TL;DR:

• Upselling increases revenue without increasing traffic. By encouraging customers already on your site to buy a higher-priced version or larger quantity, you raise average order value without spending more on acquisition.
• The right touchpoint matters as much as the right offer. Product pages, cart, checkout, and post-purchase email each create distinct upsell opportunities, and matching the offer type to the moment is what makes it feel helpful rather than pushy.
• Personalization and segmentation improve acceptance rates. Repeat customers, high-AOV buyers, and active cart builders are your most receptive segments. Generic offers shown to everyone convert poorly and risk alienating first-time visitors.
• Social proof and clear comparisons reduce friction. Side-by-side tables, "most popular" labels, and review counts help customers feel confident about upgrading without needing to do additional research elsewhere.
• Track AOV, acceptance rate, and CLTV together. AOV shows immediate impact, acceptance rate reveals offer quality, and customer lifetime value tells you whether your upsell program is building long-term revenue or trading it for short-term gains.

Personalized product recommendations, the engine behind most upselling, drive between 10 and 30 percent of ecommerce revenue, according to McKinsey. For context, that's revenue you're generating from customers already on your site, already in a buying mindset, without spending another dollar on acquisition.

That's the case for upselling. A shopper who's already decided to buy is far easier to sell to than someone you haven't reached yet. Getting that person to upgrade or add on costs a fraction of what you'd spend finding a new customer from scratch.

The 11 strategies below cover how to do that well: where to place offers, how to frame them, which tools make execution easier, and how to measure what's actually working.

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1. Run side-by-side comparisons on product pages

The most effective upsell doesn't feel like a sales push. It feels like helping a customer make a better decision.

Side-by-side comparison tables do exactly that: they make the value difference between tiers concrete, so customers can see what they gain by upgrading rather than being told to spend more.

Apple does this across every product line. Each MacBook tier sits in a column showing processor speed, memory, storage, and price. Customers see exactly where the extra cost goes and choose accordingly. Ahrefs marks their mid-tier plan "Most Popular" on their pricing page, using social proof to guide customers away from the cheapest option toward a plan that delivers more value.

Key elements that make comparisons work: clear feature differentiation (not just price), a highlighted recommended tier, and honest tradeoffs. Customers trust comparisons that acknowledge what the base option does well and explain specifically why the upgrade is worth it for certain use cases.

2. Use "Frequently Bought Together" and bundle offers

Customers who've added something to their cart have declared intent. The question is whether you can help them see what else they'll need before they figure it out on their own, after delivery, when you've already lost the moment.

Amazon's "Frequently Bought Together" is the canonical example. A laptop listing shows a mouse, carrying case, and USB hub with a one-click "Add all to cart" button. It works because the suggestions are genuinely useful and the friction to accept is near zero.

For your store, bundles work best when they solve a predictable need:

• A camera sold with a memory card and carrying case
• A skincare starter set pairing cleanser, toner, and moisturizer
• A coffee subscription that bundles beans with a grinder for first-time buyers

The logic should always be: what does this customer need to actually get value from what they're buying?

Read more: Best practices for ecommerce upselling

3. Trigger one-click upsells at checkout

Checkout is the highest-intent moment in the entire customer journey.

Payment information is already entered, the purchase decision is made, and the customer is in transaction mode. That's why one-click upsells convert so well here. The barrier to adding an upgrade is as low as it gets.

The rule is one offer, not three. A single relevant upgrade presented clearly at checkout will outperform a carousel of options every time. Multiple offers create decision fatigue and slow down a process customers want to finish quickly.

For Shopify stores, apps like One Click Upsell handle this natively. Customers can add the upgrade with a single tap, without being rerouted through a new product page.

Keep the upgrade within the 25 to 50 percent price range of the original item. A customer checking out a $40 product will seriously consider a $55 upgrade. They'll ignore a $120 one, no matter how well you frame it.

4. Offer quantity breaks and subscribe-and-save

For consumables and repeat-purchase products, quantity-based upsells are often the most natural offer you can make. A customer buying one tube of toothpaste or one bag of coffee is going to need more eventually. The question is whether they buy it from you now or from someone else later.

Quantity breaks ("Buy 3, save 20%") lower per-unit cost while raising total order value. Subscribe-and-save takes it further: you get recurring revenue and the customer gets a discount and one less thing to remember.

The key is making the math visible. "Save $8.40 per month" is more compelling than "15% off." Show customers exactly what they keep in their pocket for committing to the larger quantity or the subscription.

5. Deploy proactive live chat at key moments

Most live chat is reactive. Customers reach out when they have a problem. Proactive chat flips that: you initiate the conversation at moments when a customer is most likely to need guidance and most open to a recommendation.

The highest-value moments to trigger proactive chat:

• A customer spends several minutes on a product page without adding to cart. They're comparing or uncertain, which is a great moment to surface the premium version.
• A customer adds to cart but doesn't check out within a few minutes. This is your window to address objections, answer questions, and suggest an upgrade if relevant.
• A customer's cart is close to a free shipping threshold. Recommend a relevant add-on that gets them there.

When a support agent or an AI can recommend the right upgrade in the context of a real question, acceptance rates are meaningfully higher than generic pop-ups. The offer feels like help, not a sales pitch.

Read more: How to choose the right live chat software for ecommerce

6. Turn support interactions into upsell moments

Your customer support team talks to more customers than any other function in your business. Every ticket is a touchpoint and a potential upsell moment, if handled well.

The moments with the most natural upsell potential:

• ‍Returns and exchanges. Instead of processing a return, an agent can recommend a different product that better fits the customer's needs. The customer gets a solution and you keep the revenue.‍
• Positive reviews or post-purchase check-ins. A quick "since you loved X, you might want to try Y" feels like a reward, not a pitch.‍
• General product questions. A customer asking how to use a product is already engaged. This is a natural moment to mention a complementary item or upgrade.

For this to work at scale, agents need two things. First, the right tools: a product picker inside the helpdesk so they can pull recommendations without switching tabs. Second, the right incentives: visibility into which interactions convert to revenue, and recognition for agents who drive it.

Read more: How customer support incentives can boost performance and lift revenue

7. Use post-purchase emails to drive upgrades

The transaction is complete, but the upsell window isn't closed.

Post-purchase emails, timed well, are one of the highest-converting channels for upgrade offers. The customer is engaged with your brand and has just demonstrated trust by buying.

A few approaches that work:

• ‍Thank-you page offers. Before the customer closes the tab, present one relevant offer. A subscription upsell ("Never run out — subscribe and save 15%") or a related premium product works well while the purchase is still top of mind.‍
• Reorder timing. For consumables, send a reorder email timed to when the product is likely running low. Day 25 of a 30-day supplement supply is the right moment, not day 5 and not day 35.‍
• Follow-up sequences. A week after delivery, once the customer has actually used the product, is a good moment to suggest the upgrade or the companion item.

Tools like Klaviyo make this sequencing straightforward, and the Gorgias-Klaviyo integration lets you unify customer support and marketing data so your post-purchase emails reflect what you already know about each customer.

Read more: How to build ecommerce email marketing automation flows

8. Add social proof to your upgrade options

When customers are choosing between a standard and premium option, they're looking for validation that the upgrade is worth it. Social proof gives them that validation without requiring them to trust your copy alone.

Tactics that move the needle:

• "Most popular" labels on mid-tier products. The label itself nudges customers toward the validated choice.
• Review counts and ratings displayed prominently on premium options. A $45 product with 4.7 stars and 2,000 reviews next to a $30 product with 4.2 stars and 200 reviews tells its own story.
• Customer quotes that reference the upgrade specifically. "I almost went with the basic model — so glad I upgraded" is more persuasive than any headline you'll write.

People default to popular choices when uncertain. Make the crowd's preference visible and you reduce the friction that keeps customers from committing to the better option.

9. Segment your upsell offers by customer type

A generic upsell offer shown to every visitor converts poorly and risks annoying customers who aren't ready for it. The brands with the strongest upsell performance treat different customers differently.

Three segments that consistently respond well:‍

1. ‍Repeat customers already trust your brand and understand your product quality. The relationship is established. These customers will appreciate premium recommendations far more than a first-time buyer who's still evaluating you.‍
2. High-AOV customers have already demonstrated willingness to spend. They're less price-sensitive and more feature-focused. Lead with quality and capability, not discounts.‍
3. Active cart builders, customers who add multiple items or spend significant time comparing products, show strong purchase intent. A well-timed upgrade recommendation can tip them toward a larger purchase naturally.

