Gorgias AI: A full breakdown of its features, limitations, and a better alternative

If you're running an e-commerce store, the name Gorgias has probably popped up more than a few times. It’s earned a reputation as the helpdesk of choice for Shopify brands, with big promises of automating your customer support and boosting sales. For a lot of businesses, it does a pretty good job, especially in the early days.

But then your business starts to grow. You might feel a few growing pains. That ticket-based pricing model suddenly feels a bit shaky, the AI isn’t quite as moldable as you’d like, and getting it all to work just so is eating up time you just don't have.

This is an honest look at Gorgias AI. We’re going to walk through what it does well, where it stumbles, and introduce you to a more powerful and adaptable alternative that works with the tools you’re already comfortable with.

What is Gorgias AI?

At its heart, Gorgias is a customer service helpdesk made specifically for e-commerce. Its AI isn't just one magic button but a whole set of tools built to handle the chaos of online retail. You can think of it as a new assistant who's a natural at understanding the language of online shopping.

Gorgias AI is pretty good at figuring out what a customer actually wants. It can tell the difference between a simple "Where is my order?" and a frustrated message about a damaged product. This lets it fire off automated responses using templates (which they call "Macros") and pull in customer details from platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce. The deep integration is its main draw, letting your agents do things like edit an order or issue a refund without ever leaving the conversation.

Gorgias talks about its AI philosophy in four steps: teaching the AI about your brand, automating tickets, watching how it does, and then giving it feedback. The idea is to make the AI feel like a new hire. But as we'll get into, this new team member has some quirks you should know about.

A deep dive into Gorgias AI's features

To be fair, Gorgias gets a lot of things right, especially for the audience it's built for. Before we get into its shortcomings, let’s look at what makes it so popular.

Centralized support with deep e-commerce tie-ins

Gorgias pulls all your customer chats, emails, and social media comments into one clean dashboard. That’s fairly standard stuff for a helpdesk these days, but its secret sauce is how deeply it connects with e-commerce platforms.

Its integration with tools like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento is what sets it apart. When an agent opens a ticket, they see a sidebar loaded with customer data. They can view a person's entire order history, process a refund, or update a shipping address with a couple of clicks. It’s a huge time-saver and puts an end to the endless tab-switching that drives support teams crazy.

A screenshot of the Gorgias dashboard, a key aspect of Gorgias AI features, showing its deep e-commerce tie-ins, though some users may face limitations and seek an alternative.

Automation that works (most of the time)

This is where Gorgias AI tries to be the star of the show. The automation is built on a few core ideas:

• Rules: These are the "if-then" instructions that automate repetitive work. For example, you can set up a rule that says, "If an email contains the phrase 'return policy,' automatically tag it as a 'Return Request' and send it to the returns specialist."

• Macros: Think of these as supercharged canned responses. They aren't just blocks of text; they can pull in live data, like a customer's name or a tracking number ("{{order.tracking_number}}"), to make the automated message feel a bit more personal.

• Intent Detection: The AI scans incoming messages to figure out what a customer is trying to do. It can spot common requests like "order-status" or "shipping-issue" and even gauge the customer's mood (positive, neutral, negative) to help your team decide which tickets to tackle first.

Gorgias’s rule-based automation is a central feature, but its limitations may lead users to seek a more flexible alternative to Gorgias AI.

Self-service and revenue-focused reporting

Gorgias also provides tools to let customers find their own answers. You can set up a help center or a chat widget that fields common questions and allows people to track their own orders. This can take a good chunk of simple, repetitive tickets off your team's plate.

The reporting is where it really leans into its e-commerce focus. The analytics go beyond the usual support metrics. You can actually track how much revenue is generated from support conversations or see how well your proactive chat pop-ups are converting browsers into buyers. It's a clever way to position your support team as a profit center instead of just a cost.

Key limitations of Gorgias AI

For all its strengths, Gorgias AI has some pretty big drawbacks that tend to surface right when your business starts to take off. Here are the ones you’ll feel the most.

The unpredictable, ticket-based pricing

Let's talk about the elephant in the room. Gorgias charges you based on the number of "billable tickets" your team handles each month. A billable ticket is basically any conversation that an agent or an automated rule responds to.

This model can become a real headache for budgeting. Your ticket volume can skyrocketing during a holiday sale or a new product launch, and your bill will shoot up right along with it. In a way, you get penalized for your own success. Go over your plan's ticket limit, and you’ll get hit with overage fees, which makes forecasting your monthly costs a guessing game.

Here’s a quick look at what that looks like:

Plan	Monthly Price (Annual)	Included Tickets/Month	Overage Cost
Starter	$10	50	+$0.40 / ticket
Basic	$50	300	+$40 / 100 tickets
Pro	$300	2,000	+$36 / 100 tickets
Advanced	$750	5,000	+$36 / 100 tickets
Source: Gorgias Pricing Page. Note: AI features may require add-ons or higher-tier plans.

