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
- Richpanel at a glance
- What is Richpanel?
- How easy is it to set up Richpanel?
- What channels does Richpanel work in?
- What are the limitations of Richpanel?
- What knowledge sources can I train Richpanel on?
- What features does Richpanel have?
- The autonomous agent layer
- The copilot layer, Sidekick AI
- The actions layer
- The Self-Service Portal
- How do I improve Richpanel's responses?
- What resolution rate can I expect from Richpanel?
- What AI model does Richpanel use?
- What languages does Richpanel work in?
- How secure is Richpanel?
- Who is using Richpanel?
- How much does Richpanel cost?
- Route A, buying direct from Richpanel
- Route B, installing through the Shopify App Store
- What 5,000 tickets a month actually costs
- Does Richpanel have a free trial?
- Is Richpanel worth it?
- What are the pros and cons of Richpanel?
- Pros
- Cons
- FAQs
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Richpanel is sold two ways on different terms. It is $89 a month with a 14-day trial through the Shopify App Store, and $99 a seat with a $200 monthly AI minimum if you buy direct.
Richpanel is an ecommerce helpdesk sold as one product: ticketing, AI agents and a shopper-facing portal arrive together, so buying it means moving off the helpdesk you run today. It suits a Shopify or WooCommerce brand doing 1,000 or more conversations a month whose tickets are mostly order status, returns and refunds, because the AI executes those actions against live store data. On my read the deciding constraint is the absence of a layer option, since you cannot keep the inbox your agents use today and bolt the AI onto it.
You have a shortlist, and Richpanel is on it because someone told you the AI resolves tickets on its own.
Then you open the site and the numbers stop lining up. The homepage sells a guarantee, the pricing article prices seats, and the Shopify listing carries an $89 plan none of the others mention.
That is a hard place to buy from. You are running roughly 2,000 to 10,000 tickets a month, most of them order status, returns and sizing (the three that swallow a DTC inbox), and peak season is already in the planning spreadsheet.
I'm Mike, co-founder of My AskAI. We help 200+ ecommerce and SaaS businesses run AI customer service, so I can't be impartial here.
By the end you'll know what Richpanel does, where it stops, and what 5,000 tickets a month costs on each of the two ways you can buy it.
Richpanel at a glance
Fact | Detail |
What it is | Ecommerce helpdesk with AI agents built in |
Headline price | $89/mo on Shopify, $99/seat direct |
G2 rating | 4.6/5 from 95 reviews |
Best for | Shopify DTC brands ready to switch helpdesk |
Not a fit for | Teams happy with the helpdesk they run |
Biggest limitation | No layer option, so your helpdesk goes too |
Our verdict | 7/10 |
My AskAI is the other version of this decision. Our agent runs inside the helpdesk you already pay for, which is Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Gorgias or HubSpot, and we charge per ticket. Our roundup of the best AI customer service tools for ecommerce covers the wider field.
What is Richpanel?
TL;DR: Richpanel is a cloud helpdesk with AI agents in the core of the product. You get a shared inbox, a customer-facing self-service portal and agents that take real store actions, and you buy all of it or none of it.
In support-team terms it is three things at once: a ticketing inbox for your agents, an AI layer that answers and acts on its own, and a self-service portal your customers use before they open a ticket. All three arrive in the same purchase.
Richpanel describes itself as a team of AI agents that runs customer service end to end across email, chat, social and SMS. The helpdesk page fills in the human half, with macros, saved views, round robin, assignment rules, teams, custom fields, internal notes, CSAT and a native report builder.
The AI half goes beyond the agents that answer. Alongside the resolving agents there is a QA Agent that reviews closed conversations, a Social Media Agent for comments and DMs, a CX Manager AI that configures the rest, and the Self-Service Portal (the one your customers touch).
Richpanel spells out the commercial condition in its own price book:
"The helpdesk is never sold on its own, and there is no path where you buy ticketing now and add AI later. If you only want a ticketing inbox, Richpanel is the wrong purchase."
That makes switching helpdesk part of the purchase. The homepage leads on the outcome, promising to "Cut Your Support Costs by 30 % and Reduce Tickets by 50%", and backs that with a money-back guarantee.
Richpanel positions itself across DTC ecommerce, SaaS, fitness, education and telco. The published case studies and the integration list both skew hard to DTC retail on Shopify.
G2: Richpanel scores 4.6/5 from 95 reviews on G2. "I love the efficiency through automation and AI that Richpanel provides. The improved organization and analytics compared to our previous platform is a big plus." via Sarah K., a G2 reviewer (small business).
