Review our list of the best customer support apps for Shopify, including return management, live chat, and automation integrations.
Shopify has an astounding market share among ecommerce businesses, with nearly four million active stores and hundreds of millions of shoppers placing orders each year. But with so many active shoppers, how do merchants provide fast, helpful customer support? Usually, they use customer service apps.
Below, we’ll list the best 18 customer service apps on Shopify to help you answer incoming customer questions, organize your customer support efforts, manage the returns process, and deliver a superior customer experience. And as we all know, happy customers are the best fuel for growth.
By the way, this list is one of many Shopify app roundups. If you’re looking for apps to upgrade your ecommerce business, skip getting lost in the Shopify App Store and check out our lists of:
If you dig through the hundreds of apps on the Shopify App Store, you’ll find plenty of gems and just as many lumps of coal. Like any app, you’ll save time by choosing solutions that integrate with the rest of your ecommerce tech stack.
You’ll also want to narrow your search to software that receives regular updates, offers a variety of pricing plans, and allows you to customize the platform.
But what about customer service apps, specifically? The best apps help you:
Wait time is a constant threat to customer satisfaction. Especially on real-time channels like live chat and SMS, just a few minutes of delay causes customers to abandon carts and shop elsewhere.
Great customer support apps can decrease wait times by arming your customer support team with tools to act fast, including (but not limited to):
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To be clear, a great customer service app doesn’t make it difficult for customers to get help. Instead, the right solution should offer convenient self-service solutions for customers so they have more options than just writing into support. These solutions include:
Self-service resources are a win-win for customers and your customer support team. 88% of customers expect some kind of self-service resource on your site according to Statista. And if customers answer basic, repetitive questions with self-service resources, your support team can spend more time on high-value conversations, optimizing your end-to-end customer experience, and driving more sales.
The best apps don’t just help you answer questions fast, they help you answer questions fully to avoid extended back-and-forth with customers who just want to get on with their days.
A great customer service solution helps you resolve tickets quickly by:
Related: Our Director of Support’s guide to measuring and lowering resolution time.
Some customer support teams are wary of customer support platforms that aim to automate too much of the support process — and with good reason. We’ve all dealt with unresponsive chatbots that do more harm than good. But if your customer team is swamped with tickets, they won’t have time to get through the ticket queue, let alone add a human touch.
The right support platform strikes a balance by automating basic, repetitive, “empty-calorie” tickets with self-service, which gives your team enough time to add a human touch on tickets that actually need it. Plus, apps can help customer support reps personalize interactions by:
Here’s what Caela Castille, Director of Customer Experience at Jaxxon, a luxury jewelry store for men, says about the benefit of building relationships with customers during support conversations:
“Customer service shouldn’t just be reactive, putting out fires. We want to be proactive. And that’s what Gorgias helps you do. You go talk to customers, make sure they’re having a great experience. You don’t use it just to solve problems, but to create new relationships and create sales.”
— Caela Castillo, Director of Customer Experience, Jaxxon
Learn how Jaxxon increased revenue by 46% by switching to Gorgias to support relationship-building customer conversations.
Help desk software can offer a great way to improve the customer experience, enhance customer satisfaction, boost sales, and get more repeat buyers for your online store. But it’s not always easy to choose the best one when there are so many options out there.
That’s why we’re starting with the six best helpdesk software for Shopify stores. Pay attention to the features, pricing, and unique strengths of each to decide which solution is what you need.
Gorgias is the leading helpdesk on Shopify, with more active users than any other platform. Gorgias helpdesk ecommerce brands — from small businesses to large enterprises — centralize their customer support and automate low-impact tasks to save time for your highest-value interactions.
Unlike other helpdesks, Gorgias’s features aim to do more than answer support requests. Gorgias helps your agents prioritize pre-sales interactions and VIP customers, suggest products from within the helpdesk, and create proactive campaigns to increase sales. Likewise, it integrates with ecommerce apps for shipping, returns, and other important functions that make (or break) customer retention.