For loyalty-based segmentation, integrations with tools like Yotpo or LoyaltyLion pull review history and loyalty tier data directly into your helpdesk, giving agents the context they need to know when a customer is ready for a recommendation.

Read more: How to implement a personalized customer service strategy

10. Keep price jumps in the 25 to 50 percent range

Price anchoring affects how customers perceive upgrades more than most brands realize.

An upgrade that costs 30 percent more than the base option feels like a smart choice. One that costs 200 percent more feels like a completely different purchase and triggers the mental equivalent of starting the decision process over.

The 25 to 50 percent rule holds across most product categories. A customer considering a $40 item will seriously evaluate a $50 to $60 upgrade. They'll dismiss a $120 option as out of scope, even if it's objectively a better product.

This matters most for on-page upsells and checkout offers, where you're catching customers mid-decision. For post-purchase emails and loyalty campaigns, you have more room. The customer has already committed to your brand and a bigger recommendation feels less jarring.

When in doubt, present the upgrade in terms of value per use or cost per day rather than sticker price. "That's $0.30 more per use for twice the capacity" lands differently than "upgrade for $40 more."

11. A/B test your offers continuously

The first version of any upsell offer is rarely the best one. Headline copy, discount structure, placement, timing, and visual design all affect conversion, and the winning combination isn't always the intuitive one.

A/B testing systematically removes that guesswork. Run two versions of an offer on a subset of traffic, let statistical significance accumulate, and roll out the winner. Then test the next variable.

What to test:

• Headline copy: "Save 20% when you buy 3" vs. "Never run out — buy 3 and save"
• Discount structure: Percentage off vs. dollar amount off vs. free shipping threshold
• Placement: Product page vs. cart vs. checkout
• Timing: Immediate vs. delayed trigger for proactive chat
• Number of options: One upgrade offer vs. two

Track acceptance rate (how often customers take the offer) and AOV lift (how much the average order increases when the offer is present) as your primary metrics. Conversion rate alone won't tell you whether an upsell is working. You need to know if the customers who see it are actually spending more.

Read more: How to improve your ecommerce conversion rate

Where to deploy upsells across the customer journey

Different stages of the purchase journey create different opportunities. Matching the offer type to the moment is what separates upsells that feel helpful from ones that feel pushy.

Tools that make upselling easier

You don't need to build upsell logic from scratch. These tools handle the heavy lifting:

• One Click Upsell — Checkout upsells for Shopify with single-tap acceptance
• In Cart Upsell & Cross Sell — Product recommendations in the cart drawer before checkout
• AfterSell — Post-purchase upsell offers on thank-you pages and via follow-up email
• Gorgias Shopping Assistant — Guides shoppers toward the right product, including premium options, through conversational recommendations on your site

How to measure upselling performance

Three metrics tell you whether your upsell program is working.

Average order value (AOV) is the most direct signal. Compare AOV before and after implementing upsell offers. If it's rising, customers are accepting upgrades. If it's flat, your offers aren't landing. Either the product, the timing, or the price gap is off.

Acceptance rate measures how often customers who see an upsell offer actually take it. This isolates offer quality from traffic volume. A low acceptance rate on a high-traffic offer is a signal to rethink the offer, not show it to more people.

Customer lifetime value (CLTV) shows the long-term effect. Effective upselling, especially to subscriptions and larger quantities, should improve CLTV by establishing higher-value purchase patterns. If CLTV drops after introducing upsell tactics, you may be converting short-term revenue at the cost of long-term retention.

Attach rate (how often upsells are added to a base purchase) and incremental revenue (revenue directly attributed to upsell tactics vs. baseline) are worth tracking as secondary metrics once the core program is in place.

Read more: The ecommerce KPIs every growing business should track

The best upsell is a well-timed conversation

The brands with the strongest upsell programs share one thing: they treat upselling as a service, not a sales tactic. Every upgrade offer answers a real customer need — a better product for their use case, a quantity that fits their habits, a bundle that saves them a separate trip back to your site.

When that logic drives your strategy, acceptance rates go up, returns go down, and the customers who buy the premium version come back more often.

Most upsell tactics happen passively: a pop-up, a table, a checkout prompt. But the highest-converting upsell moment is a live conversation, when a customer is asking a question and already telling you exactly what matters to them.

That's where Shopping Assistant comes in. It handles customer questions in real time and recommend the right product, including upgrades, based on what that specific customer is actually asking about. No generic pop-ups. No irrelevant bundles.

Book a demo to see how it works for your store.

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TL;DR:

• Great customer service drives more than just satisfaction — it generates revenue. Retaining customers, increasing order sizes, and gaining referrals are key ways to grow your bottom line through excellent support.
• Customer feedback is a goldmine for improvement. Use insights from support tickets, surveys, and conversations to address common pain points and refine processes.
• Automation and self-service options enhance efficiency. Automate repetitive requests like WISMO and offer self-service resources so agents can focus on complex interactions.‍
• Train agents for deeper product knowledge. Providing agents with comprehensive training ensures they can handle inquiries confidently.

Many customer service guides focus on individual actions: be patient, show empathy, and listen actively. While these customer support tips are valuable, they only scratch the surface. 

The goal of ecommerce customer service isn’t just to please customers. Just like any function of a business, great customer service has to drive revenue — and having positive interactions with customers is just one part of that goal. Excellent customer service can help an online store grow its bottom line revenue through:

• Better customer retention (and more loyal customers)
• Higher average order volume (AOV) from loyal customers
• Better word-of-mouth advertising and referrals from high net promoter score
• More chances to drive sales with new customers through proactive customer service

With that in mind, here are 20 customer support tips for improvements on many levels, from operational changes down to individual agents’ day-to-day.

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Tips for making high-impact changes to your customer experience

For a top-down revamp, focus on high-impact, cost-effective changes that customer support leaders can implement. 

Here are five tips to tackle major customer service challenges and elevate your service experience:

1. Collect and use customer feedback

Customer feedback is the single best resource to improve the overall quality of your product and customer experience. Analyzing customer feedback from support tickets, NPS and CSAT surveys, and face-to-face conversations can surface patterns harming customer satisfaction and opportunities for improvement. 

Consider the following example: if customers frequently ask questions about return policies, you may need to make the policy clearer. Or, if feedback shows frustration with response times, consider implementing real-time support options, such as social media, chat, or SMS. You could also consider using automation and templated responses to resolve common questions quickly.

These direct channels provide immediate answers and reduce wait times for customers who want quick resolutions.

Your customer service team can use feedback to share insights with product, shipping, and other teams—often leading to broader improvements. For example, feedback about shipping issues can guide adjustments in fulfillment, while comments on product quality can drive updates in manufacturing. 

We recommend setting up a system to pass feedback to relevant departments. With Gorgias, you can automatically tag feedback for specific teams, create custom views, and invite team members to access this feedback directly. Plus, with unlimited seats on most Gorgias plans, it’s easy to involve everyone who needs to see it.

2. Automate simple ticket requests such as WISMO to let agents focus on valuable conversations

Automating responses to frequently asked questions, such as “where is my order” (WISMO), has two major benefits. First, it reduces response times by instantly providing answers to common inquiries. Fast, accurate responses to these questions are crucial for reducing customer effort.

Second, automation lets your agents focus on more complex inquiries. Without having to handle repetitive tickets, they can prioritize high-impact conversations that involve troubleshooting or personalized assistance. In practice, this means fewer hours spent on “one-size-fits-all” tickets and more time available to resolve unique customer issues and address inquiries that require customer service skills.

3. Provide self-service options

Most customers prefer to find answers on their own when possible––according to Heretto, customers overwhelmingly prefer self-service solutions as their first point of contact for support.

Options like knowledge bases, detailed FAQ pages, and interactive help centers help customers solve issues independently, without relying on customer service representatives.

Here’s a quick breakdown of effective self-service solutions:

• FAQ pages: Concise answers to frequently asked questions about shipping, return policies, and product details.
• Knowledge bases: Comprehensive guides covering product use, troubleshooting, and company policies.
• Automated chat: Quick responses that guide customers through standard issues, providing an “in-person” feel while freeing up your support team.

Automated chat bridge self-service and hands-on support, offering customers a personalized experience without tying up your team. With Gorgias, you can set up flows in your help center or chat, allowing customers to find answers or track and modify orders—all without waiting for an agent.

Read our complete guide to customer self-service.

4. Train agents to have a strong understanding of your products and processes

Effective customer service skills go beyond soft skills like empathy. Agents need a deep understanding of your product to give accurate advice and solve issues effectively. Similarly, they need to deeply understand customer service techniques and processes (for things like escalation and returns) to give clear, accurate instructions. 

