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Ecommerce support teams deal with a flood of customer queries every day.
“Where’s my order?” “Can I return this?” “This isn’t what I ordered.” The questions pile up across email, live chat, social media, and phone.
If you’re handling all this manually or switching between disconnected tools, you’re setting your team up for delays, missed messages, and frustrated customers.
That’s why growing ecommerce brands rely on a customer service software. It brings all support conversations into one place, helps agents respond faster, and ensures no customer is left hanging.
Table of Contents
- A Quick Comparison of Customer Service Software for Ecommerce Businesses
- What is An Ecommerce Customer Service Software?
- Why Do You Need an Ecommerce Customer Service Software?
- Features of An Ecommerce Customer Service Software
- 7 Ecommerce Customer Service Software
- How to Choose the Right Customer Service Software for Ecommerce
- Examples of Brands Nailing Ecommerce Customer Service
- Trends Shaping Ecommerce Customer Service Software
- The Best Customer Service Software for Your Ecommerce Business
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
A Quick Comparison of Customer Service Software for Ecommerce Businesses
Here is a quick comparison of the top seven customer service software for ecommerce businesses.
Whether you’re a startup or an established online store, this comprehensive list will help you find the perfect solution to elevate your customer service game.
| Software | Core features | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Hiver | Multichannel supportEmail templatesInternal collaborationAnalyticsIntegrationsAI co pilotAutomations | Free plan available. Paid plan starts at $19/user/month |
| Freshdesk | Ticket managementAutomationsLive chatKnowledge baseReportingIntegration with WooCommerce | Starts at $15 per agent per month.They also have a forever free plan with limited features for unlimited agent |
| Gorgias | Multichannel communicationGorgias Macros (templates)Integration with ecommerce platformsOrder information and shopping history access | Starts at $10 per month for 50 tickets |
| Zoho Desk | Customer inquiry managementAdvanced process automationZia – Zoho Desk’s AI | Starts at $7 per agent per monthThey also have a free plan that can be used by up to 3 agents |
| Zendesk | Comprehensive customer profile overviewMultichannel supportAnalyticsAutomations | Starts at $55 per agent per month |
| Intercom | AI bot – FinMultichannel supportPromotional and transactional messagingProduct toursNo-code workflow builder | Starts at $39 per month |
| Help Scout | Multichannel supportShared inboxAI summarizerAutomations | Starts at $20 per agent per month |
What is An Ecommerce Customer Service Software?
An ecommerce customer service software refers to a suite of tools and applications designed to streamline and enhance customer service and support processes for online retailers.
A robust customer service software can help ecommerce businesses deliver proactive and personalized support to shoppers. It can help your customer service team track and manage incoming queries, offer real-time support, and also empower customers to self-serve. It ensures efficient, effective, and customer-centric support operations.
Why Do You Need an Ecommerce Customer Service Software?
Support teams in ecommerce deal with high query volume and urgency like few others. One product goes out of stock, and ten customers write in. A delivery gets delayed, and five more follow up across email, chat, and Instagram DMs.
And when your systems can’t keep up, here’s what happens:
- Slow replies: Your team spends hours digging through inboxes and spreadsheets.
- Scattered context: You reply to a chat without knowing the customer already emailed earlier.
- Duplicate responses: Two agents reply to the same query from different tools.
- No performance tracking: You can’t tell how long issues take to resolve or where bottlenecks happen.
That is exactly where a customer service software for ecommerce helps. It brings every conversation across channels like email, chat, social into one place. It gives your agents full context, helps you assign and automate tasks, and gives you clarity on what’s working and what’s not with the right metrics.
Features of An Ecommerce Customer Service Software
A customer service software for ecommerce typically includes a range of features and functionalities to address various aspects of customer support, including:
- Ticket Management: Organize and prioritize customer inquiries in the form of tickets. Each ticket represents a customer issue that can be tracked, assigned, and resolved within the system.
- Multi-Channel Support: Enable customer interactions through various communication channels, such as email, live chat, social media, phone, and self-service portals.
- Knowledge Base: Create and maintain a database of frequently asked questions, articles, tutorials, and guides that customers can access for self-help.