In 2022, brands that used Gorgias lifted overall gross merchandise volume (GMV) by 5%.
Gorgias is for ecommerce merchants of all sizes. Most customer service apps are built to span industries, leading to an over-crowded set of features (and little attention to the unique needs of online retailers). Not Gorgias. We only build features that help ecommerce brands deliver a customer experience that generates happy customers and a lift in revenue.
On top of Shopify, Gorgias works for ecommerce platforms BigCommerce and Magento.
Zendesk is an all-in-one customer service and customer relationship management (CRM) platform for all businesses. It’s known for a wide range of features covering from customer support to marketing and sales. While the size of Zendesk can be an asset for businesses on larger plans, ecommerce businesses often complain about the platform’s lack of features for ecommerce and poor customer service.
Enterprise businesses and large teams
Check out our post on Zendesk pricing for more detailed information.
While Zendesk is a great platform for many businesses, its broad applications leave ecommerce stores underserved. That’s why Zendesk’s reviews on Shopify are lower than its reviews on Shopify (3.5) are so much lower than its reviews on G2 (4.3):
Related: Our deep dive into Zendesk’s features, pricing, and use cases.
Freshdesk is a powerful but highly approachable customer service software for any business that’s up and running very quickly. It’s considered the perfect alternative to Zendesk because it provides almost the same features at a lower price than its competitor. Freshdesk offers a free plan but unfortunately has no native app in the Shopify app marketplace — complete integration requires an additional app.
Small and medium businesses (SMBs), SaaS startups
Check out our post on Freshdesk pricing for more detailed information.
Re:amaze is a customer service, live chat, and helpdesk solution for small and medium businesses. It’s much simpler than Zendesk and Freshdesk but easier to use for beginners.
While the simplicity of Re:amaze is great for small stores, growth on the platform is limited because it doesn’t include many features that your store will need as it grows.
Small and medium businesses without plans to grow
Re:amaze currently offers three plans — Basic, Pro, and Plus — with prices starting from $29 per team member/month. All pricing plans are monthly rates with no contract or obligated commitments, including unlimited email inboxes, live chat, macros, and reporting. Apart from these plans, Re:amaze supports custom plans and volume-based pricing.
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HubSpot Service Hub offers a great feature set and ticketing management system, but it may not be the right choice for those who already use a CRM.
A worthy note is that HubSpot Service Hub is the same as Zendesk when it comes to support methods. For example, if you’re using the free plan, you can only ask questions on community forums. You can’t contact HubSpot customer support team unless you upgrade your plan to the Starter, Professional, or Enterprise plan.
Small and medium businesses
HubSpot Service Hub comes with a choice of free and paid plans. All the plans also include some free features from HubSpot’s CRM software. For paid plans, pricing is based on both the number of users and the features available. It ranges from $50/month for two users on the Starter plan to $1,200/month for 10 users on the Enterprise plan.
LiveAgent is a helpdesk app for companies that want to offer phone, email, live chat, and social support. It’s best if you have numerous support agents since it includes auto-routing and back-end and collaboration features. Note that LiveAgent doesn’t support chat and SMS messaging like Gorgias and other helpdesk solutions do.
Small and medium businesses
LiveAgent offers a free, full-featured plan and three paid plans. With the “forever free” plan, you get one live chat button, ticketing for one email address, and call center support for a single phone number. Paid plans start at $15 per agent/month for email ticketing only, $29 per agent/month for the ticketing and live chat plan, and $39 per agent/month for the all-inclusive omnichannel plan.
Now that we’ve covered the best customer service platforms on Shopify, let’s discuss a handful of other top apps you can use to boost your customer experience.
We’ve gone over the ecommerce helpdesk platforms that can serve as a solid foundation for your store, but no tool can do it all. Now, we’ll look at the best Shopify app integrations, from marketing and billing to chat and returns, that can round out your helpdesk app. Discover the pros, cons, and noteworthy features below.
