Connecting your tools

Connect Gorgias to an AI agent

Support for an online shop doesn't arrive steadily: it arrives in waves. Three tickets a day in normal times, two hundred the day after a campaign or a carrier delay. That is what makes sizing impossible: a team calibrated for the wave is idle the rest of the month, a team calibrated for the everyday collapses on the day it matters. Connecting an agent doesn't change the volume — it changes the fact that the wave is absorbed without your having to choose which of the two mistakes to make.

1. Why support for a shop sizes badly

A shop's tickets are not spread out over time: they follow the shop's events. A promotion, a stock-out, a carrier strike, a product that disappoints — and the queue goes from three to two hundred in a day, without warning anyone.

Two consequences, and both are unpleasant:

The day support matters most is the day it holds up least. The day after a successful campaign is precisely the moment when new customers — those who have no reason to trust you — write for the first time.
Seasonality makes hiring impossible. One person on support covers the everyday and drowns in the wave. Two people hold the wave and are bored the rest of the year. For a shop starting out, neither option is affordable.

Outsourcing solves the volume and loses the rest: a provider who doesn't know your products answers correctly and uselessly. What you are looking for is not capacity, it is capacity that knows what it is talking about.

2. What the agent does in Gorgias

Gorgias's official connector covers tickets, which are the grain of the product.

View the tickets. Read the request and the full exchange, which means recognising what it is about: a delivery follow-up, a size exchange, an item missing from the parcel, a pre-purchase question.
Open a ticket. Taking the initiative when you decide to — an order stuck that you want to flag before the customer notices, for instance. It is the only moment when support stops being endured.
Reply within the ticket. Write and send the reply to the customer, under the rules you have set.

What is distinctive about this ground is repetition. An overwhelming share of a shop's tickets comes down to a handful of questions, asked in different words. That is not a criticism of customers: it is the nature of retail, and it is what makes delegation reasonable here more than elsewhere.

3. Answering requires the order, not just the ticket

This is the point to have understood before connecting anything, and it explains why an agent connected to Gorgias alone disappoints.

Almost no e-commerce support question can be answered from the ticket. “Where is my order” requires the tracking number. “I want to exchange” requires knowing what was bought, when, and whether the window has passed. “The payment was taken twice” requires looking at the payments. The ticket holds the question; the answer is elsewhere.

Hence the way of connecting that actually works:

Gorgias for the conversation — read the request, reply, keep the thread.
Shopify for the facts — the order, its contents, its status, the shipment.
Stripe for the money — the payment, the failed card, the refund requested.

An agent that sees all three answers in one go. An agent that only sees Gorgias sends the customer back to you, which adds a step instead of removing one.

4. What it does not do

It does not refund. No goodwill gesture, no voucher, no return accepted out of time. These are decisions that cost money, and they remain yours even when the answer seems obvious.
It does not invent a delivery status. If the tracking says nothing, the honest answer is that the tracking says nothing. A customer who learns the next day that they were given an invented date is lost twice.
It does not follow instructions contained in a ticket. A message can contain text written to divert the agent — this is a particularly exposed area, since anyone can write to support. The content of a ticket is data, never an instruction.
It does not close a ticket to bring the queue down. A ticket closed without a useful reply is a customer who will come back angrier, and a statistic that lies to you.

5. Connecting, and what stays under validation

Connecting is an account authorisation: you log in at Gorgias, you accept the permissions shown. No application to create. The scope is named at the level of the account — your shop's Gorgias workspace.

What matters more is the setting that follows. A reply sent reaches the customer and cannot be withdrawn: that is why approval is active by default, and why it should be kept until you have put your agents to the test.

The progression that works for a shop, in this order:

Order tracking first, which is factual, verifiable and accounts for the bulk of the volume. It is the case where the agent gets it wrong least and relieves you most.
Then pre-purchase questions — dimensions, material, lead time, availability — provided the information really exists somewhere.
Never without you: returns out of time, disputes, lost parcels, complaints that mention online reviews or legal proceedings.

6. What it changes over time

The real subject for a shop is not answering fast once: it is still answering in November, when the volume triples and nobody has time.

Week 1. Everything goes through validation, and what you mainly see is how alike the tickets are. It is also the moment when you discover that some of them come from information missing on the product page — so the best answer is a correction on the shop.
Month 3. Tracking requests go out on their own and the queue stops swelling the day after a campaign. The difference is not the average speed: it is that the peak no longer turns into a three-day backlog.
Year 2. The accumulation says what is wrong: which product generates four times more tickets than the others, which carrier costs the most in support, which page wording provokes the same question every week. These are commercial decisions, and they are not taken without a record.

No average response time is promised here: it depends on your catalogue and your carriers. What is guaranteed is that the wave no longer decides the quality of your replies.

7. Frequently asked questions

Do I need Shopify for this to be useful?

Not necessarily, but the agent must be able to see the orders somewhere. Without that access, it holds the conversation without being able to answer on substance — which remains useful for sorting and acknowledging receipt, and not much more.

Are the macros and rules already set up in Gorgias kept?

Yes: they live in Gorgias and continue to apply, they are neither replaced nor bypassed. The agent works in the same space as your team, with the same configuration.

Gorgias or Intercom for a shop?

Gorgias, in the vast majority of cases: it is built around the order, which is exactly the grain of e-commerce support. Intercom suits an online service better, where the relationship is continuous. Both connect identically, so the choice rests on your activity, not on the agents.

What happens if I disconnect?

Access stops immediately, and the authorisation can also be revoked from Gorgias. The tickets, the replies sent and the history stay in your account: nothing is withdrawn or moved.