An overview of Gorgias live chat for ecommerce in 2025

If you’re running an ecommerce brand, you've almost certainly heard of Gorgias. It’s one of the go-to helpdesks designed specifically for online stores, especially those on Shopify. One of its most talked-about features is the Gorgias live chat, which promises to turn your website into more than just a storefront, it aims to make it a place for real conversations.

But what does it actually do? How much does it set you back? And is it really the right choice for your team as you start to grow? We’re going to walk through everything you need to know about the Gorgias live chat feature, covering what it can do, how to get it running, what the price tag looks like, and some important limitations to keep in mind.

What is Gorgias live chat?

At its heart, Gorgias live chat is a real-time messaging tool that’s built right into the Gorgias helpdesk. It lets you chat directly with visitors on your website, answering questions and helping them out without them ever having to navigate away from a product page.

What sets it apart from a generic chat app is how deeply it connects with ecommerce platforms. Every chat isn't just a fleeting conversation; it’s a ticket that lands in the same dashboard as your emails, social media messages, and texts. It’s built for direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands on platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento that are tired of switching between a dozen different apps just to talk to their customers.

Key features and capabilities of Gorgias live chat

Gorgias crams a lot of ecommerce-specific smarts into its chat tool. Let's break down what you can actually do with it.

Deep ecommerce integration with Shopify

This is really where Gorgias pulls away from the pack. The chat widget isn’t just a pop-up window; it’s wired directly into your Shopify store’s backend. When a customer opens a chat, your support agents see a complete profile of who they’re talking to. Their entire order history, real-time shipping info, and any past conversations are all there in a tidy sidebar.

This context means agents can do more than just answer questions. They can take action, like editing an order, processing a refund, or checking on a subscription, all from within the chat. It’s a huge time-saver and makes for a much less frustrating experience for the customer.

A view of the Gorgias live chat dashboard showing the deep Shopify integration, with customer order history and details available next to the conversation.

Omnichannel ticket management

Every single live chat you have automatically becomes a ticket inside the Gorgias helpdesk. This means your team is looking at one single queue that includes chats, emails from your contact form, DMs from Instagram, and texts to your support line.

It prevents conversations from getting lost in the shuffle and gives your agents a consistent workflow, no matter where the customer decided to reach out from.

Automation and basic AI features

To help your team keep up, Gorgias has a few layers of automation. You can create "Rules" that automatically tag or assign tickets based on keywords, and build "Macros" (basically, canned responses) to answer the same questions over and over with one click.

Gorgias also has an "AI Agent" that can step in for common, repetitive queries like "Where is my order?" or requests to initiate a return. It works by pulling information from a help center that you have to build within Gorgias. This is handy for the simple stuff, but it hits its limits pretty fast. The AI only knows what's inside the Gorgias ecosystem. If the real, detailed answers are in a Google Doc, a Confluence page, or a random Slack thread, the AI is completely blind to it. That just means more tickets get kicked over to your human agents.

An example of the Gorgias AI Agent automatically handling a 'Where is my order?' query using integrated ecommerce data.

Proactive chat campaigns for sales

Beyond just reacting to questions, Gorgias live chat lets you get ahead of them. You can set up "Chat Campaigns," which are just automated messages that pop up based on what a visitor is doing.

For example, you could have a message appear offering a discount if someone’s been sitting on the checkout page for a minute or two. Or you could have a chat pop up on a specific product page asking if they need help with sizing. As they show in their own playbooks, the goal of these campaigns is to act like a helpful sales associate in a physical store, turning a support channel into a way to make more sales.

Setting up and configuring Gorgias live chat

Getting started with Gorgias Chat is fairly simple, but how you do it depends on your website’s setup.

Installation and initial setup

If you're on Shopify, the setup is about as easy as it gets. Gorgias has a "Quick installation" option on their Shopify App Store page that adds the chat widget to your whole site with just a couple of clicks. No code needed.

For sites not on Shopify, or if you only want the chat to appear on certain pages, you’ll have to go the "Manual installation" route. This means you’ll need to copy a little piece of code and paste it into your website’s theme files. It sounds more intimidating than it is, but it helps to be comfortable poking around your site’s backend.

Customizing the chat widget

Once it’s installed, you get a good amount of control over the chat widget’s look and feel. You can tweak the colors and icon to match your brand, choose where it sits on the page, and configure different modes.

For instance, you can set up business hours so the chat automatically switches to an offline form to collect emails when your team has logged off. You can also make it mandatory for customers to enter their email before starting a chat and set up automated replies to let them know how long they might have to wait.