Yotpo is a wide-ranging ecommerce marketing platform that includes SMS marketing, customer loyalty, and referral programs. The company offers a Shopify app that’s much narrower in focus: it helps stores collect more product reviews and product photos and leverage social proof into new sales. The app accomplishes this through automatic review emails after purchase, SMS reminders (through companion app SMSBump), and via a Reviews widget that store owners can embed on their sites.
Yotpo allows stores to feature strong reviews, along with photos and Q&A entries, anywhere on their storefront and even across ads on Instagram, Facebook, and Google.
If you have an existing set of reviews, Yotpo lets you import them with one click.
Yotpo is a Shopify Plus Technology Partner with numerous solutions beyond this app. But Shopify stores of all sorts can use this app to curate and promote reviews and user photo content — mostly for free.
If you use Gorgias, check out our integration with Yotpo.
Which is better for your business: one-off transactions or consistent recurring revenue? The answer to that question is obvious. Less obvious is how to move your customers from occasional purchasers to loyal subscribers.
Recharge helps you do this by quickly enabling subscriptions for retail purchases. Similar to Amazon’s subscribe-and-save offer, Recharge allows you to quickly enable subscriptions on your products and provides a way for customers to manage their subscriptions once enrolled (like skipping or rescheduling deliveries or even swapping products).
With Recharge, it’s easy to roll out subscriptions with Shopify Payments, and you can use the company’s APIs to build additional functionality into your storefront.
Recharge also offers you analytics so you can see how your various subscription offers are performing and continue to iterate until you find the right mix.
If you use Gorgias, check out our integration with Recharge.
Daasity is an analytics platform that can pull in data from all sales and marketing platforms, delivering top-quality analytics that help you make decisions and grow your business. It integrates with pretty much everything that matters, including other tools on this list like Yotpo, Recharge, and Gorgias.
The Shopify integration pulls in your store’s performance data and incorporates it into your Daasity data reporting.
If you’re looking for a serious business analytics tool that integrates well with Shopify, Daasity is a great choice. Pricing is straightforward (though not cheap), based on a three-month rolling average of your total revenue.
Gatsby is a Shopify app that connects your Shopify storefront to the Gatsby site creation tool. Gatsby empowers businesses to build sites using basic Javascript templates, and the basic Gatsby + Shopify starter theme helps you get started in minutes.
The real value proposition for Shopify storefronts is in the Gatsby Cloud service, though. Sites created using Gatsby and hosted on its platform promise much faster load times and better site stability thanks to its reliance on the Jamstack.
Users don’t like slow, clunky sites. If they encounter a site that doesn’t load quickly enough, they tend to get bored and move on. Gatsby is one solution to this problem, fully optimizing your site so it loads in milliseconds.
If you use Gorgias, check out our integration with Gatsby.
Loop Returns powers up your store’s ability to manage returns and exchanges. These functions are critical for ecommerce businesses, but no one wants to get stuck in an endless loop of shipping labels, refunds, and frustrated customers.
With Loop Returns, you can automate your return policy thanks to a branded portal that runs on Loop’s architecture, not yours. You can also power up an exchange portal, helping customers stay in your ecosystem rather than return your product and jump to a competitor.
Loop also handles gift cards, store credit, return label generation, and just about everything else you might need for returns or exchanges.
If you use Gorgias, check out our integration with Loop Returns.
ShipBob enables third-party fulfillment (3PL) for direct-to-consumer brands. Thanks to its Shopify app, it can do the same for your Shopify store. By taking the order fulfillment, warehousing, and shipping off your plate, ShipBob enables you to focus on the many other aspects of retail that help you grow.
ShipBob offers a simple integration process, same-day shipping, two-day delivery to the US, shipping notifications, and automated order fulfillment.
If you use Gorgias, check out our integration with ShipBob.
