Gorgias

Gorgias makes the most sense once support volume is genuinely a bottleneck. A brand fielding 500+ tickets a month, especially on Shopify or Shopify Plus, gets the most from it: order lookups happen inside the ticket, the AI Agent resolves routine questions without a human, and the reporting ties conversations back to revenue. The 50-in-50 program is a useful framing for what onboarding actually looks like — channels connected in the first days, automation handling the queue by week three, revenue impact measured by day 50. Where it bites is the billing model. Gorgias charges by tickets and by automated interactions, not by agent seat. That's a win for teams that scale headcount without scaling cost, but it punishes low-volume stores. Under 100 tickets a month you'll pay for tiers you can't use, and a flat or free helpdesk will do the same job for less. Non-ecommerce businesses are a poor fit too — the whole value proposition leans on order data and product context that SaaS or B2B support teams simply don't have. The closest alternative depends on what you value. If you want a cheaper generic inbox and don't need Shopify context, Zendesk or Intercom will cover the basics. If you want ecommerce depth plus revenue tools — proactive campaigns, upsells in the conversation, attribution — Gorgias is ahead of those generalists. The AI Agent being included on every plan, rather than gated to the top tier, removes the usual paywall objection. One caveat worth flagging: the AI Agent's automated-interaction allowance is small on the entry tiers (30 on Starter and Basic). Real automation volume kicks in on Pro and above, so a store that expects the AI to carry the queue should budget for that tier, not the cheapest one. We'd also check the MCP beta if you want to query helpdesk