Before you quote that score back to anyone, take the figure on Richpanel's own site with a grain of salt, because it runs higher than the score on G2. Your team can open the G2 page and read the reviews behind the number.
How easy is it to set up Richpanel?
TL;DR: The AI setup is fast, because you paste a URL and it crawls your own site. The heavy part is migrating off your current helpdesk, and Richpanel's own playbook names what will not come with you.
The documented flow starts with your website address. Richpanel crawls your homepage, product catalog, FAQs and policy pages, then drafts a brand-voice profile and a set of standard operating procedures from what it found.
You connect the store and the channels next, and choose collaborative or autonomous mode for each channel separately. The AI agents page puts elapsed time at 5 to 20 minutes (the AI half only; the migration is separate).
Go direct and every button is a demo booking, with a named implementation manager on larger accounts. Through the Shopify App Store there is an install button and a 14-day free trial.
Migration is where the real days go. Richpanel imports tickets, macros, tags, custom fields and users from Gorgias, Zendesk, Kustomer, Gladly and Re:amaze, runs side by side with no downtime, and puts full cutover at two weeks.
I rate Richpanel for publishing its own Zendesk playbook, which names what does not transfer. Trigger and automation logic, marketplace apps, the small pieces of code that push ticket events into other systems, help center theming and its SEO, custom objects, side conversations, light agents and deep historical reporting all get rebuilt or lost.
Before the agent replies to a real customer it has to clear a pre-launch evaluation scored on your own past tickets, at a 95 to 99% threshold.
Seat administration comes first. The getting-started docs open on the settings screen where you invite teammates by email and set a role on each one (teams, audit logs and permissions all live in the same place).
G2 reviewers keep returning to the same theme: the automation and self-service configuration is hard to get right, and they say the documentation does not cover it well enough.
My AskAI installs into Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Gorgias or HubSpot and answers inside the inbox your team already works in, usually the same afternoon. Your macros, tags, views, routing and ticket history all stay where they are.
What channels does Richpanel work in?
TL;DR: Email, web chat, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, X and SMS all land in the Richpanel inbox, plus the self-service portal. Voice is the gap, and on the Shopify App Store route SMS sits a tier up.
Because Richpanel runs its own inbox, the channel list is what arrives in it. Email works through Gmail, Outlook or custom IMAP, and then there is the web chat widget, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, X and SMS.
For a store the self-service portal is often the most valuable channel. Customers check an order or start a return there (no ticket ever gets created).
Voice is the gap, and Richpanel says so itself. There is no native voice or phone (it integrates with Aircall, Dialpad and JustCall, and hosts no VoIP of its own). Richpanel's own
llms.txt (the plain-text summary it publishes for AI crawlers) adds a second limit: there are no channel-specific SLA rules yet.Buy through Shopify and the plan you pick decides your channels. PRO lists email, phone, chat, Facebook and Instagram, while SMS and the Social Media AI sit on PRO MAX. That gate belongs to the App Store route, since the direct route publishes no tiers at all.
The integrations page is where a store should look. Shopify, Recharge, Loop Returns, AfterShip, TikTok Shop, Amazon, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Klaviyo are what let the AI act on a real order. On a demo call I ask which of those the agent can write to as well as read from.
My AskAI answers in whatever channels your helpdesk routes to it, so email, web chat and the social conversations that already land in Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Gorgias or HubSpot all reach the same agent. There is no separate social product to buy and no second inbox for your team to watch.
What are the limitations of Richpanel?
TL;DR: Three things decide most Richpanel evaluations. You have to replace your helpdesk, there is no hosted phone channel, and the AI billing floor punishes anything under about 1,200 conversations a month.
You replace your helpdesk. This is the largest constraint, and the vendor concedes it directly, listing "a helpdesk you are happy with" among the four situations where Richpanel is the wrong buy. No version of this product sits on top of Gorgias or Zendesk.
There is no hosted telephony. Phone runs through Aircall, Dialpad or JustCall, on a separate contract and a separate bill (a second invoice every month). If voice is a primary channel for you, that is two vendors to manage and two places for a conversation to live.
The AI floor prices badly at low volume. Richpanel's price book states a $200 monthly minimum on AI usage, billed in $100 blocks, so below roughly 1,200 conversations a month you pay the $200 whatever you use. A one-person shop doing 200 conversations pays $299 (one seat plus the floor).
Prepaid credits expire: ninety days on an annual commitment, fifteen days on monthly or on demand. Buy for a peak that arrives late and you can pay twice for the same volume.
The best rate needs an annual commitment. Monthly costs about 20% more and on demand about 30% more, and that premium applies to both the seat line and the AI line.