Here’s how you can set your customer service reps up for success:

1. Product knowledge: Agents should have a strong command of product details, features, and common troubleshooting steps. When they know the product inside and out, they can solve customer issues faster and with more confidence.
2. Process knowledge: Every company has unique processes, from returns to issue escalation. Clear instructions help agents navigate these processes smoothly and give customers a streamlined experience.
3. Customer service training: Empathy and positive language are crucial in customer service. An agent who can put themselves in the customer’s shoes, show understanding, and avoid negative language is more likely to resolve issues successfully. For example, phrases like “I understand how this must be frustrating” validate the customer’s experience and demonstrate that the agent is there to help.

When guiding customers—like through checkout—agents must provide accurate information to avoid negative interactions. Macros help standardize responses and reduce human error. 

In training, prioritize product knowledge and create an internal knowledge base for quick reference. It’s also key to train agents on your service tools. Gorgias Academy offers courses and certifications, along with help center documentation for setting up automation and managing accounts. 

Plus, our help center has detailed documentation on how to configure your account, set up new automation, and so much more.

Explore effective ways to organize your customer service team for a more streamlined operation.

5. Track your customer service's impact on your brand's revenue

Exceptional customer service doesn’t just benefit the customer—it can also contribute significantly to revenue. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat buyers, and customer loyalty directly impacts long-term revenue. 

In-depth tracking is a challenge, but you can start by seeing how many customers place an order within five days of a customer service interaction and attribute that revenue to customer service.

If you want more suggestions, check out our list of 25 customer support metrics, which walk through revenue-related metrics like customer churn, revenue backlog, and more. 

Tracking this revenue contribution will help you understand the value of great customer service. With revenue statistics, brands can access detailed metrics and analysis regarding how much revenue their customer service team generates. By using Gorgias to analyze support ticket details and identify sales trends, you'll be able to figure out what works and what doesn't and use data to develop a customer service strategy optimized for revenue generation.​​

Explore more about how to drive customer retention through effective customer service.

4 Tips for driving sales through customer service

Customer service is more than damage control—it’s a chance to boost sales and drive revenue. By empowering your team to focus on increasing customer satisfaction, you can turn each interaction into a sales opportunity.

Here are three tips to help you get started:

6. Enable chat at checkout

Around 70% of all online shopping carts get abandoned. While there are many reasons why shoppers abandon shopping carts, questions or issues arising during the checkout process are some of the most common reasons.

Adding Gorgias chat to your checkout page helps prevent this by allowing customers to request help instantly.

With Gorgias, you can also reach out proactively during checkout—offering assistance, reminding customers of free shipping thresholds, or sharing discounts. This approach reduces cart abandonment and boosts average order value through strategic upsells and recommendations.

7. Proactively reach out during the shopping journey

You can boost conversion rates by proactively assisting customers through chat at key points in their journey. For example, if a customer has placed best-selling items in their cart, reaching out with a discount or answering questions could make the difference between a completed purchase and an abandoned cart.

By offering discounts, personalized recommendations, or quick assistance, you can turn an abandoned cart into a completed sale.

With Gorgias, you can automate these interactions through Gorgias Convert. Trigger responses based on customer actions—like adding high-value items or pausing on the checkout page.

Taking proactive approach drives sales and reduces cart abandonment, even when your customer service agents are offline.

3 Tips for boosting agent productivity

Boosting agent productivity speeds up response and resolution times, freeing your team to focus on delivering value. Here are three effective customer service techniques to help eliminate productivity blockers:

8. Encourage regular breaks

Sitting for prolonged periods takes a mental and a physical toll on a person, even if they don't notice it at first. 

Taking brief breaks throughout the day helps agents stay focused and reduces burnout. Something as simple as stepping away for a few minutes or doing light stretches can reset their energy and prepare them to handle the next ticket with a clear mind.

9. Set clear goals

Setting daily and long-term goals provides direction for customer service reps and keeps productivity high.

Setting daily goals keeps agents focused and motivated. These short-term goals might include:

• Resolving unresolved tickets from the previous day
• Addressing urgent requests or flagged issues
• Staying updated on team changes, like new tickets or inventory updates

Setting long-term goals helps reps stay committed to growing and developing their skillset, some goals might include: 

• Building product knowledge and customer service skills
• Providing feedback and support to help the team grow
• Reducing response times for specific inquiries

Encourage agents to discuss any roadblocks openly. By supporting them through challenges, you create a positive environment that helps them achieve their goals without added stress.

10. Prepare your workspace

With remote work becoming the norm––87% of support agents worked from home in 2021 maintaining a clear boundary between work and home life is essential. Creating a dedicated "work corner" helps remote agents stay productive.

Here are some tips to help you set up a workspace optimized for productivity:

• Use natural lighting, a nice comfy chair, and a few decorations to make your workspace more comfortable and inviting.
• Write a task plan for the workday, and then cross out everything you complete. Not only is it satisfying to cross things off the list, but it can motivate you for the day ahead.

3 Tips for avoiding common customer support mistakes

Avoiding common mistakes is just as crucial as following best practices. Here are three frequent support agent pitfalls to watch out for to protect your brand’s reputation and meet customer expectations:

11. Never interrupt customers

One of the most critical rules in customer service is to never interrupt a customer. Your customers may think you don’t want to listen to them and don’t respect them. 

They probably aren't going to be very happy as a result — even if the rep who interrupted does eventually resolve their issue.

12. Use inappropriate language

Words can have a huge impact on people. A customer support team needs to understand the power of words and always use positive language while avoiding phrases that customers could interpret as rude.

Check out our guide to customer service phrases for additional phrases to avoid.

13. Use canned responses strategically

Canned responses speed up replies but can fall flat if overused. The best practice? Personalize each response—adding the customer’s name or tweaking it for the situation can make a big difference.

That way, agents don’t need to recreate the wheel with every response, but it still puts a personal touch on each response; even something as small as including the customer’s name can make a big difference. 

Avoid canned responses if you’re unsure what the customer needs. And if there’s no relevant template, ask a teammate instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all answer.

Check out these 16 email templates to get started. Or, if you use phone support heavily, check out these customer service scripts.

6 Tips for handling angry customers

Handling unhappy customers is one of the toughest but most important parts of support. 

Here are six tips to help your team turn complaints into good customer experiences.

14. Try to always use positive language

Customers may not always have the kindest words for support agents, but it’s essential for your agents to always use positive language themselves — no matter what the customer is saying to them.

For example:

• Instead of “I might be able to help,” say, “I can definitely help with that.”
• Replace “Don’t get angry; I’m going to help you” with “I’m so sorry you’re experiencing this. Let me fix it for you.”

Training agents to use positive language helps build better customer relationships. Creating a library of positive response scripts can also be a valuable resource for your team.

15. Keep your composure

Dealing with angry customers can be challenging, but staying calm is crucial to avoid negative fallout. If emotions take over, customers may share their experience online, potentially deterring future shoppers.

Here are a few tips to keep your cool:

• Address requests from upset customers promptly. Reassure them by involving others if needed.
• Use clear explanations and soft skills. Stay composed to keep the interaction positive.

For more insights, check out our guide to handling angry customer emails.

16. Put yourself in the customer's shoes

Attempting to fully understand a customer's problems first before you try to resolve them can go a long way. 

Empathy is the ability to understand the issue from their perspective. Practicing this often leads to deeper understanding and better solutions.

17. Be transparent about what happened

Brands should take ownership of mistakes rather than cover them up. Be completely transparent about whatever happened, as your customers will likely get agitated if they feel like you're giving them the runaround.

Your customers need to know you’re always going the extra mile to help them resolve whatever issue they’re experiencing. If the problem was from your end, you need to communicate what you’re doing to prevent it from happening again.

18. Practice active listening

No matter the outcome, customers want to feel heard. If agents aren’t truly listening, frustration can grow.

Active listening means fully understanding the customer’s concerns and responding with feedback that shows you’re paying attention. Repeating details of what a customer tells you back to them is one effective way to demonstrate active listening and is sure to help calm a frustrated customer.

19. Thank the customer for bringing this issue to your attention

When an upset customer shares their issue, thank them. Negative feedback is valuable, as it highlights areas for improvement. Showing genuine appreciation reassures customers that you’re committed to solving their problem, which can help diffuse frustration.

With Gorgias and Yotpo, you can track customer reviews to tailor responses or even launch win-back campaigns, like offering a discount. 

Better customer support experience, better customer journey — more revenue generation

Implement a few of these customer support tips and see how much you boost revenue and productivity. Start by giving your customer service reps in-depth product training and automating simple responses that don’t require a human touch. 

