A complete guide to the Freshdesk BigCommerce integration

If you run an e-commerce business, you know the drill. Customers have questions, and they want answers now. "Where is my order?" "How do I make a return?" "Is this item in stock?" Answering these questions quickly and accurately is the difference between a happy, loyal customer and a frustrated one-star review.

The problem is, the answers are often scattered. The order details are in your BigCommerce dashboard, and the customer conversation is in your Freshdesk inbox. This means your support team spends their day jumping between tabs, copying and pasting order numbers, and manually piecing together information. It's slow, inefficient, and a perfect recipe for burnout and customer frustration.

That’s where connecting your helpdesk to your e-commerce platform comes in. The native Freshdesk BigCommerce integration is a solid starting point for bringing these two worlds together. In this guide, we'll walk you through how it works, what it does well, and where its limitations lie. Then, we’ll explore how a modern AI layer can pick up where the basic integration leaves off to truly automate your support.

Understanding Freshdesk BigCommerce: What are Freshdesk and BigCommerce?

You wouldn't use a spreadsheet to run your entire online store, right? And you definitely shouldn't rely on a shared email inbox to manage customer support. Using the right tool for the job is essential, and that’s why specialized platforms like Freshdesk and BigCommerce are so popular.

What is Freshdesk in a Freshdesk BigCommerce integration?

Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service tool that helps businesses wrangle all their customer conversations into one organized place. Instead of juggling emails, phone calls, live chats, and social media messages separately, Freshdesk pulls everything into a single ticketing system.

Think of it as a central hub for your support team. They can see every customer interaction, collaborate on tricky tickets, and use built-in automations to sort and assign incoming questions. It’s all about bringing order to the chaos of customer support.

What is BigCommerce in a Freshdesk BigCommerce integration?

BigCommerce is a powerful e-commerce platform that gives you everything you need to build and manage an online store. It’s a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, which is a fancy way of saying they handle all the complicated technical stuff for you. You don't have to worry about servers, security patches, or website uptime.

Instead, you get to focus on what you do best: choosing your products, designing your storefront, marketing to your customers, and processing orders. BigCommerce provides the engine so you can focus on driving the car.

How the Freshdesk BigCommerce integration works

The main way to get Freshdesk and BigCommerce talking to each other is by using an app from the Freshworks Marketplace. These apps are designed to pull your valuable BigCommerce data directly into the Freshdesk interface, giving your agents the context they need without making them switch screens.

The official "BigCommerce Suite" app, built by the Freshworks team, does a few key things:

• See order history at a glance: When an agent opens a ticket, the customer's entire order history from BigCommerce appears right next to the conversation. This means no more awkward back-and-forth asking for an order number. The agent has the full context from the very start.

• Manage orders from the ticket: Agents can perform simple, but crucial, actions like canceling an order or processing a refund directly within Freshdesk. This is a huge time-saver. Every action that doesn't require opening a new tab is a small win that adds up over the day.

• Provide better, faster answers: With all this information in one view, agents can resolve issues more quickly and confidently. They can see what the customer bought, when they bought it, and where it is, leading to a much smoother experience for everyone.

While the marketplace app is the most direct route, it's worth knowing that other connectors exist through services like Zapier. These let you build custom, trigger-based workflows. For example, you could set up a "Zap" so that every new order in BigCommerce automatically creates a ticket in Freshdesk. These can be useful for specific needs, but they often mean managing (and paying for) yet another subscription.

Comparing your Freshdesk BigCommerce integration options

To help you see the differences more clearly, here’s a breakdown of how the different integration methods compare.

Feature	Official Freshworks App	Third-Party Connectors (e.g., Zapier)	Full AI Integration (e.g., eesel AI)
What it does	Shows order data & allows basic actions in Freshdesk	Creates workflows based on triggers (e.g., new order)	Autonomously resolves issues & assists agents
Setup effort	Manual (You'll need API keys and admin access)	Moderate (Requires setting up each individual "Zap")	Minimal (Connects in a few clicks, self-serve)
Type of automation	None (It assists a human agent)	Rule-based (If this happens, do that)	AI-based (Understands what a customer means)
Knowledge sources	Just your BigCommerce data	Not applicable	BigCommerce + all your other knowledge sources
Cost	Free (App is free, but needs a paid Freshdesk plan)	An extra subscription fee	A predictable subscription

The key limitations of the standard Freshdesk BigCommerce integration

Connecting Freshdesk and BigCommerce is a great first step, but the standard integration is more of a helpful assistant than a true problem-solver. It makes your human agents more efficient, but it doesn't actually automate the work and can introduce some new headaches as your business grows.

The Freshdesk BigCommerce setup is manual and a bit technical

Getting the integration running isn't a simple, one-click process. You have to roll up your sleeves and dive into your BigCommerce admin panel to generate things like API keys, client IDs, and access tokens. Then, you need to carefully copy and paste them into the right fields in Freshdesk.

For anyone who isn't a developer, this can be confusing and a little intimidating. One wrong character and the whole thing won't work. It’s a sharp contrast to modern tools built for ease of use. For example, eesel AI offers a self-serve, one-click integration with helpdesks like Freshdesk. You connect your accounts and get going in minutes without needing to schedule a sales call or bother your engineering team.

