Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Table of Contents
- Do I need an AI customer service agent for my Shopify store?
- What type of AI agent do I need for my store?
- So what impact could an AI customer service agent have on my Shopify store?
- Which AI customer service agents are other stores using?
- What can an AI agent do for my Shopify store?
- Direct Shopify integration
- Training (on FAQs)
- Ability to integrate other APIs
- Maintaining brand voice
- Automating tasks
- Social media integration
- Size guides
- Product lookups
- How much will I be paying for an AI agent for my store?
- Conclusion
- FAQ
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Your store is growing, orders are flying off the virtual shelves faster than you can restock them, and your support tickets are starting to pile up.
Sound familiar?
Then you’re in the right place.
To truly scale your Shopify store, without hiring, you’re going to need an AI customer service agent to help you out.
But how do you decide what you need, which features and how much you should be paying?
And should you choose a help desk’s native AI agent, like Fin, Freddy or Gorgias Automate, or a 3rd party AI agent integration into your existing help desk, like My AskAI?
That’s what I want this post to help you with.
Do I need an AI customer service agent for my Shopify store?
Not all stores will need an AI customer service agent.
If you’re just starting out, or only managing a couple of hundred tickets per month then you can (and probably should) manage everything through a standard email inbox, a solid set of FAQs and some very basic automations.
If you choose to use one before this point, you’ll probably miss out on conversations with your early or evangelical customers, the ones you want to build more personal relationships with.
However, as soon as you find yourself spending more than an hour or so per day on support, or it is taking away from other growth activities, then you should look to an AI agent.
A good litmus test is whether or not you have moved from providing support directly from an email account, to using a proper support help desk, like Zendesk, Intercom or Gorgias.
So, let’s assume you passed the above test and are now looking to really scale your Shopify store’s operations.
What type of AI agent do I need for my store?
When you start looking around at AI agents you will start to realize that they can fall into one of 2 categories:
- Customer service AI agents - an agent set up to respond to support tickets e.g. “where is my order?”, “Can I get a refund?”, “How do I return?”
- Sales AI agents/Shopping assistants - an agent set up to assist in the selling of your products, convince prospects and upsell
Choosing which is most important to your store will help you with your decisioning later down the line.
Ultimately a customer service AI agent is there to help improve service, deflect tickets and reduce your operational costs, whereas a sales assistant agent’s goal is to grow your top-line revenue.
It is highly unlikely that any single AI agent will do both well as each requires a different persona and will operate in a different manner - reactive vs proactive, for example.
Some AI agents however, like Gorgias, do operate separate modes for their agents, and you can choose which you use where.
For example, you may have your sales assistant agent on your site for prospects, then once logged in users get shown the customer service agent.
Each agent will behave in a different way, and you can even use separate providers for each functionality as there likely won’t be tons of crossover in how they are managed (and by what teams).
AI shopping assistants are a relatively new concept and their impact is highly dependent on the nature of your customers and products you sell.
AI customer service agent impact however will be dictated more by the types of questions you get, and whether they are majorly repetitive, FAQ or data-driven questions, or whether they are more consultative.
For the remainder of this post however, I’ll be focusing on AI customer service agents in Shopify (as that’s what I know more about!)
So what impact could an AI customer service agent have on my Shopify store?
Let’s talk some specifics now.
There is a lot of talk around people using AI in the e-commerce world, but very few real world examples.
AI customer service isn’t one of these, it is making an impact already.
When we talk “impact”, we generally mean “ticket deflection” i.e. how many customer support tickets that you receive, in your inbox, that don’t end up having to be responded to by a person.
Your ticket deflection rate will vary based on a number of things you control such as:
- How comprehensive your documentation or FAQs are
- Whether the AI agent has access to customer order information in Shopify
- Whether the AI agent needs access to further information in your systems (outside of Shopify)
- The types of tickets you receive i.e. is it mostly WISMO? Or “what would be a good gift for xyz?”
