How to build a gorgias order status bot that actually reduces tickets

If you’re in ecommerce support, let me guess. You open your Gorgias inbox, ready to solve some real customer problems, and are immediately buried under a mountain of tickets asking the same exact thing: "Where is my order?"

It's the Groundhog Day of customer support. These WISMO (Where Is My Order?) tickets are simple, sure, but they’re a huge time suck. They pull your best agents away from the complex conversations that actually build customer loyalty and drive sales, trapping them in a copy-paste nightmare.

And while Gorgias is a great helpdesk for keeping all your customer chats in one place, that constant flood of repetitive questions is a real challenge. You need a system that can give customers instant answers without burning out your team.

A screenshot of the Gorgias dashboard, where a Gorgias order status bot can be integrated to manage customer tickets.

This is exactly what a "Gorgias order status bot" is for. It’s the key to deflecting those WISMO tickets, freeing up your agents, and giving customers the speedy replies they expect. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to build one, look at the options inside Gorgias, and uncover a better, more modern way to get it done.

What is a Gorgias order status bot?

First things first, a "Gorgias order status bot" isn't some off-the-shelf product you just download. It’s an automated system you build and plug into your Gorgias workspace. Its one and only job is to catch customer questions about their order status and give them an immediate, accurate update, no human required.

Think of it as your 24/7 frontline agent who loves answering "Where is my order?". When a customer asks about their delivery, the bot should be able to instantly find their tracking info, provide an estimated delivery date, and tell them where their package is right now.

Generally, you have three ways to set this up:

1. Using Gorgias’s native tools: This involves using the built-in Rules and Macros to create simple, keyword-based auto-replies.

2. Using the Gorgias AI Agent: This is an upgrade to Gorgias's paid, conversational AI add-on for more natural conversations.

3. Integrating a third-party AI platform: This means connecting a specialized AI tool that gives you more flexibility, control, and better pricing.

Each option has its own pros and cons when it comes to features, cost, and what it can realistically do. Let's get into which one actually solves the problem without creating a bunch of new ones.

Building a Gorgias order status bot with native tools

Gorgias gives you a few built-in tools that let you cobble together a basic "Gorgias order status bot". It’s a decent place to start, but you’ll quickly run into some pretty big limitations.

Using Gorgias's rules and macros

The simplest route is to use Gorgias's Rules and Macros. Here’s the gist of it: you create a Rule that scans incoming tickets for keywords like "order status," "tracking," or "shipping." When it spots one of those words, it automatically triggers a Macro.

An example of setting up if-then commands in a Gorgias order status bot to auto-assign tickets based on keywords.

That Macro then fires off an auto-reply to the customer, pulling in data from your Shopify or other ecommerce platform, like the tracking link for their latest order. It sounds pretty good on paper, right?

But here's the catch: this setup is incredibly rigid. It’s just a simple keyword-matching game, not a real conversation. If a customer phrases their question a little differently ("Has my package shipped yet?") or asks a follow-up question ("Where's my order and can I change the address?"), the whole thing falls apart. The bot will either not respond at all or send back a half-answer, meaning a human agent has to step in anyway. It’s a band-aid, not a real fix for cutting down tickets.

Upgrading with the Gorgias AI Agent

To get around the limits of basic Rules, Gorgias offers the Gorgias AI Agent as part of its premium "Automate" add-on. This is their version of a true conversational AI. It’s built to understand natural language, so it can handle all the different ways customers might ask about their order status. It can also help with other common questions, process returns, and even issue refunds.

A Gorgias order status bot using conversational AI to automatically handle a 'where's my order?' query with data from Shopify.

It sounds great, and in some cases, it works well. But all that power comes at a steep, and often unpredictable, price. The Gorgias AI Agent uses a per-resolution pricing model, which can turn into a major budget headache for growing brands.

The Gorgias AI Agent: Pricing explained

The Gorgias AI Agent isn't part of the standard plans; you have to buy the Gorgias Automate add-on. And this is where it gets a little complicated. Instead of a flat monthly fee, Gorgias charges you for every single conversation the AI resolves without a human getting involved.

According to their pricing page, this costs between $0.90 and $1.00 per resolved conversation. And that’s on top of your base Gorgias subscription and the cost of the helpdesk ticket itself. So, for every WISMO ticket the bot handles, you’re paying about a dollar.

Here's a quick look at what that means. The Automate add-on is tiered based on how many resolutions you think you'll need.

Note: Prices are based on the Gorgias pricing page as of late 2023 and may change. The monthly cost is added to your existing helpdesk plan.

The main issue here is that your support costs go up every time your ticket volume does. Had a killer Black Friday sale? Great! But now you have a giant support bill to go with it. This model essentially penalizes you for growth and makes it impossible to budget. You're stuck choosing between giving customers instant answers and keeping your costs under control.

