A guide to Gorgias macros: Features, limitations, and the AI alternative

If you're running a growing e-commerce brand, you know the feeling. The constant stream of repetitive customer questions, "Where is my order?", return requests, sizing questions, can feel like a tidal wave. It's easy for your support team to get buried, pulling them away from the trickier conversations where they can really shine.

Gorgias, a popular helpdesk for stores on platforms like Shopify, has a feature designed to help you fight that wave: Gorgias macros. Think of them as your first solid step into support automation.

In this guide, we'll walk through what Gorgias macros are, how they work, the good parts, and where they tend to fall short. We'll also look at how newer AI tools can pick up where macros leave off, all without you having to change your Gorgias setup.

What are Gorgias macros?

At their heart, Gorgias macros are ready-made responses that your agents can use with a single click. But they're a little smarter than a basic saved reply.

They really do two jobs at once:

• They act as canned responses. Macros can insert pre-written text into a reply. The cool part is that this text can be personalized with variables that automatically pull in customer details, like their name or order number, so your team doesn't have to dig around for that info.

• They perform automated actions. A macro can do more than just send a message. It can also work behind the scenes to add tags to a ticket, change its status (to open, closed, or snoozed), assign it to a teammate, or even trigger actions in Shopify, like processing a refund.

The whole point is to cut down on repetitive typing, make sure your brand voice is consistent, and get your customers answers faster for the most common questions.

The real-world benefits of using Gorgias macros

Macros are a great starting point for automation because you see the results almost immediately. By taking the routine stuff off your team's plate, you give them the breathing room to focus on more complex issues.

Slash your response times

Think about the top five questions your team answers all day long. Now, picture them answering each one with a click instead of typing it out from scratch. That's what macros do. One-click answers for "where is my order?" (WISMO), returns, and product questions can turn a five-minute job into a ten-second one. This isn't just about making your team's life easier; customers love fast responses, and it almost always leads to better satisfaction scores.

Keep your brand voice and information consistent

With macros, every customer gets the same correct, on-brand information, no matter who on your team is handling the ticket. You spend time getting the response just right once, and your team can use it forever. This is a huge help when you're training new agents. They don't have to guess the right tone; you can just hand them a library of approved, quality answers from day one.

Automate small workflows

This is where macros really start to feel powerful. Using variables (like "{{customer.first_name}}" or "{{order.tracking_url}}") lets you send personal-feeling messages at scale without any tedious copy-pasting. At the same time, actions like automatically tagging or closing a ticket keep your helpdesk neat and tidy without anyone having to lift a finger.

Feature	Manual Response	Gorgias Macro Response
Speed	2-5 minutes per ticket

Building out your Gorgias macros library

The best place to start is with your own data. Figure out your top 5-10 most common customer questions and build macros for those first. Gorgias also gives you a head start with a bunch of default macro templates for typical e-commerce situations like order updates, return instructions, and damaged item reports. They're a great foundation you can tweak to match your brand's voice.

Combining Gorgias macros with rules

If you want to get a bit more advanced, you can use Gorgias Rules to apply macros automatically. Rules are basically triggers. For instance, you could set up a rule that says, "If an email comes in with 'cancel order' in the subject line, automatically apply the 'Cancellation Policy' macro." This gives you a simple, hands-free way to handle predictable requests, often solving them before an agent even needs to look at the ticket.

Where you'll hit the limits of Gorgias macros

Macros are incredibly helpful, but they do have a ceiling. As your business grows and your customer questions get more diverse, you'll probably start to feel a few of these pain points.

Why Gorgias macros can be rigid

Macros can't really understand what a customer means; they just look for exact keywords. If a customer asks, "Has my package left the warehouse yet?" instead of the classic "Where is my order?", a rule-based macro might not fire. That means an agent has to jump in, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Gorgias macros require manual upkeep

Every single question, and every small variation of that question, needs its own macro. As you add new products and update your policies, keeping a library of hundreds of macros organized and up-to-date can feel like a full-time job.

Gorgias macros don't learn

Macros are static. An agent might write a brilliant, detailed answer to a tricky product question, but that knowledge just sits in that one ticket. It can't be automatically used the next time a customer asks something similar. There's no way for the system to improve on its own over time.

The knowledge of Gorgias macros is limited

A macro only knows what you've explicitly written into it. It can't pull information from other places, like a help center article, a Google Doc with your shipping policies, or a past ticket, unless you manually copy and paste that information into the macro itself.

A quick look at Gorgias pricing

Gorgias's pricing is mostly based on how many "billable tickets" your team handles each month. It's not based on how many agents you have (except for the Starter plan). Macros are available on every plan, but how useful they are can depend on the other features in your tier.

Here's a snapshot of their plans:

Plan	Monthly Price (Billed Monthly)	Billable Tickets/mo	Key Automation Features Included
Starter	$10/mo	50	Macros, Rules, Views
Basic	$60/mo	300	Macros, Rules, Views
Pro	$360/mo	2,000	Macros, Rules, Views, Revenue statistics
Advanced	$900/mo	5,000	Macros, Rules, Views, Revenue statistics
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	All features, dedicated support

A heads-up: This pricing is based on info from the official Gorgias pricing page and could change. Some plans might also offer Gorgias's own AI Agent features for an extra cost.

Moving beyond Gorgias macros with AI

While Gorgias macros are a solid foundation, real support efficiency comes from something that can understand, learn, and adapt. An AI support agent doesn't mean you have to ditch your helpdesk. Instead, it plugs right into it to handle the kinds of questions that macros just can't touch.

For example, an AI agent like eesel AI connects to your Gorgias account in a few minutes and gets around the limitations of a macro-only setup. Here's how:

• It understands what customers mean. Instead of just matching keywords, eesel AI uses natural language processing to figure out what customers are actually asking, no matter how they word it. It can handle nuanced, multi-part questions that would leave a macro confused.

• It learns from everything you have. The AI securely reads and learns from all your existing support knowledge: past tickets, help center articles, Google Docs, and yes, even your existing Gorgias macros. This means it's ready to answer a much wider range of questions from the get-go, without you having to write a single script.

• It helps create new knowledge. eesel AI can spot when your agents have successfully solved a tricky issue and suggest new draft articles for your help center based on their replies. This is a great way to automatically fill in knowledge gaps with answers that are already proven to work.

• You can test it risk-free. Before you flip the switch, you can run a simulation of eesel AI on thousands of your past Gorgias tickets. You'll see exactly how it would have replied and get a clear picture of your potential automation rate. This lets you start with simple topics and expand when you feel comfortable.

Ready to move beyond basic Gorgias macros?

Gorgias macros are a must-have tool for any e-commerce support team building an efficient workflow. They're perfect for handling predictable, high-volume questions with standard answers and actions.

But they are just the first step. Because they're based on rules, they need constant manual work and can't quite keep up with the complexity of real human conversations.

To really scale your support without just hiring more people, you need an intelligent tool that works with your macros. AI platforms like eesel AI offer a self-serve, controllable way to automate more nuanced conversations, learn from your data, and free up your team for the chats that truly matter.

Curious to see what that looks like in your own helpdesk? Try eesel AI for free and find out how many of your tickets could be automated in just a few minutes.