On the Shopify route, PRO connects up to 2 stores, and SMS, the Social Media AI, CSAT surveys and multiple brands are all PRO MAX (so a two-brand operator is on the higher plan from day one).
The documentation is a long way behind the product. For me that is the biggest practical risk here. The marketing site sells autonomous agents, while the help center's only AI article covers Sidekick AI, the agent-assist copilot.
Training the agent, its guardrails and its actions are all questions for the demo.
Richpanel names four certifications it does not hold: no ISO 27001, no ISO/IEC 42001, no CCPA attestation and no PCI DSS Level 1. If your procurement runs on an ISO 27001 questionnaire, that is your finding.
The reference base runs smaller than enterprise. Richpanel's own scale playbook tells a head of CX running 50 to 100+ agents to demand a reference at their scale from every vendor, itself included. Take them up on it: the reference I want at that point is a brand at your ticket volume rather than your agent headcount, since volume is what breaks a deployment.
A Shopify merchant weighing the same move asked in a thread on r/shopify:
"For those of you that have used both Gorgias and Richpanel for their shopify store what are your thoughts? Pros and cons of each? Im currently using Gorgias but considering leaving"
His problem was email deliverability. Yahoo was throttling mail sent through a shared sender reputation, and he reports what Richpanel told him:
"I briefly spoke to someone at Richpanel and they said tickets would use our provider to send tickets so it would only be our sender reputation that matters."
That is a good question to take into a demo. I've been on enough of these calls to say that an operational problem, rather than a missing feature, is usually what starts a helpdesk move.
If the limitation that bothers you is the migration itself, that is the whole reason My AskAI exists. We add an AI agent to Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Gorgias or HubSpot, and you keep your inbox, your routing and your history. Our agent takes actions too, through Tasks and Tools, either fully autonomously or drafting for a human to approve.
What knowledge sources can I train Richpanel on?
TL;DR: Your website, your past tickets and your live store data, plus policies you write in plain English. Richpanel publishes nothing about file uploads or wiki connectors.
Your own site goes in on setup: homepage, product catalog, FAQs and policy pages, which double as the tone reference for the brand-voice profile.
Then your ticket history. The CX Manager AI starts from your help center, your past tickets and your product pages, and Richpanel puts it at roughly 80% bootstrapped on cutover day (its own estimate). That same history is what the pre-launch evaluation scores against.
Live store data arrives through the native integrations, fetched at answer time, so the agent can state a real delivery status or run a real refund on today's data.
Where most of your ongoing work will land, though, is policy. SOPs are written in plain English, and Richpanel says there is no scripting and no flow builder. That puts the quality of the agent on the quality of the sentences you write, which is the ownership cost I weigh heaviest here.
The rest is unpublished. Richpanel publishes nothing on direct file upload, a Notion, Confluence or Google Drive connector, a sync with a third-party help center, per-source scoping, freshness controls or any volume limit on knowledge. There is no knowledge article in the help center at all.
Where your knowledge lives today, and whether Richpanel can read it there, is the first thing I put on a demo agenda.
My AskAI reads from Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, SharePoint, OneDrive, Dropbox, Salesforce and Shopify, plus the help center of the helpdesk you run. If you have no help center yet, Train on Historic Tickets writes your starter knowledge from your last 5,000 historic tickets, so a team with nothing written down can still start.
What features does Richpanel have?
TL;DR: Three layers plus a portal. Agents that resolve end to end, a Sidekick copilot for your humans, an actions layer wired into Shopify and returns, and a self-service portal customers use on their own.
The autonomous agent layer
The agent handles a conversation from first message to close. It runs in collaborative mode, where it drafts and a human approves, or in autonomous mode, and you pick per channel.
The copilot layer, Sidekick AI
This is the one part of the AI documented properly. From the agent view it can
Summarize a conversation into reason for contact, sentiment and what was resolved, draft a reply, and drop the summary onto the ticket as a private note. It also translates messages in real time (your agents get the translation in the ticket view).The actions layer
Order lookup, returns, refunds, cancellations, subscription changes and address changes all execute through what Richpanel calls deterministic tool execution, with no queries written by the AI itself. Richpanel counts that as one of its guards against a made-up answer.
The Self-Service Portal
Customers track orders, start returns and change account details without opening a ticket (no agent involved, no ticket created). You configure it in a self-service admin with
Configure Modules and Order Topics, and each topic carries a Default action and its own on-off toggle.