- Automations: Streamline workflows by automating routine tasks, such as routing tickets to the appropriate agents, sending automated responses, and escalating issues. Without any manual effort.
- Analytics and Reporting: Get insights into customer service performance, including response time, resolution time, customer satisfaction scores, and other trends.
- Customer Feedback Management: Collect and analyze customer feedback to identify areas for improvement and measure customer satisfaction.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) Management: Define and manage response and resolution time commitments to meet customer expectations.
Recommended reading
7 Ecommerce Customer Service Software
1. Hiver
Hiver is a multi-channel customer service software that can help ecommerce businesses streamline their customer support operations. The platform is easy to set up and intuitive to use, since it mimics the interface of your inbox. So you essentially work on a familiar set up with minimal learning curve.
With Hiver, you can centralize your customer conversations, collaborate seamlessly with your team members, and assign all incoming queries to support agents. This ensures customer inquiries are addressed promptly and consistently, leading to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Here are some features that make Hiver a great fit for ecommerce businesses:
- Multichannel support across email, live chat, knowledge base, and voice to interact with customers on the channels they prefer
- All incoming customer queries can be converted into actionable tasks and assigned to support agents with a few simple clicks. This is especially useful for ecommerce businesses that receive a high volume of customer inquiries.
- Create templated responses to common customer queries using the Email Templates feature. This saves time and ensures consistent responses to frequently asked questions.
- Smooth internal collaboration features to enable your agents to work together on customer issues and solve them effortlessly. This ensures faster resolution of tickets.
- Extensive analytics to track key metrics like first response time, individual turnaround time, and CSAT rating. This helps in evaluating and improving support performance
- Seamless integrations with third-party tools such as Aircall, WhatsApp, Okta, Zapier, QuickBooks, and other applications. This allows ecommerce businesses to work more efficiently without having to switch between multiple applications.
- Its AI copilot acts like a search engine, surfacing the right response for your customers. When a customer asks a question, your support staff doesn’t have to dig through the company’s knowledge base to find the right answer. The copilot does all the heavy lifting. It searches the knowledge base and provides accurate responses that your team can use.
Pricing:
Hiver offers a completely free plan that helps you track and respond to support queries across multiple channels – email, chat, WhatsApp, and phone. But if you want more powerful features such as automations and analytics, you can opt from one of their paid plans:
- Lite: $19/agent/month
- Pro: $49/agent/month
- Elite: $79/agent/month
Free trial: 7 days
2. Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a popular help desk software that offers a suite of solutions for ecommerce businesses to manage and enhance their customer support operations. Features like ticket management, automations, live chat, knowledge base, and reporting makes Freshdesk a good customer service software for ecommerce.
The platform helps them to efficiently handle customer inquiries and deliver exceptional service experiences.
Freshdesk’s customer service software for ecommerce businesses also has a free plan for teams that have limited budgets but require features like ticket management, knowledge base, and collaboration functionalities to streamline their customer support. The plan can be used by up to 10 agents.
Some of the key features that make Freshdesk a good fit for ecommerce businesses are:
- Ecommerce businesses can offer multichannel support with Freshdesk across email, chat, phone, and social media.
- An efficient ticketing system to help online stores track and manage customer conversations.
- Automated self-service across channels that empowers customers to find solutions by themselves. This frees up your agents’ time to resolve more complex issues.
- Integration with ecommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce
- Reporting and analytics features to help ecommerce businesses track and analyze customer support metrics.
The only challenge with Freshdesk is that the interface is quite difficult to configure and use. Aside from this, Freshdesk also lacks seamless integration with Google Workspace products. This means agents will have to keep switching between applications (Gmail and Freshdesk, in this case) to do even simple tasks such as answering a customer email.
Pricing:
Freshdesk offers four pricing plans.
- Free: Starter plan for unlimited agents but with limited features
- Growth: $15 per agent per month billed annually
- Pro: $49 per agent per month billed annually
- Enterprise: $69 per agent per month billed annually
Free trial: 21 days
Recommended reading
3. Gorgias
If you’re an online retailer and are looking for a customer service software for your ecommerce business, check out Gorgias.
