The 5 Best Shopify Customer Service Apps in 2025
If your ecommerce shop’s support setup is starting to get unwieldy, it might be time to upgrade to a help desk that integrates with Shopify. A help desk brings all of your communications — email, social, chat, phone, etc. — into a central location, while an integration with Shopify ensures you have the information you need about the customers who are writing in for help.
We’ve put together this list of five Shopify customer service apps to help you find the right one for your needs. Read our detailed reviews below to learn which use cases each app is best suited for, what unique features they offer, and how each works alongside your Shopify store.
1. Help Scout – Best for affordability and ease of use
Help Scout is an easy to use and affordable help desk that allows you to manage all of your customer conversations across email, live chat, and social (Facebook Messenger and Instagram) in a single place. It's built for SaaS and ecommerce teams, has a powerful Shopify integration, and offers tons of features that help your team deliver better, faster support.
Shopify integration
Help Scout’s Shopify integration gives you everything you need to help your customers right in the conversation sidebar. The integration displays details like the shopper’s order details, fulfillment status, and tracking number. Additionally, you can process refunds and cancellations, duplicate and edit orders, and review order history without ever leaving Help Scout.
Shared inbox
Help Scout's inbox houses all of your email and live chat requests. Your team can manage those requests using a host of features that make it easy to track, resolve, and collaborate on anything that comes your way:
Conversation assignments: Assign incoming customer messages to support reps or specific teams to provide accountability and transparency.
Saved replies: Standardize answers to common customer questions by creating templated responses that can be added to any reply in just a couple of clicks.
Internal notes: Provide context or drop important information into a conversation with notes that are only visible to your team.
Tags and custom fields: Keep track of different types of conversations (e.g., billing, inventory, returns, etc.) by organizing them with tags and custom fields.
Views: Focus on specific emails using inbox views. Segment conversations based on criteria like channel, assignee, date created, or tags.
Workflows: Increase productivity by automating simple tasks like routing emails to a specific department, sending auto-replies, or adding tags.
Knowledge base
Having a help center with easily accessible answers to questions on topics like returns, exchanges, and refunds allows customers to self-serve, reducing the volume of email or chats in your queue.
Help Scout’s knowledge base tool is called Docs, and with it you can easily set up a help center where you can publish return policies, answers to FAQs, and anything else that you think is important for your customers to know. Once your content is live, your support team can also add links to helpful articles into any support conversation with a couple of clicks.
Proactive messaging and microsurveys
While many help desk features focus on how to resolve customer issues once the problem has already happened, the best customer experience actually comes from being proactive.
Beacon, Help Scout's embeddable widget, can be customized and installed on any website (including your Shopify site). Beacon can be used to recommend articles from your Docs site, let customers send an email to your support team, and allow folks to reach out via live chat.
Additionally, Beacon can be used to proactively engage with your customers. You can do things like:
Recommend a help center article that's related to the page a visitor is viewing.
Announce sales or special events using a banner or modal message.
Ask for feedback or send an NPS survey to find out how customers feel about your brand.
Proactive messaging and microsurveys can help you deliver personalized experiences, improve your shop’s products and service, and help close the feedback loop so that you can better understand the needs of your customers.
AI features
You can also use Beacon to provide website visitors and customers with instant, conversational answers to their questions.
Help Scout's AI chatbot, AI Answers, uses information from your knowledge base and website to answer incoming questions immediately without any intervention from your support team. The answers use your brand's own voice and only gather data from sources you've provided, and they're particularly helpful in auto-resolving those FAQs that bog down your queue.
Other AI features you'll find in Help Scout that will save your team tons of time include:
AI Summarize: Turn long, back-and-forth conversations into bulleted summaries to help team members get up to speed quickly.
AI Assist: Check your spelling and grammar, augment your text’s length or tone, or translate your replies into other languages.
AI Drafts: Create draft replies with a click of a button. AI Drafts create responses based on historical replies your team has sent and the info in your Docs site or on your website. Create a draft, quickly review, and hit send.
Reporting
Help Scout’s reports let you monitor conversation and channel volume, time to resolution, trending issues, knowledge base stats, agent performance, and other valuable support metrics. You can also create your own dashboards and filtering data based on your account’s tags and custom fields, and you can collect and keep track of customer feedback.
Free plan
If you're running a small ecommerce shop and aren't yet earning enough profit to invest in help desk software, you can use Help Scout's free plan to get access to a lot of the features above for free. On the free plan, you can add up to five users, deliver email support, build a knowledge base, create tags and saved replies, and integrate with Shopify at no cost.
Pricing
Free plan and trial available. View Help Scout's current pricing.
Learn more about Help Scout:
2. Shopify Inbox – Best for solopreneurs
Shopify Inbox is the ecommerce platform’s built-in support tool. It’s available across all plan tiers and is an excellent starting place for smaller shops or solopreneurs.
