A practical guide to Gorgias rules: Use cases, limitations, and the move to AI

If you're in e-commerce, you know the drill: a customer has a question, and they wanted an answer yesterday. For support teams juggling a million things at once, this is where automation stops being a buzzword and starts being a genuine help. For the thousands of brands using Gorgias as their helpdesk, the built-in Rules engine is usually the first stop on that journey.

This guide is an honest look at Gorgias rules. We’ll cover what they are, what they’re actually good at, and, just as importantly, where they start to create more problems than they solve. We'll also dig into how modern AI solutions offer a smarter, more flexible way to automate your customer support, helping you grow without getting tangled in a web of manual "if-then" statements.

What are Gorgias rules?

At their core, Gorgias rules are a straightforward automation system built on "WHEN/IF... THEN" logic. You can think of them as simple recipes for your helpdesk: when something specific happens, Gorgias follows a set of instructions you’ve laid out.

For instance, you could cook up a rule that says:

• WHEN a new ticket pops up...

• IF the message includes the phrase "where is my order"...

• THEN slap on an "order-status" tag and send back your pre-written tracking info message.

This system is great for taking repetitive, predictable tasks off your agents' plates. It lets you automate things like tagging tickets, routing them to the right person, firing off a quick canned response, or closing obvious spam before it ever clutters up the queue.

A screenshot of the Gorgias interface showing the 'if-then' logic used to create an automation rule.

The three stages of automating with Gorgias rules

To really get a handle on automation, it helps to know the good, the bad, and the ugly of the tools you're using. Here, we'll break down the most common uses for Gorgias rules, the walls you'll eventually hit as you scale, and how AI offers a much better path forward.

Setup and common use cases

Let's be real: for simple, clear-cut situations, Gorgias rules are pretty effective. They’re the perfect tool for handling the low-hanging fruit of customer support.

Here are three areas where rules can make a big difference right away:

1. Keeping your inbox tidy with auto-tagging

   You can set up rules to automatically tag incoming tickets based on keywords like "refund" or "exchange," the channel they came from (like Instagram DMs), or even customer data. This makes a huge difference in organizing your queues and creating separate views for different teams or ticket types.

2. Answering the #1 question on autopilot

   The classic "Where Is My Order?" (WISMO) question is a perfect job for a rule. You can create a rule that spots these keywords and instantly replies with a macro that pulls in the customer's specific tracking information. It gives the customer an immediate answer, which is exactly what they want.

An example of a Gorgias rule automatically answering a 'Where Is My Order?' (WISMO) question with the customer's tracking information.

3. Kicking spam to the curb

   Every support queue gets bogged down with junk mail and unsolicited pitches. A simple rule can spot tickets from known spam domains or messages with common spammy phrases and close them automatically. This keeps your main queue clean so your agents can focus on actual customers.

Limitations of Gorgias rules

While rules are a solid starting point, their rigidity quickly becomes a problem for growing teams. A system that works fine for 100 tickets a day starts to show its cracks when you're dealing with 1,000.

Here are the main headaches you'll eventually run into:

• They don't get the vibe. Rules are literal. They can't understand a customer's tone, sentiment, or the context of a conversation. If a frustrated customer sarcastically asks, "So where is my amazing order you shipped last month?", a simple keyword-based rule will completely miss the negative feeling and send back a cheerful, tone-deaf response.

• They're brittle and a pain to maintain. The whole system depends on the exact words you tell it to look for. If a customer asks, "can I get tracking?" instead of "where is my order?", your rule won't fire. This forces teams to create dozens of variations for a single question. Before you know it, you're trying to manage a tangled mess of overlapping rules, and you’ll quickly bump up against the 70-rule limit in Gorgias.

• They can't handle complexity. Rules are built for one-touch problems. If a customer asks about their order status and how to make a return in the same message, a simple WISMO rule is useless. It can't handle two questions at once or troubleshoot anything that isn't in a pre-written script.

• They don't learn. Rules are static. They don’t get smarter by reading new tickets or seeing how your agents solve problems. Every new customer phrase or support issue requires someone to go in and manually build a new rule.

The AI alternative: Moving beyond rigid rules

This is where AI comes in, not to replace your helpdesk, but to act as a smart layer on top of it. Platforms like eesel AI are built to solve the very problems that rule-based systems create, and they work directly with tools like Gorgias.

Here’s how an AI-first approach deals with the core weaknesses of rules:

• It understands nuance: Instead of just scanning for keywords, eesel AI reads and understands natural language. It can analyze the entire conversation to figure out what a customer actually needs, whether they're happy, frustrated, or just a little confused.

• It's low maintenance: Rather than making you write hundreds of fragile rules, eesel AI learns from your past support tickets, help center articles, and other docs. It picks up your brand voice and common solutions from day one and adapts on its own as new issues appear.

• It handles complexity with ease: eesel's AI Agent can understand and resolve questions with multiple parts in a single conversation. It can ask follow-up questions for clarity and even take action, like looking up order details in Shopify or updating a ticket field right in Gorgias.

• You can test it with confidence: With Gorgias Rules, you have to turn a rule on and just hope it works as you intended. With eesel AI, you can run risk-free simulations on thousands of your own historical tickets. You get to see exactly how the AI would have responded, get a real forecast of your automation rate, and tweak its behavior before it ever talks to a live customer.

eesel AI's simulation mode, which allows you to test how the AI would have responded to historical tickets before activating it.

Gorgias rules and pricing

Gorgias rules are available on all subscription plans, but the number of tickets you can handle is tied to which plan you're on. The real cost of relying only on rules isn't the feature itself, but the hours your team will pour into building, testing, and constantly updating them as your business grows.

Here’s a quick look at Gorgias's current pricing plans:

Plan	Price (Billed Annually)	Billable Tickets /mo	Key Features
Starter	$50 /mo	300	Rules, Macros, 50+ integrations
Basic	$300 /mo	2,000	Everything in Starter + Live Chat
Pro	$750 /mo	5,000	Everything in Basic + Onboarding
Advanced	$1,875 /mo	12,500	Everything in Pro + Dedicated Success Manager
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom ticket volumes and advanced features

Pricing info was pulled from the Gorgias website in late 2024 and could change.

Start with Gorgias rules, scale with AI

Gorgias rules are a great starting point for any e-commerce brand looking to dip its toes into automation. They're perfect for handling the most common, repetitive questions and freeing up your agents from some of the more tedious parts of the job.

But as your business picks up steam, the inflexibility of a rules-only system will become obvious. It will cap your ability to deliver fast, smart, and genuinely helpful support at scale. For teams serious about creating a top-notch customer experience, moving to AI is the logical next step. It lets you automate with intelligence, without getting stuck in the endless cycle of manual rule management.

Ready to see what real AI automation could do for your Gorgias setup? Sign up for eesel AI and run a free simulation on your past tickets to see your automation potential in just a few minutes.