The platform focuses on enhancing customer support by providing a range of features that help overcome the challenges faced by online retailers. Some of them include:
- You can offer multichannel customer support across email, social media, live chat, voice, SMS, and WhatsApp
- Gorgias Macros and templated responses help agents respond faster to common customer questions
- Integrations with third-party ecommerce applications such as BigCommerce, Shopify, and Magento.
- View order information and your customer’s shopping history right next to a ticket. This way agents can customize their responses with ease
- Track customer data, support performance and revenue growth to help understand the total number of tickets that converted into sales
Despite its robust features, Gorgias does have a disadvantage when it comes to pricing.
The platform charges users based on ticket volume rather than number of users. This means that the plans support unlimited agents but have a monthly ticket limit.
While this may be alright for small businesses dealing with a relatively lower volume of tickets, it can get quite expensive for larger businesses.
Pricing:
Gorgias has five pricing tiers.
- Starter: 50 tickets/month at $10/month/can only be billed monthly
- Basic: 300 tickets/month at $50/month/billed annually
- Pro: 2000 tickets/month at $300/month/billed annually
- Advanced: 5000 tickets/month at $750/month/billed annually
- Enterprise: Custom ticket volume and pricing
4. Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk allows you to manage customer inquiries and support requests from various channels such as email, live chat, social media, and phone. This is particularly valuable in ecommerce, where customers may reach out through different communication channels.
The platform also has a free plan for ecommerce businesses with minimal support needs.
Zoho Desk also has several other features that make it a good fit for ecommerce businesses.
- Advanced process automation to help you design customer service workflows with ease. It automates complex, multi-step business processes and helps in improving efficiency and reducing errors. A good example is how the refund process works. When a customer initiates a refund request, the automation system triggers a review process. The validity of the request is compared against the predefined criteria of the company’s refund policy. Once the criteria is met, the automation system calculates the refund amount based on certain parameters and a payment reversal process is triggered. The customer is notified of this update through an automated email or message.
- Convert posts or messages sent to your company’s social media handles into tickets and route them to the appropriate agents
- Intuitive chatbots that analyze customer sentiment in every ticket enabling agents to prioritize and respond appropriately
One of the biggest challenges with Zoho Desk is that it is difficult to set up and use. The interface is complex and can take your agents some time to get used to.
Pricing:
Zoho Desk offers five different pricing options
- Free: Up to 3 agents
- Express: $7/agent/month up to 5 agents
- Standard: $14/agent/month
- Professional: $23/agent/month
- Enterprise: $40/agent/month
Recommended reading
5. Zendesk
Zendesk‘s customer service software for ecommerce assists online retailers in cultivating strong customer relationships by enhancing every facet of the customer journey. The platform provides a comprehensive suite of solutions, that includes phone support software, email support, customer service analytics, and social media management, amongst others.
Zendesk enables retailers to seamlessly adjust to evolving consumer expectations and expand their operations as they grow.
Here’s why Zendesk might be a good fit for your online retail store:
- Get a complete overview of customer profiles through data gathered across inventory, billing, shopping history, and purchases. This makes it easier for you to personalize your customer interactions
- Multichannel support across email, live chat, social media, and voice channels
- Automations that help answer common customer queries. This ensures that your customer support team can focus on more complex tasks
- Analytics to track real-time and historical data that help understand customer behavior and purchase trends.
All this being said, Zendesk does have a few drawbacks. The platform has a complex pricing plan which can be difficult to understand. Basic support features cost extra and you end up paying nearly 51% more with Zendesk as compared to a help desk like Hiver.
Aside from this, 24/7 customer support and onboarding assistance can only be availed at a premium, and even then users often complain of long wait times.
Pricing:
Zendesk’s Support plan has three pricing tiers.
- Team: $19/user/month
- Professional: $55/user/month
- Enterprise: $115/user/month
Zendesk also has a Suite plan that offers four pricing tiers.
- Team: $55/user/month
- Growth: $89/user/month
- Professional: $115/user/month
- Enterprise: Custom
6. Intercom
Intercom is a customer service tool for ecommerce businesses to support and engage their customers.
One of the key features of Intercom is the platform’s AI bot Fin, powered by OpenAI. It can resolve complex issues and provide highly accurate responses to customer queries. The sophisticated AI technology is capable of addressing support requests without involving human agents and this helps drastically reduce ticket volumes.