Email and chat support
Shopify Inbox lets you add a chat widget to your storefront, making support more accessible for your customers. People can reach out via live chat, or if you or your team members are unavailable, they can send an email through the same widget.
You can manage both chat and email from a shared inbox that has features like chat assignments, quick replies for fast answers, conversation tagging, and the ability to seamlessly add things like discount codes or product recommendations to your responses.
Self-service features
Set up instant answers to be displayed on your widget to provide quick answers to some of your shop’s most common questions. You can even set up an order tracking instant answer that customers can click to get an immediate update on the status of their order.
Shopify Magic, the company’s AI tool suite, can also suggest replies to questions — which you can review and edit before sending — based on your store’s policies and conversation history. Shopify Magic can also use AI to automatically respond to live chat conversations so your team doesn't have to get involved at all.
Pricing
Free for Shopify customers.
3. Gorgias – Best for increasing sales
Gorgias is a help desk that is built specifically for ecommerce companies. It has all of the features you need to handle customer communications: a shared inbox, omnichannel support, collaboration and organizational tools, workflow automations, a knowledge base builder, and reporting capabilities.
Shopify integration
Gorgias has a deep integration with Shopify, allowing you to view order history and customer data right from the customer’s ticket. You can also manage (create, edit, duplicate, cancel) orders, create discounts, and share product recommendations without ever having to switch tabs.
While the functionality above can be found across all of the tools on our list, Gorgias goes further by allowing you to automatically add order data — shipping addresses, order numbers, etc. — into macros and auto-responders, providing personalized support and saving agents the time needed to customize each message.
Support automation
Gorgias comes with two types of AI agents: a support agent and a shopping assistant (which we'll cover in the next section).
The support agent can reply to customers' questions automatically. When a request is received, the support agent identifies the intent and sentiment of the query, determines if it has the knowledge and permissions to help, and then either automatically sends a reply or escalates it to your support team to handle manually.
For those wanting a bit more control, Gorgias also has a tool called Flows, which can be used to design rule-based self-service experiences. Use Flows for things like order or tracking updates, returns, and other routine tasks.
Sales automation
Gorgias’ shopping assistant is designed to increase your shop's sales by proactively engaging with site visitors. It can:
Answer questions shoppers have about your products.
Offer personalized product recommendations.
Recommend related products to increase cart values.
Provide shoppers with discount codes when it deems doing so would increase the likelihood of the shopper making a purchase.
Pricing
Free trial available. View Gorgias' current pricing.
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4. DelightChat – Best for integrating with Meta apps
DelightChat is a customer service app that specializes in live chat, but you can also use it to manage email and social channels from its workspace and create a knowledge base for FAQs. You can also create templated fast replies, set up auto-responders, and design automations to take care of busy work.
Shopify integration
The Shopify integration with DelightChat is solid, allowing agents to view customer and order details. You can edit, view, duplicate, or cancel orders and share tracking information. Additionally, when customers write in asking about products, you can switch to DelightChat's shopping tab to browse your product catalog and send customers detailed information and checkout links.
Meta apps integrations
The most notable thing about DelightChat is that its Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp integrations are really strong. It’s fairly common for help desks to support social channels, but it’s usually just for private messaging. With DelightChat, you can respond to Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs and reply to and moderate post comments.
If your company is active on WhatsApp, you can manage support requests through the channel — both with live agents or rules-based chatbots. There are also a host of WhatsApp marketing features. You can send abandoned cart reminders and order-related notifications, broadcast messages to your contact lists, manage opt-outs, and collect product reviews.
Pricing
Free trial available. View DelightChat's current pricing.
5. Zendesk – Best for community management
Zendesk is the market leader in customer service platforms. It supports every channel you might need — email, chat, social, voice, and text messaging — all from a centralized agent workspace. Its features are robust and include powerful functionality such as AI add-ons that can resolve customer issues, build staff schedules, and QA all responses your team sends.
It's a fantastic choice if you’re a larger ecommerce operation that has really specific needs that an out-of-the-box solution just can’t meet. With the help of a Zendesk partner (or an in-house team), you can craft exactly the right customer (and agent) experience across any channel.
Integrations, including Shopify
Zendesk has a marketplace of nearly 2,000 apps that can help you easily connect your business’s entire tech stack to the platform. In addition, Suite Professional and Suite Enterprise plan users can build their own custom apps if they can’t find what they need in the marketplace.
The Zendesk Shopify app is part of the marketplace, and much like the integrations seen with the other tools on this list, it allows shop owners to easily add chat to their Shopify store as well as view customer and order details and manage orders without leaving Zendesk.
Community forums
One Zendesk feature you won’t find in the other tools on this list is the ability to create community forums. Creating a community for your customers could be an interesting move, especially if you’re selling tech products.
