Understanding Gorgias AI flows and order management: A complete guide

If you're running an ecommerce store, your support inbox is probably a battlefield. It's a constant stream of the same questions over and over: "Where's my order?", "How do I start a return?", "What are your shipping costs?". You're trying to answer them all quickly while also giving each customer a great experience. It’s a lot to handle.

Gorgias is a popular helpdesk for online stores for a reason, and its built-in automation tools, Flows and Order Management, are presented as the main fix for inbox chaos. The idea is to let customers find answers on their own, deflecting common questions before an agent ever has to see them.

But what happens when those tools aren't enough? This guide gives you an honest look at Gorgias AI flows and order management. We’ll cover what they do well, what their features are, and more importantly, the real-world limits that growing teams eventually hit. We’ll also show you how to move past those limits with a smarter, genuinely conversational AI.

What are Gorgias AI flows and order management?

Before we get into the weeds, let's quickly define what these two features are. Think of them as the one-two punch Gorgias uses for self-service, working together to handle the most frequent customer questions.

A closer look at flows

Gorgias Flows are basically interactive Q&A guides. Instead of typing a question, a customer clicks through a series of buttons, following a decision-tree conversation you've designed. You map out these conversational paths using a visual "Flow builder," setting up predefined answers to predictable questions.

You can put these automated chats on your website's chat widget, your help center, and your contact form. The whole point is to guide a shopper to an answer without an agent having to get involved.

A closer look at order management

Gorgias Order Management is a self-service portal where customers can manage simple post-purchase tasks themselves. It’s a handy feature, but there’s a small catch: it’s built to work only with Shopify stores and you need an active Gorgias Automate subscription to use it.

Inside the portal, customers can:

• Track the real-time status of an order.

• Start a return request.

• Submit a cancellation request.

• Report common problems, like a damaged item.

Key features and use cases for Gorgias AI flows and order management

To be fair, for the right kind of tasks, these tools can get the job done. They provide a basic level of automation that can definitely lighten your team's workload. Here's where they tend to work best.

Automating simple questions

Flows are at their best when dealing with straightforward, high-volume questions where you can predict the customer's path. It's like a smarter FAQ page.

• Product Recommendations: You can build a little quiz with a Flow. A skincare brand, for instance, might ask, "What's your main skin concern?" and provide buttons for "Dryness," "Acne," or "Fine Lines" to point them to the right product.

• Sizing Guides: An apparel store can use a Flow to help customers find their fit by asking about their measurements, which helps cut down on returns.

• Policy Questions: You can provide instant answers to basic questions about shipping, returns, or warranties. This saves your agents from typing out the same reply for the hundredth time.

Letting customers help themselves

This is where Gorgias automation really delivers, especially for Shopify brands. It's aimed squarely at deflecting those constant post-purchase questions.

• Track Order: It syncs directly with Shopify to give customers a live look at where their order is. This feature alone can dramatically reduce the number of "Where is my order?" (WISMO) tickets.

• Request Return/Cancellation: An agent still needs to approve these, but the portal lets customers get the process started on their own. It streamlines the first step and collects all the info you need, which saves a ton of time.

• Report an Issue: Instead of getting a vague email like "my order's wrong," customers are guided to report specific issues. This gives your team clear, actionable information right from the start.

The limitations of relying solely on Gorgias AI flows and order management

Gorgias's tools are a decent starting point, but they have a clear ceiling. As your business grows and customer questions get more complicated, you'll start to feel the pinch of a system that runs on strict rules instead of actual understanding.

They aren't really conversational

Here’s the biggest problem with Flows: they aren't real conversations. They are interactive checklists that look like a chat. A customer must follow the exact path you built, clicking the buttons you decided on. If their question is a little different, or if they have a follow-up, they're stuck. They hit a dead end and have to wait for an agent anyway. The system can't understand typos, slang, or the messiness of how people actually talk.

A truly conversational tool like eesel AI is different. It understands what a customer wants based on what they type, in their own words. It can handle nuanced follow-up questions, ask for more details if needed, and carry on a natural back-and-forth. This flexibility allows it to solve a much wider range of problems that would leave a button-based Flow completely stumped.

They are stuck with knowledge inside Gorgias

Gorgias Flows are built by hand, and they only know what you manually type into them or what's in your Gorgias Help Center. But let's be real, where does your company's important information actually live? It's probably scattered everywhere, in Google Docs, Confluence pages, spreadsheets, and product guides. Gorgias's built-in tools can't touch any of that.

Even worse, they can't access the most valuable knowledge source you have: your past support tickets. All those perfect answers your best agents have written over the years are just sitting there, unused.