Limited AI customization and knowledge sources

While the AI is decent at handling basic e-commerce questions, it's not very adaptable. You can't really give it a unique personality or a specific tone of voice beyond a few simple settings. The automation engine is powerful, but it’s also rigid, locking you into its specific way of doing things with rules and macros.

An even bigger problem is where the AI gets its information. It mostly learns from your helpdesk history, macros, and connected e-commerce stores. It struggles to tap into all the other places where your team's real knowledge is stored, like internal wikis in Confluence, project specs in Notion, or step-by-step guides in Google Docs. This means the AI’s answers can feel a bit thin and often lack the nuance that comes from your team's collective experience.

A steep learning curve and a closed ecosystem

Despite its clean look, many people find Gorgias to be surprisingly complicated under the hood. To really make it work for you, you have to block out a good amount of time to learn its rules engine and build out your workflows. For a busy team that just needs a tool to start solving problems today, that's a pretty big ask.

And its heavy focus on Shopify is a double-edged sword. It's fantastic if your whole operation lives and breathes Shopify, but it can feel restrictive if you use other platforms or if your company knowledge is spread across different tools.

An alternative to Gorgias AI: eesel AI

So, what do you do when you start hitting these walls? This is where a tool like eesel AI offers a different path. Instead of making you rip out your entire helpdesk, eesel acts as a smart AI layer that connects to the tools you already have, whether that’s Gorgias itself, Zendesk, or Freshdesk. It’s built to solve the very problems that growing teams on Gorgias run into.

Go live in minutes with a simple setup

You can forget about lengthy onboarding calls or being forced into a sales demo just to see the product. eesel AI is designed to be completely self-serve. You can connect your helpdesk and other knowledge sources with just a few clicks and have a working AI agent ready in minutes, not months.

What gives you real peace of mind is the simulation mode. Before the AI ever speaks to a live customer, you can run it on thousands of your past tickets. This gives you a clear, data-driven report on how it would have performed, showing you its potential resolution rate and how much it could save you. It’s the best way to roll out AI without any of the usual anxiety.

eesel AI’s simulation mode offers a risk-free way to test performance, addressing the limitations of Gorgias AI and providing a reliable alternative.::

Unify all your knowledge, not just your helpdesk

eesel AI directly tackles Gorgias's biggest knowledge problem. It doesn't just learn from your help center articles; it pulls in knowledge from everywhere your team works. You can connect it to your Confluence spaces, Google Docs, Notion pages, you name it.

More importantly, it learns from the solutions hidden in your past support tickets. It captures that "tribal knowledge" your team has built over years of solving real problems. This helps the AI give answers that aren't just technically correct but also reflect how your best agents actually get things done.

eesel AI connects to multiple knowledge sources, overcoming Gorgias AI features limitations and offering a more knowledgeable alternative.::

Get total control with a customizable workflow engine

With eesel AI, you get the fine-tuned control that Gorgias is missing. A simple prompt editor lets you define the AI's exact persona, tone of voice, and personality. Want it to be witty and informal? Or straightforward and professional? You decide.

You can also create custom actions that allow the AI to do much more than just answer questions. It can look up live order information from any system, update ticket fields in your helpdesk, route conversations to the right department, and escalate tricky issues based on the rules you set. You’re in the driver's seat.

Enjoy transparent and predictable pricing

eesel AI's pricing is straightforward and predictable. Unlike Gorgias, there are no per-resolution fees or surprise bills at the end of the month. The plans are based on a flat number of AI interactions, so your costs stay stable, and you aren't punished for having a successful sales season.

Plan	Effective Price/mo (Annual)	AI Interactions/mo	Key Features
Team	$239	Up to 1,000	Train on docs, Copilot for help desk, Slack integration.
Business	$639	Up to 3,000	Train on past tickets, custom AI Actions, bulk simulation.
Custom	Contact Sales	Unlimited	Advanced actions, multi-agent orchestration, custom integrations.
Source: eesel AI Pricing Page. All core products like AI Agent, Copilot, and Chatbot are included in every plan.

The verdict on Gorgias AI

Gorgias AI has a solid set of automation tools that can be a great starting point for e-commerce businesses dipping their toes into AI. But as your company grows, its rigid structure, unpredictable pricing, and walled-off knowledge base can become serious growing pains.

For teams that need more flexibility, control, and a predictable budget, eesel AI is the smarter path forward. It enhances your existing helpdesk instead of replacing it, giving you a more powerful, customizable, and cost-effective AI solution. It connects to all your company knowledge, learns from your top agents, and gives you the tools to automate support your way.

Ready to see what a truly flexible AI support agent can do for you? Start your free eesel AI trial and get it running in minutes.