Ecommerce companies typically rely on social media for community building, but troubleshooting — a task that’s pretty common when selling electronics — within Facebook or Instagram comments can get messy. A community forum can be a great place to identify brand advocates and for customers to crowdsource tips, self-serve, and connect with other users.
Zendesk’s forum feature has moderation capabilities to ensure conversations stay productive and spam-free, and it also makes it easy for your community moderators to transition conversations to a support ticket if one-on-one help is needed from your support team.
Pricing
Free trial available. View Zendesk's current pricing.
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Choosing the right Shopify customer service app for your store
Whether you're deciding between the apps we recommend or some others you’ve discovered on your own, you'll need to do a little more research and decision-making to find the perfect help desk for your Shopify store. Switching apps down the line requires a lot of effort, so spend extra time upfront to make sure you're signing up for the one that best meets your needs.
Here are some tips on how to narrow down your options and find the best Shopify customer service app for your online store.
Make sure it has the features you need
The great thing about a help desk is that it consolidates all of the tools you need to deliver support into a single platform. Of course, that only works if the help desk you choose offers all of the features you need.
Start your evaluation by creating a list of must-have and nice-to-have features, then review the tools you're considering, and take any off your list that don't have all of your must-haves.
Key features to look for in a Shopify customer service app include:
A Shopify integration: Being able to process refunds and cancellations, duplicate and edit orders, and review order histories without leaving your help desk saves your team a lot of time, and having customer and order details displayed alongside requests allows them to deliver more personalized support.
A way to manage support on the channels you use: Some platforms are email or chat only; others let you deliver support across email, chat, phone, social, and SMS. Some only integrate with Facebook Messenger; others integrate with all social platforms. Find one that covers all of the channels your customers use to contact your team.
Self-service features: Ecommerce support teams receive a lot of repetitive requests. A knowledge base with answers to those FAQs lets customers find what they need on their own, and an AI support chatbot can answer customers' questions for you and, in some cases, provide order status updates automatically.
Automation: Whether it's something as simple as automatically sending replies to customers to let them know their requests are received or as complex as an AI copilot that translates requests into different languages and writes draft replies for you, automation helps your team move more quickly and keeps your customers in the loop.
Reports: As your company grows, so will your need for detailed analytics on your support volumes, customer satisfaction, and team performance. Reports are crucial for scheduling your team properly, determining when it's time to hire, identifying issues that are negatively impacting customer satisfaction, and much more.
Get the real scoop from the app's existing customers
A help desk's website will only tell you the information the provider wants you to hear. If you want less curated information about how each platform works, you'll want to hear from its existing customers. You can check with others in your network to see if anyone you know uses the help desks you're considering, or you can read customer reviews of the platforms.
For Shopify stores, we recommend checking out the reviews on the Shopify app store. Since it's solely for apps that integrate with Shopify, you'll get a lot more specific information on how each app's integration works than you would from more general review sites like G2 and Capterra.
Consider pricing
Like most businesses, you probably don't have an unlimited budget to spend on support software, so the next step is to dive deep into the pricing for the apps that made it through the two steps above and are still on your list.
Spend extra time here looking at the more detailed pricing comparison tables on each app's website to make sure you're getting the features you need at the price you expect to pay. The shortened versions of pricing you see at the top of the page can often make it sound like you'll be getting more than you actually will, so make sure to read the fine print.
If you have a long list of apps to consider, you can narrow it down further by returning to your list of nice-to-have features. Eliminate some options by narrowing your list down to those that have the largest number of your nice-to-have features for the price you can afford to pay.
Test drive your final contenders
With a list of apps that have all of your must-have features and are available for a price you can afford, you should have a short list of tools to test drive.
Start a free trial of the final contenders on your list, bring in a few teammates to help you test, and use the tools like you would day-to-day when providing support for a week or two to make sure they're easy to use and do everything you need them to do.
You might also want to consider reaching out to the support teams of the tools you're considering (if that doesn't just happen naturally) to get a sense of the support you'll receive when you need help. If all other things are equal (pricing, features, etc.), being able to get quick and efficient help when you run into issues can be your tiebreaker.
By the end of this exercise, you should have a good sense of which app is the best choice for your team, but if you need more help making a decision, you can check out our Buyer's Guide to Choosing the Right Customer Support Tool.
Alexa Ahrens
Alexa is a content strategist at Help Scout, where she writes and helps other authors tell stories about customer experience, technology, and company culture. Before working in support and content creation, she worked at a wax museum — an experience that prepared her surprisingly well for a life of storytelling. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Jessica Greene
Jessica Greene is a Help Scout alum, where we make excellent customer service achievable for companies of all sizes. Connect with her on LinkedIn or through her website.