The portal is also where the two purchase routes diverge again. Buy direct and it is included at no charge with no per-order fee and no volume tier. Buy through the App Store and it is a named $119 a month plan, with $299 per additional 20,000 orders.
Beyond those four, the list is long. There is a QA Agent reviewing every closed conversation, a Social Media Agent for comments and DMs (both included on the direct route), and a CX Manager AI that reads the business and configures the rest.
Then there are pre-launch evals gated at 95 to 99% with published confidence intervals, a native custom report builder, and Returns and Exchanges as a paid add-on from $99 a month. There is an API on the Richpanel developer hub too (documented separately from the help center), and full configuration detail for the portal sits in the self-service docs.
My AskAI does the actions half through Tasks and Tools, written as plain-English procedures with no decision trees. On Shopify our pre-built Task checks order status, and a second Task acts as a sales agent recommending products. You choose per action whether the AI completes it or drafts it for an agent to approve.
How do I improve Richpanel's responses?
TL;DR: Start collaborative, graduate one channel at a time, and fix the written policy before the prompt. The QA Agent generates the backlog for you.
Start in collaborative mode and let the AI draft while humans approve. Richpanel's own evaluation guide formalizes this as shadow, then collaborative, then narrow autonomy, with exit criteria at each stage.
When an answer is wrong, edit the SOP, the plain-English policy a human wrote. Richpanel's governance article draws the line: a prompt tells the agent how to answer, and the tools you gave it decide what it may do.
Read the QA Agent's output weekly. It reviews every closed conversation and names the missing article, the tool call that never fired or the instruction that needed changing, so your improvement list is generated for you (reading it is the actual work).
Knowledge edits, policy edits and model changes should each send you back to the evaluations. Watch correct resolution rate, wrong-action rate and how precisely the agent escalates.
Caps belong on the economic effect as well as on each individual action. Richpanel's own example: a $150 refund cap is no cap at all when the agent can issue three $50 credits, a replacement or a shipping waiver, each one individually permitted.
Do not set this up and walk away. An agent left alone for a quarter drifts against a catalog that changed, a returns policy that moved and a carrier that started running late.
Our loop works the same way and is mostly automatic. Self-Learning compares the AI's reply to what your agent actually sent and drafts the new knowledge article for you to approve, and your team can open any conversation in the dashboard and ask why that answer was given and which source it came from.
What resolution rate can I expect from Richpanel?
TL;DR: Richpanel's written money-back guarantee is 50% autonomous resolution within the first 30 days, refunded in full if it misses. Plan on that number, and watch that a self-service deflection figure is a different measurement.
The published figure is 50% autonomous resolution within the first 30 days of going live. Richpanel puts that in writing, and the remedy is money: miss the number and the fees you paid come back in full.
Read the promise narrowly. It covers eligible conversations the agent closes with no human reply, and the share of your inbox the AI merely touches is a looser measure that the refund does not attach to.
The Shopify App Store listing uses a similar number for a different plan (easy to mistake for the one above): its Self Service tier promises the portal will resolve up to 50% of issues on its own. That is a claim about the self-service portal rather than the AI agent's resolution guarantee.
Richpanel also defines the term. Resolution means the conversation closed with no human reply, against a stated denominator, and the vendor separates it from deflection explicitly. Deflection appears on its list of metrics a buyer should refuse.
Our own AI resolution rate benchmark research covers 195 rated deployments across 38 vendors, with a median of 70% and a middle band running from 56% to 80%. Read those as direction only. The numbers are aggregate, how each vendor defines the metric moves them a long way, and a vendor's published figure comes from a deployment that went well.
A Richpanel customer on G2 shows what the difference looks like in practice:
"close to 50% of our tickets are answered through self-service" via a G2 reviewer, on G2.
That is a deflection number. It counts customers who found an answer in the portal and never opened a ticket, which measures something different from the agent resolving a conversation. Ask which one a demo is quoting you.
If you want the definitions straight before you sign anything, our post on containment versus deflection versus resolution pulls them apart, and our AI resolution rate benchmarks piece has the full corpus behind those field numbers.
What AI model does Richpanel use?
TL;DR: Several, and you pick. Richpanel names GPT-5.6, Gemini, Opus 5, Sonnet 5 and Kimi on its Shopify listing, and your choice changes what a conversation costs.
Richpanel describes itself as multi-model under the hood, naming Claude, Gemini and GPT, and says customers can choose the one they want. The Shopify App Store listing goes furthest, naming five: GPT-5.6, Gemini, Opus 5, Sonnet 5 and Kimi.
Model choice is wired into the bill. The price book uses Gemini 2.5 Flash as its reference model, so the $0.20 headline is calculated on that model and a larger one costs more per conversation.
