A complete 2025 guide to the Gorgias Instagram DM integration

If you're running an ecommerce brand, you know Instagram is way more than just a place for pretty pictures. It's where customer service happens. People slide into your DMs asking about sizing, comment on your posts wondering about their order, and tag you in stories to show off their new stuff. It’s a constant stream of messages that can easily get out of hand.

This is where a tool like the Gorgias Instagram DM integration is supposed to help. The idea is simple: get all those conversations in one place to make life easier. But does it actually work as advertised?

In this guide, we'll walk you through everything you need to know about connecting Gorgias to your Instagram. We'll cover what it does, how to set it up, how much it costs, and, most importantly, where its limits are. We'll also talk about what to do when you outgrow its basic features and need to bring in a dedicated AI to handle the volume.

What is the Gorgias Instagram DM integration?

Alright, let's start with the basics. Gorgias is a customer service helpdesk made specifically for e-commerce shops. Its main job is to pull all of your customer chats from email, live chat, SMS, and social media into one dashboard so you're not juggling a dozen different apps.

The Gorgias Instagram DM integration is the piece that connects your Instagram Business account to that central dashboard. It takes every interaction, DMs, story mentions, comments on posts and ads, and turns it into a support ticket.

The big win here is pretty obvious: your team can see and reply to Instagram messages right next to everything else. No more passing a phone around the office or trying to keep track of conversations on a tiny screen. It cleans up your workflow and gives you a full picture of every customer's history.

A screenshot of the Gorgias dashboard, showing how different customer tickets, including those from a Gorgias Instagram DM, are organized in one place.

Setting up the Gorgias Instagram DM integration

Getting this integration running is mostly straightforward, but you do have to jump through a few hoops on both Instagram and Gorgias.

First things first, you'll need an Instagram Business account that's already linked to a Facebook Business page. You also need to have Admin, Editor, or Moderator access on that Facebook page to give Gorgias permission to connect.

Here’s a quick rundown of the process:

1. Allow Message Access in Instagram: This is the most important step, and it's easy to miss. On your Instagram profile, go to "Settings -> Privacy -> Messages". You should see an option for "Allow Access to Messages." Make sure that's toggled on. If it's not, Gorgias won't be able to see your DMs.

2. Connect Through Facebook in Gorgias: Log into your Gorgias account and find your Facebook integration settings. Click the "Log in With Facebook" button. A window will pop up asking you to grant Gorgias permission to access your info.

3. Pick Your Page and Channels: Once you've logged in, Gorgias will show you a list of your Facebook pages. Choose the right one. Then, you’ll see a bunch of checkboxes for different channels like Facebook Messenger and comments. You’ll want to tick the boxes for "Direct messages" and "Story mentions" for Instagram.

4. Save and Sync: Hit save, and that's it. Gorgias will start pulling your Instagram interactions into your helpdesk as new tickets.

While the steps are simple, getting the permissions just right between Facebook and Instagram can sometimes be a headache. It's a common stumbling block, so if things aren't syncing, that's usually the first place to look.

Key features and use cases for the Gorgias Instagram DM integration

Once you're all set up, the integration pulls in a few different types of Instagram interactions and organizes them into tickets for your team.

• Direct Messages (DMs): This is the main event. You can read and reply to all your private customer messages without ever leaving Gorgias.

• Story Mentions: Anytime a customer tags your brand in their story, it pops up as a ticket. You can reply to the mention directly from Gorgias, which then starts a new DM conversation.

• Post & Ad Comments: You can also see and respond to comments on your regular posts and your ads. A neat little trick here is the ability to reply to a public comment with a private DM, which is great for handling sensitive issues like a shipping problem.

To help you manage all these new tickets, Gorgias gives you two main automation tools: Macros and Rules.

Macros are just saved replies. Think of them as templates for the questions you get all the time, like "Where's my order?" or a quick "Thanks for the shoutout!" for story mentions. They save your agents a lot of repetitive typing.

Rules are your basic "if this happens, then do that" automations. You can set them up to do simple things like tag tickets that contain certain words. For example, a clothing store could create a Rule that automatically tags any story mention with "UGC" and sends it to the marketing team. Another Rule could look for words like "broken" or "refund" in a DM, automatically tag it as "Urgent," and move it to the front of the support queue.

A screenshot showing the 'if-then' logic used to create automation Rules in the Gorgias Instagram DM integration.

Limitations and challenges of the Gorgias Instagram DM integration

Having all your Instagram messages in one place is a big improvement, for sure. But as your brand grows and the DMs start piling up, you’ll pretty quickly hit the ceiling of what the built-in tools can do.