Plus, a number of things outside of your control e.g. the performance of your AI agent provider.
However, in a low case you can still expect an AI agent to be capable of automating or resolving ~25% of tickets.
But, if you have a number of the above in place, you can expect deflection rates of 81% or more.
Your deflection rate won’t be a static number either, as most AI agents will have some way of showing you what they can’t answer and how to improve performance over time.
Which AI customer service agents are other stores using?
Now you’re sold on wanting to use an AI customer service agent in your Shopify store, you’re probably wondering: “What is everyone else using?”
A year ago, while we were building our AI agent for Shopify, we wanted to see which help desks stores were using.
So we looked at 50 popular Shopify stores and this was what we found:
- 20 (40%) used Gorgias
- 5 (10%) used Zendesk
- 3 (6%) used Intercom
- 2 (4%) used Tidio
- The remaining 20 (40%) still used plain old email!
Then we started looking into which used AI.
Of these 50, only 3 (6%) were already using AI within their help desk.
If you look at the Shopify app store you’ll see some other AI chat apps (like Chatty AI) with 1,560 reviews, but these are more standalone chatbots you use if you don’t have your own help desk already.
So right now, you are still a lot earlier than you think if you are using AI!
What can an AI agent do for my Shopify store?
Chatbots and AI has come on a very long way in the last few years and are now as capable as a tier 1 support assistant.
When you are looking for an AI agent for your Shopify store, you therefore want to be looking out for the following:
Direct Shopify integration
This one almost goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway.
Your AI agent must directly integrate (via a simple one-click connection) with Shopify.
This means it must be able to read your customer data from Shopify, so it can answer questions on order statuses, tracking links and returns.
But it should also be able to read all your product data from your store too, so it can answer specific product questions and guide customers through product selections.
Training (on FAQs)
Again, this should be a base-level requirement.
You should be able to give your AI agent your store’s FAQs or help center articles in an easy way (either via selecting a page in Shopify, adding a URL or integrating a help center) and it answer questions based on them.
Some tools will also let you train your AI based on historic tickets in your help desk too, however this is often unnecessary in an e-commerce setting given the types of queries customers have.
Ability to integrate other APIs
In addition to adding in Shopify data and static FAQ data, you should also be able to feed in other APIs from your back end databases to provide more custom data to your AI agent.
This could be for more granular fulfilment updates or for product lookups.
Maintaining brand voice
A common complaint about AI agents is often that customers can feel replies are “robotic”.
While this can often be true of AI in its default settings, with a little time spent giving it instructions or guidance, you can achieve a highly customized tone of voice that mimics your brand’s own, sometimes better, or at least, more consistently, than your human agents’.
But there is another way around this problem too for those slightly more conservative with their AI roll-outs: copilot or internal reply modes.
These mean that instead of having an AI reply immediately to your customers, you can choose to use the AI agent as a productivity or efficiency tool for your human team to respond to more tickets each day but still giving them final say in how they respond.
Automating tasks
Where AI agents really show-off is when you start using them to automate actions or tasks on your behalf.
AI customer service agents nowadays can do simple actions like look up an order for a customer, but they can also take multi-step, complex actions that require logic, data retrievals and policy alignment in order to come to a decision.
An example of this could be initiating a refund on behalf of a customer where the AI needs to:
- Identify the order the user wants to refund
- Check whether the refund is in line with your refund policy
- Initiate the refund from Stripe (or other payment platform)
- Confirm back to the user the refund has been processed
Or think of a similar process for an address update.
Now these types of actions can be done without the input of a person.
Social media integration
Another thing to consider is whether your AI agent can answer questions for your store from your different social media channels.
Not all can, and if this is a popular channel for your customers it could be a deal breaker, so check upfront.
Size guides
Often a good test for an AI agent to see how they perform can be to ask questions that require referring back to a size guide in order to provide an answer.
If you have one, it’s a good way to benchmark across different AI agent providers.
Product lookups
One area some AI agents can get unstuck is with a product lookup.