In cases where Fin cannot resolve a query, it ropes in your support agents, ensuring a seamless experience for your customers.
Here’s what makes Intercom a good customer service software for ecommerce businesses.
- Multichannel support across live chat, email, SMS, and other channels to help reduce support volumes and elevate the shopping experience
- Promotional and transactional messaging options to keep customers engaged and give them crucial information (ex. password changes, shipping delays, promotional offers) on time
- No-code builders to help you design smart automations that can take care of repetitive tasks such as ticket prioritizing and routing, following up with inactive customers, customer feedback, and more
One of the biggest challenges with Intercom however is its steep pricing. Small businesses may find it too expensive especially if you require features such as automation, chatbots, or integrations. Vendor support is also reported to be limited and quite slow.
Pricing:
Intercom has three pricing plans.
- Essential: $39/agent/month
- Advanced: $99/agent/month
- Expert: $139/agent/month
Free trial: 14 days
7. Help Scout
Help Scout is a shared inbox tool that can help ecommerce stores grow their business through personalized support. The platform’s most noteworthy feature is their AI technology that can boost the productivity of your support teams.
If your support agents tend to spend copious amounts of time going through long email threads to find important information such as the nature of a customer query or previous resolution paths, Help Scout’s AI Summarize is exactly what you need.
The feature condenses information from emails into bullet points, giving your support agents all the context they need. This saves time, boosts productivity, and enables faster resolutions.
Here are some features that make Help Scout a good tool for your ecommerce business:
- Multichannel support across email, live chat, and knowledge base
- A single platform through which you can track, prioritize, and respond to customer queries
- Deliver faster support by viewing all the relevant customer information alongside every support ticket
- Powerful automations to take care of repetitive tasks such as sending automatic replies, escalating responses, and assigning requests to teammates.
However, users have reported certain limitations when using Help Scout. The interface is quite complex and requires extensive training to get started with. Aside from this, reporting capabilities are quite limited with Help Scout. Basic analytics such as tracking call or live chat durations are absent in Help Scout.
Pricing:
Help Scout has three pricing plans.
- Standard: $20/user/month
- Plus: $40/user/month
- Pro: $65/user/month
Free trial: 15 days
Recommended reading
How to Choose the Right Customer Service Software for Ecommerce
Not every support tool is built with ecommerce in mind. Some are clunky. Some miss the basics. Others just don’t scale when your order volume spikes.
Here’s what to look for in a customer service software for ecommerce:
1. A centralized platform for all customer conversations.
Your customers might message you on Instagram, follow up over email, and then call for a status update. If your team can’t view this as one ongoing conversation, context gets lost.
Choose software that unifies all support channels into one dashboard. It should let agents see the full history of every interaction, regardless of the channel.
2. Intelligent assignment and workload balancing
If support queries are assigned randomly or picked up manually, it leads to confusion, uneven workload, or worse, things falling through the cracks. Look for tools that let you auto-route tickets based on priority, query type, or agent availability. Bonus if it supports skill-based routing for more complex queries.
3. Automation for repetitive tasks
Tagging issues, sending out-of-office replies, or following up on unresolved queries shouldn’t be done manually. These slow your team down and increase the chance of errors. Good customer service software lets you automate these repetitive tasks with clear workflows, so your agents can focus on solving real problems.
4. Real-time analytics and performance tracking
You need insight into how well your team is doing. Choose tools that let you track response time, resolution rates, ticket spikes, agent productivity, and CSAT. The tool should also offer dashboards that are easy to interpret without needing a data analyst.
5. Easy to set up and intuitive to use
If the tool is clunky, your agents won’t use it. Worse, you’ll spend weeks on training and onboarding. Look for a clean, user-friendly interface that requires minimal setup and integrates well with tools your team already uses.
Examples of Brands Nailing Ecommerce Customer Service
1. New York Custom Labels
New York Custom Labels prints barcode and product labels for ecommerce sellers. But with order volumes spiking and queries coming in nonstop, their old system couldn’t keep up.
They invested in a customer service software, to centralize all queries for better visibility.