A reactive, not proactive, Freshdesk BigCommerce workflow

The native integration is built to show information to a human. It puts the data on the screen, but it can't act on that data. An agent still has to read the ticket, look at the order details, figure out the right answer, and type out a reply.

This creates a bottleneck. Your team can only answer questions as fast as they can type. An AI agent, however, can be set up to access BigCommerce data on its own and autonomously answer your most common e-commerce questions, 24/7. Questions like "Where is my package?" or "Have you processed my refund?" can be handled instantly, without anyone needing to lift a finger.

Your company knowledge stays siloed

The standard integration only bridges the gap between two systems: Freshdesk and BigCommerce. It has no idea about your detailed shipping policies saved in a Google Doc, your return instructions tucked away in a Confluence page, or the product FAQs on your website.

This means your agents are still hunting for information across different tabs and documents. True automation is only possible when your AI has access to all of your company knowledge. This is a core strength of a tool like eesel AI, which connects to over 100 different sources to give both your AI and human agents the complete picture.

The Freshdesk BigCommerce automation is rigid and rule-based

Freshdesk has some great native automation for routing and tagging tickets, but it relies on strict, predefined rules. For example, you can create a rule that says, "if a ticket subject contains the word 'refund,' assign it to the billing team." This is useful, but it’s fragile because it can’t understand the nuances of how real people talk.

What if a customer writes, "I need to send this back," or "This wasn't what I expected, can I get my money back?" A simple keyword-based rule would miss these completely. An AI-powered tool, on the other hand, understands the intent behind the words. It knows that all three of those questions are about the same thing and can correctly route or even fully resolve the ticket, no matter how the customer phrases it.

Boosting your Freshdesk BigCommerce workflow with an AI agent

The good news is you don't have to scrap your current setup to get the benefits of intelligent automation. The modern approach is to add an AI layer that works with the tools you already use, enhancing your helpdesk without forcing you into a massive, painful migration project.

Automate your frontline e-commerce support

An AI agent, like the one from eesel AI, can be configured with custom actions that connect directly to your BigCommerce store. This unlocks the ability to autonomously handle the high-volume, repetitive questions that take up most of your team's day, such as:

• Looking up live order statuses.

• Answering questions about shipping times.

• Checking on the progress of a refund.

• Providing customers with their tracking numbers.

This frees up your human agents to focus their brainpower on the complex, sensitive, or high-value conversations where a human touch really matters.

Unify BigCommerce data with your knowledge base for better support

As we’ve discussed, an effective AI needs to learn from everything, not just order data. eesel AI is designed to be a central brain for your company. It analyzes your past Freshdesk tickets to learn your brand's tone of voice, scans your public help center for official policies, and connects to your internal wikis (like Notion or Confluence) and shared drives. This allows it to give complete, consistent, and contextual answers that a simple data lookup could never provide.

Go live in minutes and test your automation with confidence

One of the biggest fears with launching automation has always been the risk. What if it gives the wrong answer? How do I know it will work? Modern AI platforms have solved this with powerful, risk-free testing environments.

With eesel AI, you can use a simulation mode to test your AI on thousands of your real past tickets. It shows you exactly how the AI would have responded, giving you a precise forecast of its performance and automation rate. This lets you fine-tune its behavior and roll it out with total confidence, knowing exactly how it will perform before it ever talks to a live customer.

Freshdesk pricing plans

To use any apps from the Freshworks Marketplace, including the BigCommerce integration, you'll need to be on a paid Freshdesk plan. Here’s a quick overview of their pricing.

Plan	Price (Billed Annually)	Key Features for Integration
Free	$0 for up to 10 agents	Basic Ticketing, Knowledge Base (No Marketplace Apps)
Growth	$15/agent/month	Automation, Custom Views, Marketplace Apps
Pro	$49/agent/month	Custom Roles, Advanced Reporting, Round-Robin Routing
Enterprise	$79/agent/month	Skill-based Routing, Sandbox, Audit Log

Note: AI features, like their Freddy AI, are usually included as add-ons or are part of the higher-tier Pro and Enterprise plans.

The future of Freshdesk BigCommerce support is connected and smart

So, let's wrap it up. The native Freshdesk BigCommerce integration is a genuinely useful tool. It gives your support agents valuable customer context right inside their helpdesk, which means less tab-switching and more efficient work.

However, it’s a solution that helps humans work better; it doesn't automate the work itself. The setup can be technical, and it doesn't solve the bigger problems of automating responses or unifying knowledge from all your company's different apps and documents. For any e-commerce business that's serious about scaling its support and delivering a top-tier customer experience, the next step is to layer an intelligent AI platform on top of your existing tools.

Get true e-commerce automation for Freshdesk BigCommerce

eesel AI is the solution that bridges the gaps left by basic integrations. It connects seamlessly with the tools you already know and love, unifies all your scattered knowledge into a single source of truth, and uses advanced AI to automate resolutions, not just display data.

Ready to move beyond basic integrations? See how eesel AI can automate your e-commerce support on Freshdesk in minutes. You can book a demo or start for free.