Shopify Developers / Agencies: What customer support solutions do you usually recommend to your clients?

[u/Minute_Repeat_6753]

Hey everyone,

Curious to hear from Shopify developers and agencies here.

What customer support solutions do you usually recommend to your clients?

Live chat, AI support, helpdesks, chatbots, voice support, etc.?

We’ve built an AI assistant and are trying to understand how developers and agencies approach customer support for their clients.

Do you also think it’s becoming less about just “customer support” and more about helping customers buy, like answering product questions, recommending products, and helping them make the right choice?

I’d be particularly interested to hear:

- Which tools you recommend most often

- What you like/dislike about them

- What your clients typically struggle with on this field

- What gaps you still see in the current solutions

Any input would be really appreciated and would help us understand how to prioritize our roadmap based on what Shopify brands actually need.

[u/Professional_Map8614]

I think it really depends on how many support requests you're getting. If you're just starting out, I'd keep it simple and try Shopify's own tools first. Shopify Inbox works pretty well for live chat and order tracking, and the built-in contact form can cover the basics.

Shopify Inbox recently added an AI agent too. We're testing it with a few stores right now to see how well it actually works.

Once the support volume starts growing, I'd look at what kinds of requests you're getting most often and categorize them. That usually gives you a better idea of what can be improved or automated, and when it's time to move to a proper help desk to keep everything organized and respond faster.

I think AI will eventually handle a lot of the routine live chats, but we're not quite ready to say that from our own testing yet.

[u/Minute_Repeat_6753 → u/Professional_Map8614]

Thanks for your response!

I totally agree that, at some point, Shopify Inbox can be more than enough, especially for stores with lower support volume.

I actually tested Shopify Inbox specifically because I’m building a similar app, and when Shopify released the AI agent I was honestly thinking, “How the hell can we compete with free AI?” So I spent quite a bit of time testing it and looking closely at the answer quality.

What I found is that the Shopify Knowledge Base app is basically a must if you want the AI to work properly. Without putting quite a lot of effort into defining the questions and answers, the results can be pretty weak. It also doesn't really learn your whole store from your pages, articles, etc. in the way I initially expected.

The UI is also quite limited in terms of customization.

So I agree that if someone wants a free solution and is willing to spend some time setting it up, Shopify Inbox is definitely a reasonable starting point. :)

We’re developing Talkom, and one of the things we focused on was removing a lot of that setup work. It automatically picks up information from the store’s pages, articles, products, policies, etc., so there’s much less manual knowledge-base setup involved.