And once they did that, their team was able to:
- Assign queries faster using the centralized platform
- Cut their first response time by 50%
- Eliminate confusion around who’s replying to what. Because the tool notified everytime an agent drafted a response to a query in real time.
This lets them scale support without adding more people. It also ensured that customer questions never got missed, when when the volume increased.
2. Beer Cartel
Beer Cartel is an Australian brand that sells craft beer online. The brand aimed to better understand customer preferences to enhance their offerings. They conducted comprehensive surveys to gather insights into customer tastes and preferences.
After analyzing the survey responses for days together, they were able to tailor their product selection more closely to customer desires. They saw significantly less number of customer complaints and also saw an improved CSAT score after releasing their new offerings.
This again proves the importance of customer feedback. If you analyze them and work on it, customers notice and appreciate that.
Trends Shaping Ecommerce Customer Service Software
Ecommerce is no longer just about fast shipping. Customers expect fast, helpful support across every step, from browsing to checkout to post-delivery hiccups.
Here are five trends that are changing how ecommerce teams deliver customer service:
1. AI is becoming a co-pilot, not just a bot
Basic chatbots are out. Today, AI is deeply embedded in the agent workflow, acting as a second brain, not a script generator. Here’s how AI facilitates in customer service:
- Email summarization: AI condenses long email threads so that agents can get full context before responding, without going through the entire conversation.
- Smart suggestions: Based on tone, query type, and past interactions, AI tools recommend replies.
- Auto-drafted emails: Agents get pre-written drafts tailored to the customer’s order history, shipping status, and sentiment.
- Answer common questions: AI also suggest responses to the agents by searching through the knowledge base for the right answer to customer queries. This saves your agents time considerably.
2. Automation help you deliver proactive service
Support isn’t just reactive anymore. Top-performing teams are solving problems before the customer even asks.
Brands do not provide reactive support anymore. Teams are now solving problems before the customer even asks.
For example,
- If a shipment is delayed, an automated workflow sends a status update before complaints roll in.
- If a customer browses the returns policy twice, a chat prompt offers help.
- If multiple failed payments happen, customer service tools alert support automatically, to step in with alternatives.
Automation like these cut down frustration and reduce repetitive queries significantly.
3. Smarter reporting features
Legacy systems flood teams with dashboards and data no one acts on. Newer ecommerce software focus on clarity and action.
You get:
- Real-time notifications when SLAs are about to breach
- Visual heatmaps of when ticket volume peaks (e.g., post-campaign or delivery windows)
- Agent-level performance breakdowns to spot burnout or training needs
Strong analytics like these help growing ecommerce brands take decisions on hiring, scaling, and prioritization faster.
The Best Customer Service Software for Your Ecommerce Business
As technology evolves and customer expectations rise, investing in the right customer service software offers a competitive advantage for ecommerce businesses and helps them to foster a customer-centric culture.
A multichannel help desk like Hiver allows you to offer delightful customer experiences without overcomplicating things. Whether it’s managing customer queries, offering multi-channel support, or leveraging automation, Hiver caters to the unique needs of online retailers
If you’d like to know more about how Hiver can help your ecommerce business, simply sign up for a free trial and learn how you can elevate customer service.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What makes Hiver unique amongst the different customer service software for ecommerce?
Hiver stands out for its integration directly into Gmail, providing a seamless experience for managing customer service without the need for switching between applications. It offers features such as multichannel support, email templates for common queries, and extensive analytics to track and improve customer service performance.
2. What are the pricing plans for Hiver? Is there a free trial available?
Hiver offers three pricing plans: Lite at $19/agent/month, Pro at $49/agent/month, and Elite at $79/agent/month. There is also a 7-day free trial available for new users to test out the platform’s features.
3. What should I consider when choosing a customer service software for my ecommerce business?
Consider factors such as the volume of customer inquiries, preferred communication channels, integration capabilities with your current tools, the ease of use of the software, and your budget. It’s also beneficial to look for software that offers scalability to grow with your business.
4. How do these customer service platforms handle multichannel support?
Most of the listed platforms, including Hiver, Freshdesk, and Gorgias, offer support across multiple channels like email, live chat, social media, and voice. This allows businesses to interact with customers on their preferred channels, improving customer satisfaction and engagement.
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