A complete guide to the Zendesk BigCommerce integration (2025)

Juggling tabs is the worst. If you’re running a BigCommerce store and using Zendesk for support, you know exactly what I’m talking about. A customer asks about their order, and suddenly you’re on a digital scavenger hunt, digging through BigCommerce for details while the customer is left waiting.

It’s a clunky process that slows your team down and makes for a pretty frustrating experience on both sides. Your support agents are wasting time on copy-paste tasks, and your customers are waiting longer for simple answers.

A Zendesk BigCommerce integration is meant to fix this mess by pulling all that important ecommerce data right into your support view. In this guide, we’ll walk through why this connection is a must-have, the usual ways people set it up, and where those traditional methods fall short. More importantly, we’ll show you how a modern AI approach can go way beyond just displaying data to actually automating your support work.

What is Zendesk?

You’ve probably heard of it, but let’s quickly break it down. Zendesk is a customer service platform that helps companies manage all their customer conversations in one place. The heart of Zendesk is its ticketing system, which pulls in questions from email, chat, phone calls, and social media. Businesses use it to keep their support organized, build out help centers, and track how well they’re doing. The whole point is to give agents the context they need to solve problems quickly and personally.

What is BigCommerce?

On the other side of the equation, you have BigCommerce. It’s a popular ecommerce platform that gives businesses the tools to build and run an online store. It handles everything from managing your product catalog and processing payments to marketing and SEO. It’s known for being pretty flexible, letting sellers create custom shopping experiences and connect with tons of other apps.

Why you need a Zendesk BigCommerce integration

Getting these two platforms to talk to each other isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s how you build a support operation that actually works. When your sales platform and your support platform are stuck in their own separate worlds, you create a ton of unnecessary work for your team and a choppy experience for your customers.

Connecting them tears down those walls. Here’s what really changes:

You get much faster resolution times. When a customer asks the classic, "Where is my order?" question, your agent won’t have to say, "One moment while I check." The order status, tracking number, and shipping history will be right there in the Zendesk ticket. No more awkward pauses, just fast answers. This alone can make a huge difference in how customers perceive your brand.

Your agents become way more efficient. Constantly switching between different browser tabs is a massive productivity killer. Think about it: every time an agent has to leave Zendesk, log into BigCommerce, search for a customer, find the right order, and then come back, they lose focus and time. An integration keeps them in one place, letting them handle more tickets with less stress. This isn’t just about speed; it’s about reducing agent burnout and letting them use their brainpower on trickier problems.

You finally get a complete picture of your customer. A proper integration gives you a 360-degree view of who you’re talking to. Your agents can see a customer’s entire order history, how much they’ve spent with you, and any previous conversations they’ve had. This context is gold. It allows your team to offer personalized, thoughtful support that makes people feel valued, not like just another ticket number.

You can start spotting problems before they get out of hand. With all your data in one spot, patterns become easier to see. Are you suddenly getting a lot of complaints about a new product? Is one of your shipping partners always running late? An integrated system helps you connect the dots between support tickets and your operations, so you can fix the root cause instead of just dealing with the symptoms.

3 common integration methods

Okay, so you’re sold on the idea. How do you actually make it happen? You’ve got a few options, and the best one for you really depends on your budget, your team’s technical skills, and what you’re trying to accomplish.

Method 1: Marketplace apps

The most popular route is to grab a pre-built app from the Zendesk Marketplace. These are basically plug-and-play connectors built by third-party developers that add a BigCommerce data panel right inside your Zendesk interface.

You’ll find apps from companies like agnoStack, Zenplates, and Commercium. They’re generally easy to install and don’t require any coding, which is a huge plus.

The downside? Most come with a recurring subscription fee, usually priced per agent per month, which can start to add up as your team grows. But the biggest limitation is that they are designed to show information to humans. They don’t actually do any of the work for you.

Method 2: Automation platforms (iPaaS)

Next up are tools like Zapier, often called iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service). These platforms let you create simple, trigger-based recipes to connect different apps.

For example, you could set up a workflow that says, "When a new order is placed in BigCommerce, automatically create a new ticket in Zendesk." This can be handy for creating a proactive record of customer orders.

The good part is that these tools are very flexible and can connect thousands of different apps. The not-so-good part is that the workflows are often pretty basic. They can kick off an action, but they can’t understand context or have a real conversation with a customer. Plus, the costs can be unpredictable since they’re often based on how many automated tasks you run each month.