On data handling, Richpanel states that customer data is not used to train shared models. Refunds and similar operations run through deterministic tool execution, which is why I trust the actions layer.
Richpanel publishes a production hallucination rate under 1% for its own agents. It is a self-reported figure, credited to that same four-layer defense, with no independent audit behind it. It names no model version beyond the Gemini reference either.
We run a suite of models, predominantly OpenAI with Google and Anthropic models used for the specific jobs they do better, and we A/B test the mix continually. Smaller fast models handle routing and classification, and the larger ones write the reply your customer reads, so the model choice is not a lever you have to price.
What languages does Richpanel work in?
TL;DR: Richpanel publishes no language count and no language list anywhere. The only stated language capability belongs to the Sidekick copilot, which translates for your agents.
There is no published language coverage for the customer-facing AI agent. Richpanel names no count, no list and no per-channel variation anywhere on its own site.
The one language statement it does make sits with Sidekick AI, which is multi-language and translates messages in real time for the human agent. That is agent assistance for your human team.
If a meaningful share of your volume is not in English, make it a scripted part of the demo (three real tickets, in that language).
My AskAI answers in 95 languages, detected per message, and replies in the customer's language by default. On Intercom, Live Translation puts the conversation back into your agent's language as an internal note when a human takes over, then translates the reply forward. A language count is easy to publish, so the check I run on a demo is a ticket that switches language halfway through, watching whether the reply follows the customer.
How secure is Richpanel?
TL;DR: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR with a full DPA, and a HIPAA audit the vendor deliberately refuses to call a certification. No ISO 27001 and no PCI DSS Level 1, and Richpanel says so itself.
The trust page is the document to send your security reviewer. SOC 2 Type II is audited annually, and the Type II designation covers how the controls ran over a period.
GDPR coverage runs through a DPA that includes standard contractual clauses and the UK IDTA, with a documented sub-processor list and a designated data protection officer contact.
HIPAA is handled unusually well. Richpanel was audited by Scrut Automation against NIST SP 800-66 Rev 2 with zero non-compliant findings, and operates as a business associate with an AWS agreement in place.
It still declines to call itself HIPAA-certified, on the grounds that no US body certifies a product as HIPAA-compliant.
The mechanics are standard and stated: AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.2 or better in transit, 99.97% uptime on a rolling twelve-month average, SAML SSO, two-factor authentication and role-based access. Audit logs and permissions sit in the settings area.
Richpanel names four things it does not hold: ISO 27001, ISO/IEC 42001, a CCPA attestation and PCI DSS Level 1. Data residency options and retention periods are unpublished, so ask for both in writing.
For the same conversation on our side, My AskAI holds SOC 2 Type II and is GDPR compliant.
Who is using Richpanel?
TL;DR: DTC ecommerce brands, named and with numbers attached. Ridge, Jones Road Beauty, Aeons and Haus all publish outcomes, and Richpanel says it serves 3,000+ brands.
The case studies put seven named executives on the record. Four of them:
Ridge, with CEO Sean Frank on the record, reports a 70% drop in cost per ticket, roughly $500,000 in annual savings, and CSAT moving from 88% to 96%.
Jones Road Beauty took its CX team from 18 agents to 10 while order volume held or grew. CEO Cody Plofker reports no Black Friday backlog (their busiest trading week of the year).
At Aeons, founded by Dr. Sarah Brewer, the AI sends 63% of all customer messages, at an AI CSAT of 4.39 out of 5 against the human team's 4.33, returning about five full-time roles of capacity.
Head of customer experience Samantha Connors puts Haus at 45% of qualifying closed inbound conversations resolved with no human involved, and 69% of support messages sent by AI.
Richpanel names further customers across its own case-study and product pages, including Karta Ventures, Pela, Pique, Forchics, Paleovalley, Olavita, Lashify, Mott & Bow, Tryfi, Innersense, RoadID, SweetzzzMattress and BGreater. Richpanel puts its install base at 3,000+ brands (its own figure).
Richpanel also publishes its own install rank. On Store Leads' Shopify Plus filter it shows 959 installs, third behind Gorgias on 10,375 and Zendesk on 7,219. On that slice Gorgias is the one to beat.
That is a vendor-selected slice of the market.
On our side, Barn Owl is the closest comparison for this reader. It is a Shopify DTC brand running Gorgias, and the numbers are published in full on our reviews and case studies page.
How much does Richpanel cost?