The challenge of a siloed knowledge base

Here’s the biggest catch with the automation inside Gorgias: it works best if every piece of your company’s knowledge is neatly filed away in its help center or macros. But let’s be realistic, whose company actually works that way? Most support teams are pulling information from internal guides in Notion, product specs in Confluence, and last-minute updates dropped in Slack. Gorgias can’t see any of that.

This is where a dedicated AI tool really makes a difference. A platform like eesel AI works as an intelligent brain that connects to all your existing tools. It plugs directly into your Gorgias account and, with simple one-click integrations, instantly learns from all those scattered sources of information. Instead of making you move everything into a new help center, eesel AI works with the knowledge you already have, wherever it lives. This lets your AI give much more accurate answers and cuts down on the number of questions that a human has to handle.

Gorgias live chat pricing plans

Gorgias uses a ticket-based pricing model, which is something you really need to get your head around before signing up. A "billable ticket" is any conversation that gets a response, whether from a human, an automated Rule, or the AI Agent. This means your bill is directly tied to how busy your support team is.

The AI Agent features often have their own separate costs, too. According to their pricing page, you can expect to pay between $0.90 and $1.00 for each conversation the AI handles all by itself, and that resolution still counts as one of your billable helpdesk tickets.

A view of the Gorgias pricing page detailing the costs associated with the AI Agent.

Here’s a quick look at their standard plans:

Plan	Monthly Price	Billable Tickets/mo	Overage Cost	Key Features for Live Chat
Starter	$10/mo	50	$0.40 / ticket	Basic Live Chat
Basic	$60/mo	300	$40 / 100 tickets	Live Chat, Automation Add-on Available
Pro	$360/mo	2,000	$36 / 100 tickets	Live Chat, Automation Add-on Available
Advanced	$900/mo	5,000	$36 / 100 tickets	Live Chat, Automation Add-on Available
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom	All features, dedicated support

The risk of unpredictable costs

This pay-per-ticket and pay-per-resolution model can make your monthly budget a bit of a guessing game. A successful marketing campaign, a product going viral on TikTok, or just the usual Black Friday madness can make your ticket volume shoot up, leaving you with a surprisingly big bill from overage fees. You’re basically paying a penalty for your own success.

This is a big difference from the model used by platforms like eesel AI. With eesel AI, you get transparent, predictable plans based on a fixed (and generous) number of AI interactions. There are no per-resolution fees, so you can automate as many conversations as you want without dreading the end-of-month invoice. It’s just a much more stable way to budget for your support.

Why Gorgias live chat might not be enough

Let’s be clear: for a new ecommerce brand, Gorgias is a fantastic, tightly integrated helpdesk. The live chat tool is solid and does its job well. But as your brand grows and your support needs get more complicated, you might start to feel the platform’s limitations.

Here are the main challenges you might run into:

1. Siloed Knowledge: The AI is stuck inside the Gorgias sandbox. It can’t tap into the huge amount of information that already exists in your other company tools.

2. Rigid Automation: The "Rules" engine is great for simple, if-this-then-that logic, but it isn’t a truly flexible AI that can handle complex, multi-step problems.

3. No Safe Way to Test: You can't really test how the AI will respond to your actual customer questions before you unleash it. You’re more or less launching it blind and hoping for the best, which can be risky for your customer experience.

This is why many growing brands decide to add a specialized AI layer like eesel AI to their setup. Instead of a massive rip-and-replace project, eesel integrates right into the Gorgias setup you already have.

• Go live in minutes: eesel AI is designed to be incredibly easy to set up yourself. You can connect it to Gorgias in one click and have a working bot ready to go without ever needing to sit through a sales demo.

• Test with confidence: The simulation mode in eesel AI is a huge stress reliever. You can run it on thousands of your past Gorgias tickets to see exactly how it would have replied. This gives you a real, data-backed prediction of your automation rate before a single customer ever interacts with it.

• You're in control: With eesel AI, you get a fully customizable workflow engine. You can adjust the AI's personality, create custom actions that connect to external tools (like checking shipping status from your logistics partner), and get really specific about which types of tickets you want to automate.

Gorgias live chat: A powerful tool with room for an upgrade

So what’s the final verdict? Gorgias live chat is a strong, native solution for ecommerce brands that are already committed to the Gorgias platform. You really can’t beat its deep Shopify integration and seamless omnichannel ticketing.

However, if you're getting serious about scaling your support with smarter automation, want an AI that can learn from your entire company’s brain, and prefer to deploy new tools with confidence and a predictable budget, then a dedicated AI platform is the natural next move.

For teams already on Gorgias, eesel AI offers an integration that boosts your current workflow in minutes, not months. You get to keep the ecommerce helpdesk you know and love, just with a much more powerful AI engine running under the hood. You can see how eesel AI works with Gorgias or start your free trial today.