Find out how Gorgias' industry-leading customer service tools helped Kirby Allison boost conversions by 23% after automating 30% of tickets. 

To learn more about how Gorgias' cutting-edge customer service and automation features can help you improve customer service at every level, book a demo with Gorgias.

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Inventory management and order fulfillment are often two of the more time-consuming tasks of running a Shopify store. However, the ability to ship orders on time is also key for ecommerce businesses to deliver a great customer experience. 22% of online shoppers will abandon their order if they see that it will take too long to be delivered.

Relying on a third-party fulfillment solution is one way to mitigate the challenges of order fulfillment and provide the speedy fulfillment services that today's customers have come to expect. Of the various fulfillment providers online retailers have available, the Shopify Fulfillment Network is one option to consider for merchants who sell on Shopify.

In this Shopify Fulfillment Network review, we'll cover everything you need to know about outsourcing your order fulfillment responsibilities to Shopify. We'll dive into what the program is and how it works, the biggest benefits it offers to online retailers, comparable alternatives, and a conversation with Supply CEO and co-founder Patrick Coddou on his company's experience with Shopify Fulfillment Network.

Don't have time to read our full review of the Shopify Fulfillment Network? Here’s a summary of our thoughts on the program:

Joining the Shopify Fulfillment Network won't reduce your order fulfillment expenses. As a matter of fact, it will more than likely increase them due to the various fees that Shopify charges as part of the program. However, joining the network will allow you to:

• Save time by completely outsourcing your inventory management and order fulfillment responsibilities
• Offering faster and more reliable fulfillment to customers
• Boost conversion rates by advertising expedited shipping delivery on your website

If you can afford to join the network and don’t have the know-how or in-house capacity to handle fast fulfillment, the SFN. If you’re a small operation and longer shipping times haven’t hurt your purchase rates, then you might consider an alternative fulfillment solution.

What is the Shopify Fulfillment Network?

The Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) program is similar to Amazon's FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon). It lets you ship your products in bulk to a single Shopify warehouse, where they are then distributed to a network of fulfillment centers across the United States and Canada.

Along with inventory storage and warehousing services, SFN also offers ecommerce fulfillment services. When a customer orders one of your products, Shopify will pick and pack the product from the nearest fulfillment center and ship it to the customer on your behalf.

This program allows business owners to reduce the tedious tasks associated with ecommerce fulfillment. It also offers additional benefits as well, such as the ability to provide faster shipping and access to powerful analytics for demand forecasting and improved inventory management.

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The launch of Shopify Fulfillment Network: A brief history lesson

In June 2019, Shopify announced that it would be spending $1 billion to launch the Shopify Fulfillment Network. A few months later, in October 2019, this plan was accelerated when Shopify acquired 6 River Systems — a company that produces robotics for warehouse management.

By October 2020, the SFN had increased its shipping volume by 2.5x compared to the first quarter of 2020. One driving factor behind the network's faster-than-expected growth was the increase in online shopping driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. In comments made to the Wall Street Journal, the program director stated that the pandemic pushed the program's development forward by about 10 years.

In 2022, the SFN continues to go through some understandable growing pains. The program continues to add new merchants and fine-tune its services. Today, the network has nine different centers in North America that are all operated by third-party fulfillment partners.

The key benefits of the Shopify Fulfillment Network

Joining the Shopify Fulfillment Network offers merchants plenty of benefits, allowing them to create a fulfillment operation that essentially runs itself. The biggest benefit of outsourcing your order fulfillment is saved time.

As Sergio Tache, CEO of Dossier says, “I shipped everything myself and made a lot of trips to the post office. It was intense and pretty tough. You quickly reach that breaking point, where you cannot do it any longer, and it’s not worth the compromised quality of life.”

Along with saved time, the SFN offers several other noteworthy benefits, including:

Free customizable packaging

One key benefit of the SFN compared to similar networks such as FBA is that the SFN lets you customize your product packaging. This enables you to develop branded packaging for your products to help market your store instead of shipping your packages in Shopify-branded packaging. This gives you greater control over your branding and marketing overall.

Best of all, packaging comes free to SFN merchants. While there is still a fulfillment cost associated with using the FSN (and it might be higher than your current shipping costs — more on that later), paying for packaging is not one of those expenses.

Simplified inventory management

Even if you sell from multiple marketplaces and sales channels, partnering with the Shopify Fulfillment Network makes inventory management a breeze. All you have to do is ship your products in bulk to a single SFN fulfillment center, and Shopify and its partnering third-party logistics companies will take care of the rest. Shopify even provides recommendations for minimum inventory levels, allocation, and when it's time to reorder products.

All these tedious logistics being handled elsewhere can be a huge weight off your shoulders — and a great way to lighten the load on your employees as well.

By simplifying your inventory management responsibilities, joining the SFN can free you up to focus on other tasks and ensure that you don't encounter any inventory management mistakes that lead to out-of-stock products and unhappy customers.

Real-time analytics for demand forecasting

Another way that the Shopify Fulfillment Network helps simplify inventory management and ensure fulfillment success is through insightful real-time analytics that you can use for demand forecasting. Members of the SFN can look forward to having a wealth of customer data at their disposal — data to forecast demand so that your inventory is kept at optimum levels all year long.

Potential same-day fulfillment

One of the biggest benefits of the Shopify Fulfillment Network is the potential for expedited shipping. Thanks to the network's streamlined and automated order fulfillment process and its strategic inventory distribution, the SFN can ship products to most US customers within two days. In many cases, merchants who are members of the SFN can even offer customers same-day fulfillment. This is nearly impossible for most brands — especially smaller brands — that manage fulfillment in-house.

Given current customer expectations, this ability to offer faster shipping is something that could make your products far more appealing to online shoppers. Research by Deloitte indicates that 67% of online shoppers want their items delivered in two days or less.

Customers don’t just want fast shipping, they want free shipping. Learn how to offer free shipping in our guide.

Seamless inventory distribution through machine learning

One of the ways that the Shopify Fulfillment Network can expedite order fulfillment is through an optimized inventory distribution strategy. By distributing products across a network of fulfillment centers that spans the U.S. and Canada, the SFN can ship orders from the fulfillment center closest to the customer for faster delivery times. And faster delivery times lead to greater customer satisfaction.

Shopify doesn't just spread products across these warehouses blindly, though. Instead, the SFN uses machine learning to predict demand and strategically distribute inventory. This is a strategy that large corporations have been using to optimize their supply chains for several years now. Thanks to the SFN, it's a strategy that ecommerce stores of all sizes can now leverage to meet consumers' increasingly short delivery window expectations.

Shopify Fulfillment Network cost

There's no denying the fact that the Shopify Fulfillment Network offers great functionality and a number of considerable benefits. However, these benefits do come at a cost.

There are several different fees that you will incur as a member of the SFN, and these fees will vary depending on factors such as your inventory volume, the number of product returns that are processed, and more. Shopify doesn't provide pricing for most of these fees and instead requires merchants to apply for the program to receive a custom quote.

However, Shopify does include an interactive tool to estimate the domestic fulfillment rate per item, depending on the number and weight of items, on their website:

One of the more substantial fees that you will incur as a member of the SFN is storage fees. Shopify doesn't charge storage fees for products sold within six months of being shipped to an SFN fulfillment center. But if your products sit for longer than six months, you will begin incurring storage fees of $2.25 per cubic foot per month. This makes it essential to develop an inventory management strategy that limits the number of products sitting in storage for long periods.

If you have any additional requirements, such as the need to put together special bundles for the holiday season, you will have to pay a one-time "special projects" fee. This fee is variable depending on the project's scope but can often be substantial.

Is it worth it? A review of the Shopify Fulfillment Network

Now that we've looked at the benefits and costs of the Shopify Fulfillment Network, the question is whether its benefits outweigh its costs. As with the fees themselves, though, the answer to this question will vary from business to business. To help you decide if joining the SFN is the right choice, let's look at a few instances when it is and is not worth the cost.

There comes a point in a company's growth when many business owners have more money available than time. If you are trying to scale your ecommerce store but are too bogged down by day-to-day responsibilities such as order fulfillment, the SFN can be a great way to take a lot of burdens off your shoulders. However, it won't reduce your shipping costs and will likely increase the money you spend on inventory management and order fulfillment rather than reduce these expenses.

Of course, you need to factor the potential revenue-boosting benefits of the SFN into this calculation. Along with freeing you up to grow your company and make it more profitable, the expedited shipping that the SFN allows may also directly boost your sales by making your offerings more appealing to potential customers.

