audits
• Provides automatic JSON-LD microdata and metadata optimization

Pricing

• A Pay As You Go plan that costs $0/month for up to 50 free image optimizations per month. Additional image optimizations cost 3¢/image.
• A 24 Months plan that costs $47.76/year for up to 5,000 free image optimizations every two years. Additional image optimizations cost 1¢/image.
• A Monthly plan that costs $9.99/month for up to 1,000 free image optimizations per month. Additional image optimizations cost 2¢/image.
• A Special Offer plan that costs $19.99/month for up to 3,000 free image optimizations per month. Additional image optimizations cost 1¢/image.

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

Best loyalty and retention Shopify apps

38) Yotpo

Yotpo is a review app that lets you stay engaged with customers, using email or SMS and a variety of customizable opt-in tools. Segment your lists based on detailed customer analytics, whether new or returning. The most unique selling point of Yotpo, however, is its tool set for encouraging customer reviews and dynamically displaying those reviews on your website.

Key features

• Provides customers with the ability to include photos and videos in their product reviews
• A powerful SMS flow builder
• Customizable on-site opt-in solutions

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month
• A Growth plan that costs $19/month
• A Prime plan that costs $59 a month
• Premium and Enterprise plans with custom pricing

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

See how Yotpo integrates with Gorgias.

39) Retention Rocket

Retention Rocket is an SMS marketing platform that allows you to grow your SMS subscriber list and encourage long-term loyalty with TCPA compliant opt-in templates. Message individual customers or entire subscriber lists directly from the app, and create automated SMS messaging campaigns that can be triggered by a wide range of customer events.

Key features

• Allows you to create automated SMS flows and series such as an abandoned cart flow, a customer win-back series, a welcome series, and more
• Provides TCPA compliant opt-in methods such as "text to join" keywords, opt-in landing pages, and opt-in popups
• Provides the option to send customer browser push notifications

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month and includes up to $5 in free SMS messages per month
• A Bronze plan that costs $10/month and includes up to 333 free SMS messages per month
• A Sliver plan that costs $49/month and includes up to 2,450 free SMS messages per month
• A Gold plan that costs $199/month and includes up to 19,900 free SMS messages per month
• An Enterprise plan with custom features and pricing

Available on Shopify Plus?

• No

40) Smile.io

Smile.io is an app designed to help you improve your customer retention and increase your lifetime customer value by making it easy for you to create and manage loyalty and referral programs for your Shopify store.

Key features

• Allows you to create points programs that reward customers for desirable actions such as repeat purchases and referrals
• On-site nudges that remind customers when they have points available to spend
• Allows you to search for customers by name in order to adjust their points manually

Pricing

• A Free plan that costs $0/month and includes basic features such as options for creating points and referral programs
• A Starter plan that costs $49/month and includes additional features such as program branding and rewards emails
• A Growth plan that costs $199/month and includes additional features such as on-site nudges and points expiry
• A Pro plan that costs $599/month and includes additional features such as a VIP program and unlimited integrations
• An Enterprise plan that starts at $1,000/month and includes additional features such as API access and custom reporting

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

See how Gorgias integrates with Smile.io.

41) LoyaltyLion

With LoyaltyLion, Shopify store owners can retain more loyal customers and increase repeat purchases with customized loyalty programs. This platform simplifies the management of your customer loyalty program and offers a number of promotional marketing tools that help you promote your program to new and existing customers.

Key features

• Notifications that alert customers that they have reward points available for incentives
• CRM
• Loyalty features that you can embed on product and post-purchase pages
• Referral tracking
• Point statements for customers 
• Rewards management
• Loyalty tiers

Pricing

• A Classic plan that costs $399/month and includes 2,000 monthly orders
• An Advanced plan that costs $699/month and includes 4,000 monthly orders (with the option to add more)
• A Plus plan that costs $1,500/month and includes 10,000 monthly orders (and scales as your business grows)

Available on Shopify Plus?

• Yes

See how Gorgias integrates with LoyaltyLion.

Find out why companies use Gorgias for Shopify customer service

Tthe right Shopify apps can provide you with a broad range of revenue-boosting capabilities, from tools to grow your subscriber lists to tools for improving the quality and efficiency of your customer support (and everything in between).

At Gorgias, we are dedicated to helping Shopify store owners grow by providing their customers with the best possible experience as efficiently as possible.

If you would like to see for yourself the many benefits that Gorgias provides to Shopify store owners, see how Gorgias works with Shopify and sign up for Gorgias today.

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