TL;DR: Two routes, two prices. Direct is $99 a seat a month plus about $0.20 a conversation with a $200 monthly AI minimum. Through Shopify it is $89 a month for PRO plus the same conversation rate, with no minimum stated.
Richpanel is sold two ways, on different terms, and each page shows one route as if it were the whole product.
Route A, buying direct from Richpanel
Two line items, and three seat tiers on a yearly contract: PRO at $69 per agent a month, PRO MAX at $99, and Enterprise quoted. Multiple brands, the extra channels and the deeper analytics sit on PRO MAX, which is the tier I price the rest of this section on. That seat is $99 a month on an annual commitment, $119 billed monthly and $129 on demand.
AI is charged per conversation, and the rate moves with your billing term. Conversations draw down prepaid credits priced at $0.50 on annual, $0.60 on monthly and $0.65 on demand, and the $0.20 a conversation quoted everywhere is the annual number. On every term there is a $200 monthly minimum, billed in $100 blocks.
Unused credits expire after 90 days on annual, or 15 days otherwise (and buying ahead of peak is how teams lose them). Included at no extra charge on this route are the Self-Service Portal, the QA Agent and the Social Media Agent.
Returns and Exchanges is a paid add-on from $99 a month, ecommerce only. All of it is on the official pricing page and the fuller price book.
Route B, installing through the Shopify App Store
Three plans, each with a 14-day free trial and an install button (no sales call anywhere in it). PRO is $89 a month, with $89 per additional user, a cap of two connected stores, and email, phone, chat, Facebook and Instagram.
PRO MAX is $119 a month and adds the SMS channel, the Social Media AI, CSAT surveys and multiple brands. Self Service is $119 a month, with $299 per additional 20,000 orders.
AI conversations are from $0.20 each on every plan, and no monthly AI minimum appears on the listing at all. Richpanel also publishes annual prices here, at $828 a year on PRO and $1,188 a year on PRO MAX.
What 5,000 tickets a month actually costs
Here is the same month priced three ways. The assumption is 5,000 tickets a month, mid-band for a DTC store, and one ticket is treated as one AI conversation on the Richpanel rows and one credit on ours. Every row is priced on the cheapest plan that covers that volume.
Option | Plan priced | The math at 5,000 tickets | Monthly cost |
Richpanel, direct | 10 seats, annual commitment | 10 seats × $99 = $990, plus 5,000 conversations × $0.20 = $1,000 | $1,990 |
Richpanel, Shopify App Store | PRO, 10 users | $89 base + 9 extra users × $89 = $890, plus 5,000 conversations × $0.20 = $1,000 | $1,890 |
My AskAI, on the helpdesk you already run | Pro | $199 base + (5,000 − 1,000 included credits) × $0.12 | $679 |
Read the rows for what they buy, because they are not the same purchase. Richpanel's numbers include the helpdesk itself. Ours is the AI charge on its own, sitting on top of the helpdesk seats you already pay for, so a store shopping for a new helpdesk is comparing a total against a component.
One more asymmetry worth pricing before you compare the totals: Pro includes five team seats, while the other two rows are priced for a ten-agent team. A support team that size needs Scale to cover seats, even though Pro alone already covers this ticket volume.
The direct figure is Richpanel's own worked example for this volume.
The $0.20 rate is calculated on their cheapest reference model (Gemini 2.5 Flash), so a larger model raises it. On the direct route the seat line dominates at small headcount, while the AI line takes over as volume grows.
If your volume is under about 1,200 conversations a month, the direct route stops working on price. The $200 minimum means a small store pays for capacity it never uses. At that size, install through the App Store.
My AskAI charges per ticket, resolved or not, at $0.12 a credit on Pro and $0.10 on Scale, so the bill does not climb as the AI gets better. Our pricing page has the full ladder, the ROI calculator will model your own volume, and the trial is 30 days with every feature unlocked, unlimited tickets and no card. Our post comparing AI customer service pricing models covers the wider category.
Does Richpanel have a free trial?
TL;DR: Yes through the Shopify App Store, which gives you 14 days on any of the three plans with no sales call. No if you buy direct, where the answer is a demo plus a money-back guarantee.
The App Store answer is clean. The listing header reads "From $89/month. Free trial available." All three plans carry a 14-day free trial, and there is an install button where the contact form would be.
Go direct and there is no trial: every button on the Richpanel site books a demo, in which Richpanel builds the agent on your own data while you watch.
In place of a trial the direct route offers five guarantees (four of them pay out in money, the fifth attached to a separate paid add-on):
- The 50%-in-30-days autonomous resolution guarantee, put in writing and paid as a full refund.
- A written guarantee to beat a stacked incumbent's bill by 30%.