A few other qualifications can easily determine whether or not your business is a good fit for the Shopify Fulfillment Network. For one, you need not apply to the SFN if you are shipping less than 10 orders per day; the program does not accept merchants with lower volumes, and it wouldn't be worth your time even if they did.

The program is also only available to sellers in the U.S. or Canada, and only to companies with under 2,000 unique SKUs.

If you meet all of these qualifications and can justify the fees, joining the SFN can be an excellent way to scale your company without building your own supply chain from the ground up.

ShipBob: A worthy alternative to the Shopify Fulfillment Network

ShipBob is a third-party order fulfillment provider that offers services similar to those of the Shopify Fulfillment Network. Like the SFN, ShipBob enables you to ship your products in bulk to a single ShipBob warehouse, where they are then distributed to fulfillment centers all over the globe.

The "All over the globe" is actually one advantage that ShipBob has over Shopify’s fulfillment services — with ShipBob, you can ship products from 30+ fulfillment centers across six different countries. Ecommerce businesses that sell to a lot of European and Australian customers are therefore likely better off choosing ShipBob than the Shopify Fulfillment Network.

Like SFN, one of ShipBob’s biggest benefits is helping brands of all sizes offer fast shipping — ShipBob even guarantees two-day shipping everywhere in the US.

ShipBob is a 3PL, or a third-party logistics provider. Shopify itself is not a 3PL, it’s a middleman between Shopify stores and other 3PLs and warehouses. This isn’t a bad thing, per se, but it introduces an additional player and potential for disconnect, confusion, and lack of accountability that you wouldn’t have by partnering directly with a 3PL.

As with the SFN, pricing for ShipBob varies depending on your needs, and ShipBob requires you to contact them for a custom pricing quote. This makes it difficult to compare the cost of ShipBob vs. the cost of the SFN in a blog post. However, ShipBob packs quite a bit more value than SFN due to its focus on order fulfillment and maturity. Here are a few of the pros ShipBob has over Shopify’s fulfillment system:

• Integrations with ecommerce platforms other than Shopify, like Magento and BigCommerce
• More control and visibility into order fulfillment than SFN, which outsources to third-party warehouses
• Five more years of experience than SFN, having operated its own fulfillment centers since 2014
• Better customer support: Because Shopify outsources parts of the process to third parties, you risk finding yourself in a situation where the Shopify support team isn’t sure what went wrong
• Additional features to manage your inventory and supply chain management that Shopify has yet to develop
• The ability to work with brands that ship 80,000+ orders a month (whereas SFN maxes out at 6,200 orders/month)
• A deep integration with Gorgias to sync and display historical and real-time fulfillment data in your helpdesk

Learn more about how Gorgias and ShipBob work together to improve your end-to-end customer experience.

How to apply for the Shopify Fulfillment program

Applying for the Shopify Fulfillment Network is a quick and simple process. All you have to do is create a Shopify account, ensure that your business meets the qualifications to join, and apply online by contacting Shopify. You can start the process by clicking “Learn more” on this page.

Once Shopify receives your application, their team will review your business to see if it is a good fit for the SFN. If accepted, Shopify will provide you with a custom quote detailing all the one-time and ongoing fees you will have to pay. If you choose to proceed, you will gain access to the Shopify Fulfillment Network app within your Shopify store.

How Supply was chosen to be in the Shopify Fulfillment Network

To better understand the value of the Shopify Fulfillment Network, we sat down for a discussion with Patrick Coddou — co-founder and CEO of Supply, the personal-grooming ecommerce store. You can listen to our conversation in the last third of this podcast episode:

From what Patrick remembers, Shopify reached out to him about Supply being one of the early adopters of the Fulfillment Network. Since he has long supported Shopify and openly acknowledges that it allowed him to accomplish his dreams, Patrick was excited about the opportunity. He told us that he sees this as another way that Shopify will continue to change people’s lives for the better, and he wanted to be a part of it. He was also interested after hearing all the buzz about Shopify's new program.

So, he said yes (obviously).

He told us that right now it’s still a small program — almost the equivalent of a beta project — and they have strategically dispersed warehouses that are white-labeled for their merchants.

We’re here for it. And so far, Patrick is, too: After months of experiencing it firsthand, he’s still loving it.

Supply's Shopify Fulfillment Center is in Austin, Texas, and across the U.S. there are about three centers in total with approximately 10 or fewer merchants (Note: This is Patrick’s best guess on numbers). As Shopify continues to test and perfect the program, these numbers will undoubtedly increase.

One of the biggest value-adds from the Shopify Fulfillment Network is that the software actually lives in your online store. There’s a fulfillment app, which is how Patrick and the Supply team review their inventory levels, along with other settings that really come in handy.

Though it’s not a very robust software right now, and merchants such as Supply are still waiting on Shopify to work through some of the kinks, there’s a very clear and strong potential here that could help countless ecommerce businesses.

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Optimize your order fulfillment, shipping, and inventory management with Gorgias

Joining the Shopify Fulfillment Network can be an excellent way to streamline your order fulfillment process, speed up your delivery times, and reduce your daily workload. However, it isn't the only order fulfillment solution available today.

At Gorgias, we recognize how important it is to have effective inventory management and order fulfillment. That's why we've designed our comprehensive customer support platform to integrate with numerous inventory management and order fulfillment solutions, including ShipBob, ShipMonk, LateShipment.com, and more.

To learn more about these powerful integrations, check out our full list of shipping and fulfillment integrations.

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TL;DR:

• Forecasting CX workload prevents burnout, long wait times, and wasted headcount.
• To project ticket volume, calculate your ticket-to-order ratio (tickets ÷ orders) and use a metric like average order volume or cost per acquisition.
• Most ecommerce stores receive 20–50 tickets per 100 orders, depending on the level of automation used.
• Once you have an estimate of BFCM ticket volume, estimate the number of agents you need based on average capacity. A healthy benchmark is ≈40–60 tickets/day per agent.
• Pull transaction counts from your ecommerce platform (e.g., Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce) or Google Analytics, and ticket counts from your helpdesk (e.g., Gorgias).

Customer service forecasting is tough in any season. But during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s even harder. Fast growth can throw your estimates off, and miscalculations have real costs. Too few agents can lead to burnout and long wait times, while too many means wasted budget on unused headcount.

The good news is forecasting doesn’t have to be guesswork. Instead of trying to predict the future, it’s better to forecast customer service volume as a percentage of revenue growth.

Following this best practice gives you a much clearer picture of staffing levels, when to bring in more help, and how to plan your support team for BFCM and beyond.

At HelpFlow, we run 24/7 live chat and customer service teams for over 100 stores. We’ve helped brands improve their customer experience through huge holiday seasons, new product launches, and even lean downturns with our accurate forecasting model.

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Why forecast customer service volume?

For CX leaders, forecasting helps make sure your team is ready for whatever comes next.

Accurate forecasts help you:

• Plan for BFCM surges. Black Friday and Cyber Monday can generate ticket spikes unlike any other time of year. Forecasting gives you a data-driven way to staff up ahead of the rush instead of scrambling mid-sale.
• Right-size your team. Whether you’re scaling up during a growth phase or rethinking headcount during a slowdown, forecasts give you the confidence to add or reduce agents strategically instead of reactively.
• Protect agent well-being. Burnout is real when workloads swing without warning. Clear forecasts let you balance ticket loads fairly and avoid overwhelming your team.
• Budget smarter. Forecasts tie support costs directly to revenue expectations, making it easier to justify hiring plans and prove the long-term value of CX to finance leaders.
• Support org-wide decisions. Restructuring, product launches, or new market entries all impact ticket volume. Forecasting helps you align CX with the rest of the business so nothing catches you off guard.

Bottom line: Forecasting volume lets CX managers run proactive, not reactive, support operations.

A 3-step framework for forecasting customer service volume

Don’t wait until your agents are overwhelmed to decide if you need more help. Forecasting support volume should be proactive and data-driven. The good news is you only need two inputs to get started: sales transaction volume and ticket volume over a set period of time.

With data from Shopify and Gorgias (plus Google Analytics if you’d like more context), you can calculate your ticket-to-order ratio, or how many tickets your team receives for every 100 transactions. This ratio stays surprisingly steady as you grow, making it one of the most reliable ways to forecast ticket volume and plan headcount.

1) Calculate your ticket-to-order ratio

To find your ticket-to-order ratio, divide tickets by orders within a set period of time.

To find your average number of orders on Shopify, go to Analytics -> Reports and select your date range. Find your total orders under the Orders column. On other ecommerce platforms, the process is similar—look for order or transaction reports in your analytics dashboards.