LoyaltyLion helps ecommerce merchants build and manage their loyalty programs that motivate engagement and repeat purchases. LoyaltyLion’s programs are simple to set up and, especially compared to the high cost of customer acquisitions, offer a more cost-effective way to boost revenue: customer retention.
If you use Gorgias, check out our integration with LoyaltyLion.
Smile.io is a loyalty and rewards provider that enables small businesses to implement loyalty programs similar to the ones offered by larger competitors. Smile drives repeat traffic and purchases for more than 50,000 stores by offering referrals, points, exclusive offers, and other incentives.
Smile also provides customers with rich loyalty data, helping them power up their email marketing and subscription tools.
Best of all, Smile is highly customizable with minimal branding (and no Smile.io branding at any paid tier), so you can customize it to fit the look and experience of your Shopify store.
If you use Gorgias, check out our integration with Smile.io.
Ada is a next-gen AI-powered brand interaction engine that helps businesses offer always-on availability and consistent answers to customers that reach out over a range of channels. Ada uses Interaction AI to interpret and understand what customers are looking for. With integrations across all the channels and platforms where people are reaching your brand, Ada brings everything together and handles most of the interactions without assistance from your human team.
Connect Ada to your Shopify storefront, and the AI can access Shopify Order Tracking data to automatically provide shipping insights to customers, keeping those requests out of the queues of your human agents.
If you use Gorgias, check out our integration with Ada.
Aircall describes itself as “the phone system for modern business.” It’s a customer-centric call center software that keeps call center agents informed, engaged, and on target — and helps customers reach the right departments quickly with IVR menus, skill-based routing, and live call monitoring.
One of the greatest strengths of Aircall is that it integrates with many of the top apps companies might use that store customer information. It can then source and surface that information as soon as the call starts, giving agents access to rich information and order history from the moment they connect the call.
Aircall offers numerous integrations with top solutions, including a Shopify integration. This isn’t technically an app for Shopify but a way to pull Shopify data into Aircall. With it, your call center agents can instantly pull up Shopify customer and order data as a call starts. If they need more information, they can open up a customer’s Shopify profile for deeper context.
If you use Gorgias, check out our integration with Aircall.
Klaus is a conversation review, QA, and customer service management platform targeting hypergrowth companies. If you need a way to automate first-level queries and scale your QA process, Klaus can get you there.
The platform starts with AI-based customer service bots that can seamlessly pass queries along to your human agents (without your customers noticing a gap or having to do anything on their end). Klaus also includes coaching and learning features for helping your human agents improve, plus there are analytics tools to help you keep your customer service system running at optimal efficiency.
It integrates with many popular tools, including Gorgias. And thanks to the way Klaus operates, it can enhance your operations within other tools and ecosystems, including Shopify.
If you use Gorgias, check out our integration with Klaus.
Textline is a business text messaging platform that organizations use in a wide range of ways to provide fast customer service. With Textline, customers can skip the hold music and text you about their problem instead. The tool keeps communications organized, safe, and compliant, allowing customer service teams to respond to problems and even collaborate as necessary.
Similar to Aircall, Textline offers a Shopify integration that can pull customer data into every service encounter with a Shopify customer. The integration doesn’t add new capabilities or features to either platform; it simply shows your customer support team the information you already have about a particular customer so your team can make faster, better decisions and resolve customers’ concerns more quickly.
If you use Gorgias, check out our integration with Textline.
Gorgias is the ultimate helpdesk and customer support tool for Shopify merchants. Unlike most customer support apps, every Gorgias feature and integration is built for ecommerce businesses like yours.
With Gorgias, you can finally stop asking customers for information you already have. It’s right there in front of your agents, every time. You’ll also gain these abilities:
Over 10,000 Shopify merchants use Gorgias every day, and the Gorgias Shopify app is the first customer support app to achieve Shopify Plus Certification.
Ready to connect Gorgias with your Shopify store? Get started today.