Looking up a product using an AI search is not always effective when those products are largely similar with small differences between them.
In such cases it is much better to use a tool API to look up and identify relevant products, so ensure your chosen AI customer service platform can do this too.
How much will I be paying for an AI agent for my store?
Let’s assume you already have a help desk solution (like Gorgias, Zendesk etc).
Most of their pricing models are based on number of “resolutions”.
A “resolution” - broadly speaking - will be defined as the conversation or ticket not having to be handed over to a person within a 24hr period from the last message being received.
Not a wholly fair representation of “resolved” I think you’ll agree, but its the best they’ve got at the moment.
With that in mind, let’s look at pricing for the AI agent side of their products, for a store that get ~10,000 tickets each month on average and achieves a 50% resolution (and leaving out the cost of “AI copilot” features - free with My AskAI):
ㅤ | Gorgias (Automate) | Intercom Fin | Zendesk AI | HubSpot (Breeze AI) | Freshdesk (Freddy AI) | My AskAI |
Unit cost | $0.90 per
resolution | $0.99 per
resolution | $1.50 per
resolution | $1 per ticket | ~$0.20 per “session” | $0.10 per ticket |
AI replies cost (monthly) | $4,500 | $4,950 | $7,050 | $10,000 | $2,166 | $1,000 |
AI replies cost (annually) | $54,000 | $59,400 | $84,600 | $120,000 | $25,860 | $12,000 |
As you can see, prices can vary widely, from $1 per ticket with HubSpot’s Breeze AI to $0.10 with My AskAI’s AI agent.
If your average cost per customer is very high, these prices may not influence your decision, but for most stores, it can heavily impact which AI vendor you choose to go with.
Conclusion
Hopefully you can now consider yourself AI-educated when it comes to choosing an AI customer service agent for your Shopify store!
And in case you skimmed over everything here’s the TL;DR:
- Decide what type of AI agent you need most: Sales, support or both
- Check out your help desk provider’s current offering but know 3rd party solutions are available
- Be wary on pricing - you can end up paying $1.50+ per ticket, but can be as little as $0.10
- And make sure they have the features you need, at a minimum a Shopify integration and FAQ training
At the end of the day, the only real way to see what works for you though is to test everything out and see how it works for you (and if you need some advice on what to look for, check out this guide).
But if you want an affordable AI solution for your Shopify store, that does everything I’ve shared above and more, try out My AskAI on a 30 day free trial.
FAQ
Do I actually need an AI customer service agent for my Shopify store?
If you’re handling < ~200 tickets/month, still replying from a basic inbox, or want to nurture early customer relationships, not yet. Once you’ve moved to a help desk (e.g., Gorgias, Zendesk, Intercom) and spend ~1+ hour/day on support - or it’s blocking growth - an AI agent is a smart next step.
What’s the difference between a customer service AI agent and a shopping assistant?
Support agents are reactive and focus on deflecting tickets, resolving WISMO/returns/refunds, and cutting costs. Shopping assistants are proactive and aim to lift revenue and AOV. Some platforms offer both modes, but most stores treat them as separate tools and KPIs.
How much ticket deflection can I expect with an AI agent?
Baseline ~25% deflection is realistic. With strong FAQs, Shopify order access, relevant backend APIs, and continuous “knowledge gap” improvements, 80%+ is achievable.
What integrations should a Shopify AI support agent have?
At minimum: one-click Shopify (orders, tracking, returns, product data) and easy FAQ/help-center training. Bonus: custom API hooks (e.g., fulfilment, inventory), social channel replies, internal/copilot modes to maintain brand voice, and product lookup via tool APIs (not just semantic search).
How much does an AI customer service agent cost?
Most help desks price per “resolution.” At ~10k tickets/month and 50% resolution, costs vary widely - from around $0.90–$1.50 per resolution with native help desks to about $0.10 per ticket with My AskAI - so pricing can materially affect ROI.