Note: ‍You can also get this data from Google Analytics by going to Conversions -> Ecommerce -> Overview and selecting the target date range. The transaction count will be under the Transactions field.

This might not be accurate if a significant portion of your orders are subscriptions that are not tracked in Analytics. Still, it will be close enough for now as long as you continue to use this transaction count in future calculations.

Next, you need your average ticket volume. In a customer experience platform, like Gorgias, find this number by going to Statistics -> Support Performance -> Overview → Created Tickets and select the same time period.

Put it all together: Plug in your order number and ticket volume into this formula: tickets ÷ orders. For example, if you had 1000 orders and 400 tickets, then your ticket ratio is 40. This means for every 100 transactions, 40 tickets are created.

Pro Tip: We typically see the ticket ratio anywhere from 30% to 50%. For stores that use customer support automation in their helpdesk workflow, the ticket ratio normalizes to about 20%.

Related: Orthofeet took a step in the right direction by automating 56% of tickets in 2 months with Gorgias 

2) Use your ratio to project ticket volume

Once you have the ticket-to-order ratio, you need a baseline business metric to anchor your forecast. In other words, you need a way to estimate how many orders will be placed. That order volume is the bridge between sales activity and customer service demand.

Here’s how to project ticket volume using cost per acquisition, average order value, or ticket ratio.

1. Based on paid traffic (using CPA)

• Media spend: $200,000 in Nov–Dec
• Cost per acquisition (CPA): $20
• Projected orders: 10,000

2. Based on projected revenue (using AOV)

• Revenue forecast: $600,000 in Nov–Dec
• Average order value (AOV): $60
• Projected orders: 10,000

3. Converting orders into tickets (using ratio)

• Ticket ratio: 40%
• Projected tickets: 4,000 for Nov–Dec
• If reduced to 20%: 2,000 tickets (showing the impact of improving efficiency)

Once you’ve forecasted ticket volume, the next step is translating it into how many team members you’ll need. 

Related: How Psycho Bunny avoided adding additional headcount while doubling revenue 

3) Estimate the number of agents needed based on past capacity

At some point, you can’t just throw more people at the problem. People are a finite resource, and it takes time to hire and train competent agents. Don’t let yourself end up in that position as you drive growth.

To run an effective customer service operation, you should have benchmarks set for agents’ capacity to handle tickets. With this data, you can convert the forecasted ticket volume into a forecasted agent headcount needed to handle that volume.

How to calculate agent capacity: Find the average number of tickets resolved per agent over a specific time period. Be sure to focus your analysis on full-time agents, not part-timers who jump in from time to time.

In Gorgias, navigate to Statistics -> Support Performance -> Agents, and locate the data under the Closed Tickets column.

Pro Tip: We typically see anywhere from 40 to 60 tickets per day per agent as a healthy benchmark.

Once you’ve forecasted ticket volume, the next step is turning that into staffing needs (so start preparing your interview questions). Here’s how it works in practice:

Projected tickets: 4,000 (Nov–Dec)

Agent capacity: 40 tickets/day

Monthly agent capacity: 40 tickets/day × 5 days/week × 4.3 weeks/month = 860 tickets per agent per month

Required agents:

• 4,000 tickets ÷ 2 months ÷ 860 = 2.33 agents
• Round up to 3 agents to allow buffer for spikes (shipping delays, stockouts, promos, etc.)

This gives you a concrete, data-backed number you can use for BFCM staffing plans, instead of guessing or waiting until your team feels overwhelmed.

This is a little simplistic since it assumes the tickets come fairly uniformly during that time, but the basic forecasting process here is sound. 

Check out HelpFlow.com's free Customer Service Forecast Calculator (no email address required).

Turn support into revenue with HelpFlow and Gorgias

The way you handle customer service has a massive impact on sales. Based on Gorgias support performance data across all customers:

• A sub-10 minute response time on tickets increases conversion rate by around 10%
• Answering live chat questions in less than 2 minutes increased conversion rate by as much as 50%

Slow responses cost revenue, and live chat conversion rates drop sharply when first replies take more than 10 seconds. If your team is overloaded, hitting <10 minutes on tickets or seconds on chat just isn’t realistic without the right tools.

Two options to consider:

• HelpFlow: Provides 24/7 live chat and customer service teams for 100+ ecommerce stores, handling thousands of tickets daily and driving over $100M in revenue.‍
• Gorgias: If you already have a team, Gorgias gives you visibility into agent performance and the data you need to forecast and scale. Book a demo today.

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In August 2020, Amy started her job at Gorgias as a Customer Success Manager. Fast forward to today: Amy has held four positions in the company, pioneered two brand-new Gorgias programs, and holds a new position as the Manager of Customer Education.

How is that possible in only two years? What special sauce has she found at Gorgias that keeps her going? And what kind of higher education was the precursor to her professional success?

Read the interview with Amy to learn more about her dynamic career evolution and the support Gorgias provided to make it possible.

What did you do before Gorgias?

My career path is a little unconventional. After finishing school I decided against going to university and launched into full-time work instead, picking up study later in life.

I was fortunate to find a field where adaptability, problem-solving, and experience in customer relationships held high value in junior roles. When I transitioned to tech in my mid-twenties I had six years of hands-on experience which was a huge advantage in the startup space. From there, all of my training has been “on the job.”

I’ve been lucky to work underneath brilliant managers, most of whom were female. They provided me with excellent opportunities to benefit from industry-leading mentorship.

How did you find out about Gorgias and what made you apply to work here?

It is a classic story — I stumbled across a position on LinkedIn. 

After doing the case study the product had me hooked. I saw its potential to help merchants deliver an exceptional customer experience and drive revenue from happy shoppers. From that point, all my eggs were in the Gorgias basket. 

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At that point, Gorgias had just raised a 25M series B funding and had around 75 employees and 5,000+ customers. 

What are the roles you had at Gorgias and how did they change over time?

Back in August 2020 when I initially started in Gorgias, I was a Customer Success Manager. I started when the Success team had half a dozen people wearing many hats.

The CSM role was originally a hybrid position — encompassing both CSM and Onboarding Manager responsibilities. The focus was on managing full-cycle customer relationships: retention, churn, and expansion.

As Gorgias grew, Success roles were split into specialties, and a new department was created to service our non-managed merchants. I transitioned into Scaled Programs, a two-woman team led by Elena Balagush (who we recently welcomed back to the Gorgias family.)

Being a new function there was plenty of trial and error but always support from leadership which was essential to our success.

In this role, I managed merchant relationships using a one-to-many approach and maintained a local book of business. After a few months, I was promoted to senior CSM — a natural progression for anyone at Gorgias who performs well. While continuing the above duties, I took on additional education duties running webinars and creating educational content.

After realizing the value of education, I upskilled in eLearning, content creation, and instructional design. The culminating project was setting up the Gorgias Academy. 

While I built the academy, I needed to prove its impact (one of Gorgias’ values is to maximize your impact, so everyone is accountable for delivering measurable results). I focused on before/after data comparisons to show the substantial impact the academy was having.

After proving the function was valuable, I moved into the Customer Education Specialist role as a one-woman show. 

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From there, the upskilling continued. With incredible guidance and investment from my brilliant manager Elise Kubicki, I was equipped with the tools necessary to make the Customer Education function (CEd) a success.

One of the most valuable strategies I had was connecting with industry leaders. I became an active member in a few CEd communities and leveraged group tips/feedback to guide decisions in lieu of a team. One particular community is called Customer Education Org run by Sumeru Chatterjee. The support from other CEd leaders has been instrumental to my career growth.

After managing a substantial workload and delivering high-quality results consistently, Elise generously promoted me into a management position which I’m thrilled to be in today.

What training and resources did you receive to help you in your new roles? 

Elise, my manager, has been incredible. She led by example and gave me an excellent benchmark for what a manager should look like. She encouraged me to be brave with ideas and trust my intuition and experience. She listened to me pitch new strategies, provided feedback to strengthen my proposals, and gave me the confidence to execute my ideas. 

Without a manager who fostered open communication and responded with encouragement and empathy, I would never have advanced this quickly. 

Gorgias is also committed to getting the right tool for the job. We invest in technology. I could not have performed at the volume or velocity I did without a company that understands the benefit of a solid tech stack.

Elena Balagush was my manager when I was on the Scales Programs team, and she is also amazing. She celebrated my wins and gave me the freedom to go after new, out-of-the-box ideas.

How did you manage growing new functions while keeping up with your old role? 