- A contract buyout of up to 100% of a remaining term on your existing contract.
- A pre-launch evaluation on your own past tickets, before the agent replies to anyone.
- On the paid Automation Success Kit add-on: a separately marketed guarantee of 30% automation within 60 days, or a full refund.
You still commit before you have touched the product. If you are on Shopify and want to see it working, I would install through the App Store and spend the 14 days.
For comparison, our trial is 30 days with all features unlocked, unlimited tickets and no credit card, and you sign up with a business email.
Is Richpanel worth it?
TL;DR: Worth it for a Shopify or WooCommerce brand doing real volume, whose tickets are mostly actions, and who is ready to switch helpdesk. Not worth it if phone is central, if your current inbox is fine, or if volume is small.
Most of a store's inbox is order status, refunds, returns, cancellations and subscription changes, all of which are actions. Richpanel's actions layer is built for exactly that work.
The economics look cleaner than most of the category to me. With a vendor that stacks a per-resolution charge on top of a per-ticket fee, a successful deployment raises your AI bill while the seat bill stays where it was. Richpanel charges once for the AI and once for the seat, so both lines behave predictably.
Choose Richpanel if:
- You run Shopify or WooCommerce, do 1,000+ conversations a month and have 3+ agents.
- Your inbox is dominated by order status, refunds, returns and subscription changes.
- You are willing to move helpdesk, with the migration work that implies.
- You run multiple brands and want seats and usage pooled at the account level.
Don't choose Richpanel if:
- Phone is a primary support channel, since there is no hosted voice.
- Your current helpdesk works and the only thing you want is AI on top of it.
- You do under a few hundred conversations a month, where the $200 AI floor dominates.
- Your procurement runs on ISO 27001 or PCI DSS Level 1, or a large share of your volume is not in English.
Still comparing the field? Our roundup of the best AI customer service tools for ecommerce covers the category, and there is a Gorgias-specific version for stores already on that helpdesk.
This verdict rests on fourteen things: what Richpanel is, setup, channels, limitations, training sources, features, improvement, resolution rate, model choice, languages, security, customers, cost and the trial. Evidence comes from Richpanel's own product pages and price book, its help center documentation, its Shopify App Store listing, its published case studies, G2 reviews and a Shopify merchant thread on Reddit. Any item Richpanel does not publish stays marked unverified.
The other real option is to keep the helpdesk you have. My AskAI puts an AI agent inside Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Gorgias or HubSpot, so your team keeps the inbox it knows, your history stays put, and the only new line on the bill is the AI. That is the choice a lot of stores make, and Richpanel's own price book rules it out by design.
What are the pros and cons of Richpanel?
Pros
- One bill you can forecast. Seats plus per-conversation AI, with the self-service portal, QA Agent and Social Media Agent included at no extra charge on the direct route.
- Actions the AI can execute. Order lookup, refunds, returns, cancellations and subscription changes all run through deterministic tool calls on live store data.
- A resolution claim you can hold them to. 50% autonomous resolution in 30 days, backed by a full refund and a pre-launch evaluation on your own tickets.
Cons
- The helpdesk comes with the AI, wanted or not. Richpanel states it will not sell ticketing on its own and there is no path to add AI later, so this is a migration decision.
- The AI floor punishes small volume. A $200 monthly minimum means anything under roughly 1,200 conversations pays for capacity it never uses.
- No hosted telephony. Phone runs through Aircall, Dialpad or JustCall on a separate contract, and there are no channel-specific SLA rules yet.
- The documentation is behind the product. One AI article in the help center, covering the assist-side copilot while the marketing sells an autonomous agent.
Richpanel
- Brand: Richpanel Inc
- Rating: 7/10
- In a sentence: A capable ecommerce helpdesk whose AI does the actions that matter to a store, held back by a $200 AI floor, a missing phone channel and documentation that has not kept up.
Seven is where I land, because the product does two things well and asks a lot in return. The actions layer and the included self-service portal are better than most of the field, the guarantee pays out in money, and the pre-launch evaluation on your own tickets is a real quality gate.
The price of entry keeps it off an eight. You replace your helpdesk, you lose the phone channel to a second vendor, and below about 1,200 conversations a month the billing floor makes the math stop working. An eight would need the documentation to catch up and the small-volume floor to go.
If you want the head-to-head as well as the guide, our roundup of the best AI customer service tools for ecommerce scores Richpanel against the rest of the field.
FAQs
What is Richpanel?
