u/Round-Patience3193

Been looking into help desk options for my Shopify store and honestly it's overwhelming. Most of the well known ones feel like they're built for bigger teams and the pricing reflects that.

What I actually need is pretty simple. Something easy to set up without developer help, reasonable pricing for a store that's not doing huge volume, and ideally some AI to help with replies so I'm not writing everything from scratch.

Gorgias keeps coming up but the ticket based pricing makes me nervous for busier periods. Anyone found something that hits that middle ground?

Today I decided to have breakfast at a cafe, ALONE. No husband, no kids.

At the table next to me was a mom with a baby (maybe around 6 or 7 months old). They brought over a high chair, but the baby was clearly uncomfortable. She kept sliding down, wiggling around, starting to fuss, and then her mom would pick her back up again.

Her breakfast came out, but she literally had no way to eat it.

I had two thoughts fighting in my head “don’t get involved” and “just help her”

So I walked over and asked:

- Do you want me to hold her for a couple minutes so you can eat?

She looked shocked, but let me take the baby. In those 5 minutes, she got to eat and drink at least some of her coffee.

I kept thinking how little it can take sometimes! Not advice, not judgment, not “well, I did it differently”. Just giving another mom 5 minutes to breathe 💔

Last year I ran a seasonal sale and honestly wasn't ready for the message volume. Usually it's manageable but during the sale it just exploded. Missed some stuff, replied late to others, not my best moment.

This year I want to actually prepare before it happens. Thinking about setting up a proper Shopify help desk before the summer sales kick in but not sure where to start.

What did you do to prep your support before a big sale? Any tools or workflows that actually helped?

One time a customer asked me about delivery times. I wasn't even that busy, just didn't feel like replying and decided I'd do it later.

Lost the customer. And honestly it annoyed the hell out of me, because it was my own fault.

My inbox isn't a mess or anything, I'm just genuinely lazy about this part of the work. And I can already imagine what happens when order volume goes up.

Going to find a solution for this. Would love to hear about your screw ups and how you handled them.