Honestly, balancing all my responsibilities took a whole lot of time. But Gorgias investing in the right technology is a big factor — if I had to work without the right equipment, I could not have delivered quality content on time. I’m extremely grateful for this. Not enough businesses respect the impact the right tools can make.

The $2,000 learning stipend is also amazing. I managed to do most of my training for free but having funds available gives me the confidence to take on projects that require new skills. I used a portion of it to complete certifications in different areas like SQL.

Gorgias is also full of amazing, collaborative people. Openness with colleagues and genuine interest in sharing skills is not common. It’s one of the things that makes Gorgias an incredible place to work.

How do you think your experience would have been different at another company?

I don’t think many companies would match the level of trust Gorgias had when I was piloting new projects. Beyond that, there are a few factors that other companies struggle with that I feel are important to mention:

When goals aren’t unified across an organization, teams don’t want to help one another

If departments operate in closed silos, they can find themselves striving toward opposing goals. At Gorgias, we are all aware of the major targets and work toward them together. We celebrate wins as a team and take responsibility for setbacks as a team. 

This unity gives us a huge advantage because everyone wants everyone to do well.

Competition between colleagues discourages skill sharing

Healthy competition is good. But too often, leadership uses competition as the primary way to drive results. The notion that only one can win can be archaic and doesn’t motivate all personality types. 

At Gorgias, we have the understanding that if everyone exceeds the target, everyone is eligible to advance their career, be it in a different role or a different team. That’s motivating.

We have a culture of empowerment, enablement, and rapid growth 

At Gorgias, the idea is to hire the best of the best. The result is that everyone is hungry to become a better version of their professional selves, and Gorgias repays that hunger with great career progression, room (and budget) to learn new things, and a healthy collaborative atmosphere.

No one is happy “coasting”

The combination of the enormous amount of work to do and the brightest minds around means you are constantly encouraged to push yourself to deliver great work, fast. We all help each other to upskill and remove bottlenecks that occur when there isn’t enough work to go around.

A lack of honesty breeds anxiety

Not knowing why decisions have been made can plant the seed of doubt in the workforce, causing staff to be in a constant low-level state of panic. Gorgias operates with radical candor, meaning no matter what happens — good or bad, at the individual contributor level or in leadership — we understand why. This alleviates the stress associated with ‘the unknown’ and leaves employees' minds free to be creative and push harder in the right direction.

How can you connect your experience with Gorgias's core values?

To recap, Gorgias’ values are:

• Maximize your impact
• Customer-first
• 100% honest
• Strive for excellence
• Take extreme ownership

The honesty value is a huge benefit to me, personally. I am relaxed knowing leadership is open to hearing feedback from all levels of staff and that blindspots I have will be flagged. I have the confidence to speak my mind and know I will be heard.

Also, I respect how truly customer-first Gorgias is. Every company says they are customer first but I’ve never seen it lived the way it is at Gorgias. At all levels, we have an unprecedented number of conversations with merchants to learn about their challenges and develop new solutions. 

Lastly, my experience hinged on taking extreme ownership. Taking extreme ownership means passing the buck is not an option. This encourages people to think things through and rationalize the why. Knowing I own a project from end to end makes me push harder to deliver work I’m truly proud of.

What other anecdotes have you heard from people at Gorgias with similar career evolutions? 

Elise is amazing (I know I say it a lot but she really is). She started as an Onboarding Manager and is now leading the whole success department — and that’s a mammoth workload. 

She moved from onboarding manager to interim head of success in less than a year. She is now our VP of Success and, gosh, she earned it. She lives and breathes Gorgias' values - it shows in the team she’s chosen, of which I’m honored to be a part.

We also recently welcomed back Elena Balagush, who was my manager before Elise. When staff return to an organization it speaks volumes about the environment.

What is your favorite thing about working at Gorgias?

Does it have to be just one? Here are a few of the standouts:

The support from upper management to try new things and experiment

A great deal of my success at Gorgias is due to supportive management. First, in Success from Chloe Kesler, then in Scaled Programs from Elena Balagush, and in the last 12 months from our outstanding VP of Success Elise Kubicki.

I have a particular soft spot for Elise, as she gave me the skills to develop strategies and concepts of my own but, more importantly, instilled in me the confidence to put them into practice.

The resources to become a better version of my work-self

The Gorgias team, internally, is jam-packed with team members who are experts in their field. This has given many of us a rare opportunity to learn on the job from the industry's best performers.

A culture that encourages the sharing of knowledge

Following on from my earlier point, the collaborative culture at Gorgias is second to none. I have experienced first-hand the way sometimes competitive nature can become engrained at companies with aggressive goals. 

At Gorgias, you won’t find a skerrick of this. Instead, the value of 100% honesty and having a unified goal breeds an undercurrent of genuine camaraderie and a sense of drive to achieve as a collective. 

Knowledge is freely shared across all departments and seniority levels. This flat structure encourages curiosity and discussions between everyone — regardless of role.

If there is one thing you would like to change about the company, what would it be?

That we can’t hire everyone. There isn’t a single tech person I know who wouldn’t benefit from the experience of working here.

Now that you are holding a management position, what are your plans for customer education at Gorgias?

In the future, I’m going to do everything I can to develop a winning Customer Education program and (fingers crossed) position us as industry leaders in this field.

I’d like to see us continue to roll out new initiatives to help our merchants thrive, especially given the difficult landscape at this time.

I’ll continue to learn and grow in the Customer Education space. I still have plenty of areas to work on — I’m just grateful I’m part of an organization that gives me every possible opportunity to do this.

What's next for you at Gorgias (and how is Gorgias helping you get there)?

I’d love to carry on in Customer Education and one day move up into a director position. I’ve got a long way to go but I’m confident Gorgias is the most suitable place for me. 

I couldn’t wish for a better manager, better team, or better organization. Results are rewarded and I’m incredibly proud of not just the growth that we’ve seen but the way we got here — we move fast, we make mistakes, we learn and we adapt. Rinse and repeat. That’s the kind of company I want to be with for life.

Interested in joining Amy and the rest of Gorgias team? Check out our jobs page to learn more about our benefits, interview process, and open roles.

TL;DR:

• The formula: NPS = % Promoters - % Detractors, based on a 0-10 scale measuring likelihood to recommend.
• Scores range from -100 to +100: Negative scores mean more detractors than promoters, while scores above 50 are considered excellent.
• You can calculate NPS three ways: Use a free calculator tool, build an Excel formula with COUNTIF functions, or automate collection and calculation with survey software.
• Measure both transactional and relational NPS: Track post-interaction scores to identify friction and periodic scores to monitor loyalty trends.
• Automation turns measurement into action: Integrated tools eliminate manual calculation, enable real-time tracking, and ensure you never miss a detractor follow-up.

NPS measures how likely your customers are to recommend your business. The calculation is straightforward: subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. You can calculate NPS manually using spreadsheets or automate the process with survey tools as your customer base grows.

The formula is the easy part — the real value comes from knowing how to interpret your score and act on the results. This guide covers the NPS formula, walks through calculation examples, and shows you how to automate the process to turn scores into customer retention.

What is NPS? net promoter score meaning

Net promoter score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric that measures how likely customers are to recommend your business on a scale from 0 to 10. The score reflects the gap between customers who promote your brand and those who detract from it.

Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company introduced NPS in 2003. Research from Rob Markey, founder of Bain & Company's Customer & Marketing practice, found that companies with high NPS for their industry grow revenue 2.5 times faster than competitors.

NPS centers on a single question: How likely are you to recommend our product to someone else? Customers respond on a 0-10 scale, where 0 means not at all likely and 10 means extremely likely.

The metric connects to business outcomes because it measures both satisfaction and the willingness to stake personal reputation on your brand. Customers who recommend you bring in new business through word-of-mouth. Those who wouldn't recommend you signal retention risk.

How to calculate net promoter score (NPS)

The NPS formula is: NPS = % Promoters - % Detractors

The calculation breaks down into four steps:

• Ask customers: On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product to someone else?
• Categorize responses into three groups based on their rating
• Calculate the percentage of promoters and the percentage of detractors from your total responses
• Subtract the detractor percentage from the promoter percentage

The result is an integer between -100 and 100. You never express NPS as a percentage.

Worked example

Imagine you survey 200 customers. Here's how their responses break down:

• Promoters (9-10): 110 customers = 55%
• Passives (7-8): 50 customers = 25%
• Detractors (0-6): 40 customers = 20%

The calculation: 55% - 20% = 35

Your NPS is 35.

NPS scale explained (promoters, passives, detractors)

Promoters (9-10) are loyal customers who actively recommend your brand. They drive growth through referrals and repeat purchases. Most of your organic growth comes from this group.