Common problems with Gorgias order status bots

The headaches that come with Gorgias's native tools aren't unique. A lot of other AI chatbots for Gorgias, like PerfectBot or Amio, fall into the same traps and end up creating a whole new list of problems for support teams.

Here are the most common issues you'll likely face:

• The cost roller coaster: That "pay-per-resolution" pricing is pretty common. It sounds good at first, "only pay for what you use!", but it leads to unpredictable costs that you can't forecast. You shouldn't get a bigger bill just because your latest marketing campaign was a hit.

• A bot that only knows half the story: Most bots are only trained on your public help center articles. But where's the real company knowledge? It's usually scattered everywhere, in Google Docs with internal policies, Confluence pages with product details, and thousands of old support chats in Slack. When your bot can't access all that info, it gives incomplete or wrong answers, which just frustrates customers and makes more work for your team.

• The long and winding setup: Getting started with many AI platforms feels like a whole project. You have to sit through mandatory demos, deal with long sales calls, and go through a complicated onboarding that can take weeks or even months. Finding a platform that’s truly self-serve, where you can just sign up and get going, is surprisingly hard to find.

• A lack of control: One of the biggest fears with launching an AI bot is the "black box" problem. You build it, turn it on, and cross your fingers. There's often no way to safely test the bot on your own historical tickets to see how it would have performed. You can't simulate its responses, predict its resolution rate, or roll it out slowly with any real confidence.

A better approach: A unified, self-serve AI platform

These problems aren't impossible to solve. You just need to think about automation differently. Instead of a rigid, expensive, and siloed bot, you need a flexible, unified, and transparent AI platform. This is where eesel AI comes in. It’s a modern AI solution designed to plug right into your Gorgias helpdesk and fix the exact issues we've been talking about.

Here’s how eesel AI offers a smarter way to build your "Gorgias order status bot".

Get started in minutes

Forget about booking demos and waiting for a salesperson to call you back. With eesel AI, you can sign up, connect your Gorgias account, and build your first AI agent in just a few minutes. The whole platform is designed to be self-serve from the ground up. This puts you in the driver's seat, letting you build, test, and launch on your own timeline, without any annoying roadblocks.

Give your bot a brain that knows everything

An AI is only as good as the information it’s trained on. eesel AI connects to all of your data sources with one-click integrations, breaking down those knowledge silos. It doesn't just learn from your help center. It learns from:

• Past Gorgias tickets: It reads through thousands of your old conversations to get your brand voice, understand common customer problems, and see what a good answer looks like.

• Internal Docs: Connect it to your Google Docs, Confluence, Notion, and more. Now your bot can pull shipping policy details from a Google Doc and product specs from a Confluence page in the same conversation.

• Ecommerce Platforms: It connects directly with platforms like Shopify to pull real-time order information.

The eesel AI interface shows how a Gorgias order status bot can connect to multiple knowledge sources for comprehensive answers.

This unified knowledge base means your bot has all the context it needs to answer customer questions correctly and completely the first time around.

Test your bot with total confidence

eesel AI takes the guesswork and risk out of launching a bot. Before you ever turn it on for your customers, you can run it in a powerful simulation mode. It will go through thousands of your past Gorgias tickets and show you exactly how it would have responded to each one.

Simulation mode in eesel AI for testing how a Gorgias order status bot would have replied to historical tickets.

This gives you an incredibly accurate preview of its potential resolution rate. You can look at the AI’s draft responses, spot any gaps in its knowledge, and tweak its behavior until you're 100% happy with how it performs. You can start small by automating just one type of ticket and having the bot escalate everything else, then slowly give it more responsibility as you see it working well. No other platform gives you this much visibility and control before going live.

Pricing that actually makes sense

This is where the difference is night and day. eesel AI does not use a pay-per-resolution model. Instead, our plans are based on a flat, predictable monthly fee that includes a generous number of AI interactions.

What does that mean for you? Your support costs stay stable and are easy to plan for. A big spike in tickets after a successful sale won't cause a surprise on your next bill. You can scale your automation without your costs spiraling out of control. It’s a model that’s actually designed to support your growth, not hold it back.

Stop answering WISMO tickets and start building loyalty

Look, those repetitive "Where is my order?" tickets are never going to completely disappear, but they don't have to be your problem. For Gorgias users, this is a totally solvable issue.

As we've covered, relying on Gorgias's own tools can leave you with a system that's either too basic to really help or too expensive to keep running. And many third-party bots just add more complexity with siloed knowledge and pricing models that punish you for doing well.

A modern AI platform like eesel AI offers a much clearer path. It gives you a powerful, smart "Gorgias order status bot" that fits right into your current workflow. By bringing all your knowledge together, letting you test with confidence, and offering simple, predictable pricing, eesel AI helps you automate your frontline support the right way. You can finally free up your agents to focus on what they do best: building relationships and turning shoppers into loyal customers.

Ready to see how many WISMO tickets you can automate? Sign up for eesel AI for free and run a simulation on your Gorgias tickets in minutes.