Richpanel is a cloud helpdesk for ecommerce with AI agents built into the core of the product. It gives you a shared inbox for your agents, AI that resolves conversations and takes store actions on its own, and a customer-facing self-service portal (included at no charge on the direct route). It is sold as one product, so you cannot buy the ticketing and add the AI later.
What problems does Richpanel solve?
The action-heavy half of an ecommerce inbox. Order status, refunds, returns, cancellations, subscription changes and address changes are all things the AI can execute itself, using live data from Shopify, Recharge, Loop Returns and AfterShip (the order is read at answer time). The self-service portal takes another slice off before a ticket is ever created.
How much does Richpanel cost per month?
It depends which way you buy it. Through the Shopify App Store it starts at $89 a month for the PRO plan, with AI conversations from $0.20 each. Direct it is $99 per seat per month on an annual commitment, plus about $0.20 a conversation with a $200 monthly AI minimum. A 10-agent store doing 5,000 conversations a month lands around $1,990 direct (the vendor's own worked example).
How does Richpanel pricing work?
Two line items in both cases, which are people and AI usage. You pay for seats, and you pay per AI conversation (about $0.20 each on both routes). The direct route has three seat tiers and a $200 monthly AI minimum, while the App Store route has three plans of its own and no stated minimum. The best rates need an annual commitment, and prepaid credits expire after 90 days on annual or 15 days otherwise.
Buying direct | Shopify App Store | |
Plan tiers | PRO, PRO MAX, Enterprise | PRO, PRO MAX, Self Service |
Seats | $69 on PRO, $99 on PRO MAX | $89 a month for PRO, $89 per extra user |
AI conversations | About $0.20 a conversation | From $0.20 each |
Monthly AI minimum | $200, billed in $100 blocks | None stated on the listing |
Free trial | None, a demo and five guarantees | 14 days on all three plans |
Does Richpanel work with Shopify?
Yes, and closely. Shopify is a native integration alongside Recharge, Loop Returns, AfterShip, TikTok Shop, Amazon, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Klaviyo, which is what lets the AI read a real order and run a real refund. Richpanel is also distributed as a Shopify App Store app, which is the only route with a free trial (14 days on any of the three plans).
Is Richpanel a CRM or a helpdesk?
A helpdesk. It runs its own ticketing inbox with macros, views, assignment rules, teams, custom fields and CSAT, and it pulls customer and order context from your store while your system of record stays where it is (Shopify, usually). If a heavy ERP or CRM holds that record today, it keeps holding it.
What does Richpanel's AI actually do?
It resolves conversations end to end and executes actions, in collaborative mode where a human approves each draft or in autonomous mode, chosen per channel. Separately, Sidekick AI assists your human agents by summarizing a conversation, drafting a reply and translating messages (agent-side, inside the inbox). There is also a QA Agent reviewing closed conversations and a Social Media Agent handling comments and DMs.
Does Richpanel have an API?
Yes. The Richpanel developer hub carries the documentation (it sits outside the main help center), and Richpanel is also available as a connector in automation platforms, so you can wire it into other systems without writing code.
What do Richpanel customers say about the AI?
Reviewers on G2 (4.6/5 from 95 reviews) are consistently positive about the automation and the reporting, and one customer reports close to half their tickets being answered through the self-service portal. The recurring criticism is configuration. The automation and self-service setup takes work to get right, and reviewers say the documentation does not cover it well enough. There is a plain counterpoint on the same page:
> "Today we have the smaller package because the AI didn't really work for us." via marcus J., a G2 reviewer (small business), on G2.
What channels does Richpanel cover for customer service?
Email through Gmail, Outlook or IMAP, a web chat widget, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, X and SMS, plus the self-service portal. There is no hosted voice, so phone runs through Aircall, Dialpad or JustCall (a separate contract each). On the Shopify App Store route, SMS and the Social Media AI sit on the PRO MAX plan.
Who is Richpanel, and how big is the company?
Richpanel Inc is an ecommerce helpdesk vendor serving what it describes as 3,000+ brands across DTC ecommerce, SaaS, fitness, education and telco. Its published customers skew heavily to Shopify DTC retail, including Ridge, Jones Road Beauty and Haus (each with published outcomes). Richpanel publishes no revenue figures anywhere on its own site.
Can I add an AI agent to the helpdesk I already have instead?
Yes, and for a lot of teams that is the cheaper decision. My AskAI runs inside Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Gorgias and HubSpot, so your inbox, macros, routing and ticket history all stay as they are and only the AI is new. Third-party agents install as an approved marketplace app. Favor that route: it has been through the helpdesk's own approval process, the helpdesk knows it is there, it is more stable and it is less likely to be pulled.