Here are a few of the main challenges you'll likely run into:

1. Platform Restrictions: Gorgias has to play by Meta's rules, which come with some limitations. One of the biggest is the 7-day reply window. If a customer messages you and you don't get back to them within a week, that conversation is locked. You can't reply to it through Gorgias anymore. The API can also be a bit finicky with certain media types, so if a customer sends you a Reel, it might not show up properly in the ticket.

2. Very Basic Automation: Gorgias's Rules are fine for simple, keyword-based tasks, but they aren't actually smart. They can tag a ticket or send a templated response if they spot a certain word, but they can't understand the nuance of a real conversation. They can't look up a live order status in Shopify, figure out if an item is eligible for a return based on your policy, or grasp what a customer really wants beyond a few simple keywords.

3. Siloed Knowledge: The automation inside Gorgias is stuck in its own little world. It can use information from your Gorgias help center or past tickets, but it can't see anything else. If you keep your detailed product information in a Google Doc, your return policies in Notion, or your technical guides in Confluence, the automation has no idea it exists. This means your agents are still stuck hunting for answers or escalating tickets that a smarter AI could have easily handled.

4. It's All Reactive: The integration only works one way. You can only respond to people who have messaged you or commented on your posts. You can't use it to start a new DM conversation with a follower, which limits any chances for proactive customer service.

Adding a smarter AI layer to your Gorgias Instagram DM workflow

When you get to the point where basic automation just isn't cutting it anymore, you don't have to scrap your whole setup. The next move is to add a layer of real intelligence on top of it.

This is exactly what a tool like eesel AI is for. It's an AI platform that connects directly to the tools you already use, including Gorgias, to handle complex support questions and automate entire workflows.

Go beyond simple rules with a real workflow engine for your Gorgias Instagram DM

Gorgias Rules are stuck with simple, predefined actions. In contrast, eesel AI's AI Agent is built for real, back-and-forth conversations. It can figure out what a customer is asking and then take specific actions that Gorgias's native tools can't.

For instance, an eesel AI agent can:

• Look up live order information from Shopify and give a customer an up-to-the-minute update on their package.

• Check your return policy against a customer's order date to see if they can get a refund.

• Triage incoming tickets with much higher accuracy because it understands the actual request, not just a few words.

• When a human is needed, it can escalate the conversation to the right agent with a full summary of what's happened so far.

Bring all your knowledge together for better Gorgias Instagram DM answers

The "siloed knowledge" problem is a huge hurdle for good automation. eesel AI gets around this by connecting to all of your company's information, not just what lives inside Gorgias.

You can hook it up to your help center and past tickets, of course, but you can also connect it to Google Docs, Confluence, Notion, PDFs, and pretty much anywhere else you store information. This gives the AI a complete understanding of your business. So when a customer asks a tricky question about product ingredients or a specific policy in an Instagram DM, the AI can pull the right answer instantly, cutting down on escalations.

Get started in minutes and test your Gorgias Instagram DM setup first

The idea of setting up an enterprise-grade AI might sound like a huge project, but eesel AI is designed to be completely self-serve. You can sign up and connect it to your Gorgias account in a few minutes, without having to sit through a sales call.

Even better, you can test it all out risk-free using eesel AI's simulation mode. Before the AI ever talks to a real customer, you can run it on thousands of your past Instagram DM tickets. It will show you exactly how it would have replied to each one, giving you a clear forecast of how much it can automate and how well it will perform. This lets you get everything just right before you flip the switch.

How Gorgias pricing works for the Instagram DM integration

It's important to get a handle on Gorgias's pricing because it's based on how many tickets you handle, and the AI features often come with their own separate costs. This can make your monthly bill a bit of a moving target, especially as your Instagram DMs grow.

Their pricing is based on a certain number of "billable tickets" each month. The interactions that their AI handles, which they call "AI Agent resolutions," are usually a separate line item with their own limits and overage fees.

Here's a look at their plans:

This is a big difference from eesel AI's pricing model, which is a flat, predictable monthly fee based on your total number of conversations. There are no surprise per-resolution charges, which makes it a lot easier to budget and grow without getting dinged for being successful.

Automate your Gorgias Instagram DM conversations

The Gorgias Instagram DM integration is a perfectly good starting point. It does a decent job of pulling all your social media chats into one place and taming some of the chaos that comes with a popular Instagram account.

But for brands that are growing fast, you will eventually outgrow it. Its built-in automation is too basic, and its knowledge is trapped within its own platform. You'll end up spending more time managing conversations instead of reducing the number of them in the first place.

That's when it makes sense to step up to a real AI and automation platform. eesel AI is the logical next step. It enhances the tools you already have to provide smart, automated support. It helps your team stop just managing conversations and start resolving them instantly, which saves a ton of time and leads to happier customers on one of your most important channels.

Ready to see how many of your Gorgias Instagram DMs you could actually automate? Start your free eesel AI trial or book a demo to see how the simulation mode works with your own data.