Method 3: Custom integrations

For larger businesses with very specific needs, sometimes a custom-built solution is the only way to go. This means hiring developers to build a direct connection between the two platforms using their APIs.

Companies like Intuit Solutions or platforms like Clarity Connect specialize in this.

The obvious benefit is that you get a solution that is perfectly molded to your team’s exact workflow. The major drawback, however, is the cost and time involved. This is easily the most expensive option, requiring a big upfront investment and ongoing maintenance from developers to keep it running smoothly as the platforms evolve.

The hidden limitations of a standard integration

While the methods above seem different, they all share a similar philosophy: they focus on giving your human agents better visibility into BigCommerce data. And while that’s helpful, it comes with some serious limitations that aren’t always obvious at first.

What standard integrations do well

Let’s be fair, these tools are good at what they do. Off-the-shelf integrations from developers like agnoStack, Zenplates, and Commercium are fantastic at pulling real-time order data into a neat little window inside Zendesk. They let agents see order statuses, look up shipping info, and even perform basic actions like issuing a refund without having to switch tabs. They definitely make an agent’s job easier by putting the right information at their fingertips.

But here’s the catch

The fundamental problem with every one of these standard integrations is that they are tools for humans, not tools for automation.

They are completely reactive. They arm your agent with the information they need to answer a question, but they can’t answer the question themselves. The support agent is, and always will be, the one doing the work. You’ve just given them a slightly better shovel, but they’re still the one digging the hole.

Because of this, these tools don’t actually reduce your ticket volume. They might help an agent close a "Where is my order?" ticket in two minutes instead of five, but they do absolutely nothing to stop that ticket from showing up in the first place. Your team is still stuck answering the same repetitive questions, day in and day out.

Finally, their knowledge is incredibly narrow. These integrations can only see what’s in BigCommerce. They have no idea what your return policy is (because it’s in a Google Doc), what the detailed product specs are (because they’re on a help center page), or what the solution to a tricky issue was (because it’s buried in a past Zendesk ticket). This means they can only solve a tiny fraction of your customers’ real problems.

A better way: Using AI to automate the work

So what if you could move beyond just showing data? What if your system could actually understand a customer’s question, look up the answer in BigCommerce, and provide a complete reply all on its own?

This is where the next step in the Zendesk BigCommerce workflow comes in: adding a layer of artificial intelligence. This is exactly what we built at eesel AI. It plugs into your existing setup and uses AI to move you from just looking at data to actually automating resolutions.

How eesel AI enhances your existing setup

eesel AI was designed specifically to solve the problems that standard integrations can’t. It integrates with your helpdesk in a few clicks and gets to work immediately.

• It goes beyond displaying data to resolving tickets. The eesel AI Agent can truly handle common ecommerce questions from start to finish. When a "Where Is My Order?" ticket comes in, it doesn’t just show the info to an agent. It uses a custom action to check the BigCommerce API in real-time, finds the tracking information, and drafts or sends a friendly, accurate update to the customer instantly.

• It connects all of your knowledge, not just one app. Unlike standard integrations that are blind to anything outside of BigCommerce, eesel AI learns from everywhere. It connects to your help center, past Zendesk tickets, Google Docs, and more. This means it can answer complex, multi-part questions that require information from different sources, like "What’s your return policy for sale items and can you confirm my last order has shipped?"

• It sets up in minutes, not months. You don’t need a team of developers or a long-winded sales process. With a one-click helpdesk integration, you can have a powerful AI agent live and handling tickets the very same day.

• You can test it with zero risk. We get it, letting an AI talk to your customers can feel a bit scary. That’s why eesel AI has a simulation mode. You can test it on thousands of your past tickets to see exactly how it would have replied. This gives you a clear and accurate forecast of your automation rate before you ever turn it on for live customers.

Stop just connecting Zendesk and BigCommerce, start automating support

A basic Zendesk BigCommerce integration is a great starting point for any online store. It puts crucial information in front of your agents, saves them time, and makes their day-to-day work a little less painful.

But that’s where the benefits end. Standard integrations help your human team work more efficiently, but they don’t do anything to reduce their overall workload.

If you want to truly scale your support and give customers the instant answers they expect, you have to think beyond just data visibility and embrace AI-powered automation. Tools like eesel AI build on that integrated foundation to understand what customers are asking for, take action, and resolve issues on their own. By doing that, you can finally free your agents from the flood of repetitive questions and start actually lowering your ticket volume.

Ready to see how many of your BigCommerce support tickets could be automated? Try eesel AI for free and find out in minutes.