This is where eesel AI makes a huge difference. It connects and unifies all your scattered information instantly. It plugs into your existing documents and, most importantly, trains on your historical Gorgias tickets. It learns your brand's voice and finds the best solutions your team has already used to solve new tickets on its own.

Actions are limited and hard to customize

Gorgias automation is built for Shopify, and it handles that connection well. But what if you need to do something in another system, like check inventory in your warehouse software or update a subscription in Recharge? With Gorgias, that usually means you need a developer to build custom integrations.

This creates a serious bottleneck. Your support team knows exactly what they want to automate, but they have to wait in line for a developer to build it. It slows everything down and keeps useful automation out of reach for the people who need it most.

In contrast, eesel AI gives your team full control with a simple workflow engine. Your support agents can easily set up custom actions to look up order details, process a refund, or update customer info in pretty much any third-party system that has an API, all without having to write a line of code.

A better way to automate: Upgrading with eesel AI

If you're hitting the ceiling with Gorgias's native tools, you don't need to switch helpdesks. You just need to give your current one a brain. eesel AI is designed to be an intelligent layer that turns your existing Gorgias setup into a genuine automation powerhouse.

Moving from simple rules to smart conversations

The difference is pretty straightforward: Gorgias is based on rules, while eesel is conversational. eesel’s AI Agent plugs directly into your Gorgias helpdesk and acts like a new member of your team. It reads incoming tickets, figures out what the customer is asking for, and provides complete, helpful answers. If it needs to, it can even perform actions in your other tools to resolve the issue completely.

Test with confidence before you launch

When you build a Flow in Gorgias, you’re mostly guessing. You map out a path and hope it covers what customers need, but you have no real way of knowing how well it will work until you push it live and see what happens.

This is probably the single biggest difference with eesel AI. Our simulation mode lets you test your entire setup on thousands of your actual, historical Gorgias tickets. You get a data-backed forecast of your automation rate and can see exactly how the AI would have responded to past questions. This allows you to fine-tune everything before a single customer ever interacts with it. It takes all the guesswork and risk out of the implementation.

Get set up in minutes, not months

Building out a complex web of Flows in Gorgias to cover every possible question is a slow, manual chore. Every time a product or policy changes, you have to go back in and edit multiple different paths.

eesel AI is built to be incredibly easy to use. You can connect your Gorgias account with a click. Within minutes, it starts learning from your past tickets, help center, and any other knowledge sources you've connected. You can have a smart, functional AI agent ready to go in less time than it takes to build one complicated Flow.

Gorgias AI flows and order management pricing explained

To make the right call, you need to know what it costs. Gorgias's pricing is based on the number of "billable tickets" you handle each month, not how many agents you have.

It's also worth noting that their AI Agent is an add-on. The cost is based on the number of resolutions it fully automates. This pay-per-resolution model can make your bills unpredictable, especially during busy seasons like Black Friday. A sudden jump in automated tickets could lead to a surprise on your next invoice. In contrast, eesel AI offers clear, predictable pricing with no fees per resolution.

Here’s a quick breakdown of Gorgias's plans:

Plan	Monthly Price (Billed Monthly)	Included Helpdesk Tickets	AI Agent Resolution Cost
Starter	$10	50	$1.00 / resolution
Basic	$60	300	$0.90 / resolution
Pro	$360	2,000	$0.90 / resolution
Advanced	$900	5,000	$0.90 / resolution
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	$0.90 / resolution

Note: This pricing is based on public information from late 2024 and could change. AI resolutions are billed on top of the helpdesk tickets they use.

Move beyond Gorgias AI flows and order management to intelligent support

Gorgias AI flows and order management are a solid starting point for any ecommerce brand looking to get into automation. They do a good job of deflecting the simplest, most common questions, especially for businesses on Shopify.

But as you scale, you'll almost certainly find that their rigid, rule-based nature, siloed knowledge, and lack of good testing tools create a frustrating bottleneck. You just can't build a modern, top-tier support experience on a system of predefined buttons.

eesel AI is the natural next step for teams that are ready to get serious about automation. It transforms your existing Gorgias helpdesk by adding a layer of real intelligence. By holding natural conversations, unifying all your company knowledge, and letting you test everything risk-free with powerful simulations, it’s the clear path forward for anyone who wants to build truly intelligent support.

Take the next step in automation beyond Gorgias AI flows and order management

Ready to see what real AI automation can do inside Gorgias? Connect your helpdesk and simulate how eesel AI can resolve your tickets in just a few minutes. Start your free trial today.