Passives (7-8) are satisfied but not enthusiastic. They won't actively promote you and competitors can pull them away. These customers don't factor into your NPS calculation, but they matter for your improvement strategy.

Detractors (0-6) are unhappy customers who may share negative experiences. They're at risk of churning and can damage your brand through poor reviews or word-of-mouth.

What is a good NPS? benchmarks

A good NPS varies by industry. The score that signals strength in retail may be average in financial services.

Here's a general framework for interpreting scores:

• Below 0: Needs immediate attention
• 0-30: Room for improvement
• 30-50: Good
• 50-70: Excellent
• 70+: World-class

Context matters more than the number itself. Compare your score to competitors in your industry. Track whether your score trends up or down over time. Segment by customer type or product line to identify where you're strong and where you need work.

Industry benchmarks

Different industries perform at different levels. Retently's 2023 NPS benchmark data shows how scores vary:

B2C Industries:

• Insurance: 74
• Financial services: 71
• Retail: 61
• Ecommerce: 50
• Healthcare: 45
• Communications and media: 29‍
• B2B Industries: ClearlyRated's 2022 data shows most B2B service NPS ranges from 23 to 60.

B2C scores vary more widely than B2B scores because consumer expectations shift based on product type and price point. Use these benchmarks as reference points, not targets. Your goal is continuous improvement relative to your own baseline.

Transactional vs relational NPS (when to use each)

Transactional NPS (tNPS) measures specific interactions. Send these surveys after purchases, support conversations, or key touchpoints to identify friction in real time.

Relational NPS (rNPS) measures overall relationship health. Send these surveys quarterly or annually to track loyalty trends and benchmark against past performance.

Use transactional NPS when you need to connect scores to specific experiences. If a customer rates their post-purchase experience poorly, you know exactly where to improve. The feedback is concrete and actionable.

Use relational NPS when you want to understand overall brand loyalty. These surveys tell you how customers feel about your company as a whole, independent of recent interactions.

Most ecommerce brands benefit from both. Transactional surveys catch problems as they happen. Relational surveys show whether you're building loyalty over time.

How to design an NPS survey

Survey design affects response rates and data quality. The channel you use, when you send it, and how often you ask all influence whether customers respond and how they answer.

Distribution channels include email, in-app prompts, SMS, and web intercepts. Email works well for relational surveys. In-app or SMS work better for transactional surveys when the interaction is fresh.

Timing matters. Send transactional surveys within hours of the interaction. Wait too long and customers forget details or lose interest. Send relational surveys quarterly or biannually to avoid survey fatigue.

Question wording and scale

The standard NPS question is: "How likely are you to recommend [Company] to a friend or colleague?"

The 0-10 scale anchors at both ends. 0 means not at all likely. 10 means extremely likely. This scale format is consistent across industries, which makes benchmarking possible.

Keep the wording consistent if you want to track scores over time. Changing how you ask the question makes it harder to compare results from different periods.

Follow-up questions

Follow-up questions reveal why customers gave their score. The NPS number tells you what customers think. The open-ended response tells you why.

Effective follow-up questions include:

• "What's the primary reason for your score?"
• "What could we do to improve your experience?"
• "What do you value most about [Company]?"

Make these questions optional. You'll get fewer responses, but the customers who do respond often provide the most actionable feedback. Use open-ended formats that allow customers to explain in their own words.

Read more: NPS survey best practices for the best response rate

How to calculate NPS in Excel and other tools

You can calculate NPS manually using spreadsheet software. Both Excel and Google Sheets handle the formula, and the approach is identical across platforms.

Manual calculation makes sense when you're starting out or running occasional surveys. As your survey volume increases, automation becomes more practical.

Excel/Google Sheets formula

The COUNTIF function counts responses in each category. Here's the step-by-step approach:

1. ‍Count promoters: =COUNTIF(A2:A201,">=9")‍
2. Count detractors: =COUNTIF(A2:A201,"‍
3. Calculate total responses: =COUNTA(A2:A201)‍
4. Calculate NPS: =(promoters-detractors)/total*100

Replace A2:A201 with the actual range containing your survey responses. The formula assumes responses are in a single column with each row representing one customer.

You can combine these into a single formula: =((COUNTIF(A2:A201,">=9")-COUNTIF(A2:A201,"

Interpreting and analyzing your NPS

Your score is a starting point for further action. The number tells you where you stand. Analysis tells you what to do about it.

Track scores over time rather than treating any single score as definitive. A score of 40 looks different if it's up from 25 than if it's down from 55. The trend matters more than the absolute value.

Context shapes interpretation. A score below your industry benchmark signals competitive weakness. A declining score, even if still positive, indicates deteriorating loyalty. A rising score validates that your customer support and experience improvements are working.

Segmentation and churn modeling

Segmentation reveals patterns that overall scores hide. Break down NPS by customer type, product line, or channel to find where you're strong and where you're weak.

Useful segmentation approaches include segmenting by:

• Product or product category
• Customer tenure (new vs. longtime customers)
• Purchase frequency or customer lifetime value
• Support channel (email, chat, phone)

Churn modeling uses NPS to predict which customers are likely to leave. Detractors churn at higher rates than promoters. Combining NPS with other signals like purchase frequency or support ticket volume creates a more complete risk profile.

Read more: 9 creative and effective ways to collect customer feedback

How to improve your NPS

Measuring NPS only creates value if you act on the results. The score identifies problems. Your response determines whether those problems get solved.

Improvement is an ongoing process. Each survey cycle should inform changes to product, service, or operations that address the root causes of low scores.

Close the feedback loop

Closed-loop feedback means following up with survey respondents to address what they told you. This turns measurement into relationship-building.

The approach varies by respondent type:

• Detractors: Follow up within 24-48 hours. Acknowledge the issue, explain how you'll resolve it, and make it right if possible.
• Promoters: Thank them for their support. Ask for a review or referral when appropriate.
• Passives: Understand what would move them to promoter status. These customers are satisfied but not loyal.

Responding to detractors shows customers you listen and care about their experience. Fast follow-up can turn a detractor into a promoter. Even when you can't solve the problem immediately, acknowledging it maintains the relationship.

Use customer feedback to improve every support interaction

NPS shows how customers feel about your brand. Post-support feedback shows where your CX team can improve. Gorgias lets ecommerce teams send CSAT surveys after eligible support conversations, with control over timing, ticket channels, and the message customers receive.

Book a demo to see how Gorgias helps you collect feedback and improve customer support.

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As a Talent Acquisition Specialist, I firmly believe talent sourcing is a crucial component of recruitment. It involves proactively reaching out to good-fit candidates to broaden your talent pool and make key connections well in advance, rather than just waiting for the perfect person to find and apply to job postings once they go live.

Talent sourcing helps us at Gorgias cut through application noise and get the highest quality candidates possible. Our outreach emails for Engineering positions, one of the most challenging roles to fill, see 26%-46% response rates. And in this deeply competitive labor market, getting in contact with those gem candidates is especially important. 

In this article, we’ll discuss the merits of talent sourcing as a hiring strategy, as well as the tools and tactics we use for talent sourcing at Gorgias.

The state of the hiring market in Q1 2022 (post-pandemic)

The state of the hiring market in 2022 is worrisome, to say the least. It seems like every single company has at least 10 open roles, and they’re all competing over the same pool of top-notch candidates.

Let’s take a step back and look at the last couple of years. Compared to Q1 2020, iCIMS reports job openings in Q1 2021 are up by 86%, hires are up by 45%, and job applications are down by 11%.

Meanwhile, 78% of companies report being unable to find enough talented candidates in the market to fill their open roles. Why? As we mentioned above, the labor market has tightened. This means that naturally, there are more jobs open than people to fill them, which consequently makes hiring even harder.

2022 continues these trends. There are now a record 5 million more job openings than unemployed people in the US, according to this article published by CNBC (which contains many top takeaways from the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.)

Also, like always, certain roles are particularly difficult to fill right now. Full-stack engineers are most in-demand right now, meaning they’re especially difficult to find and hire. Fortunately, a shift toward hiring remote talent in smaller regions is taking place. Software engineers who are open to remote work receive 20% more interview requests.

Part of appealing to this pool of in-demand talent is understanding software engineers’ top priorities. Here’s below the full list of the biggest motivators for software engineers, according to the 2022 State of Software Engineers Report: 

These motivators are valuable insights because they can help you market your open roles (and, to get back to the topic, talent sourcing outreach) more sharply. 

What exactly is talent sourcing?

There are differing opinions about the exact definition of talent sourcing. But the basic definition of talent sourcing is engaging candidates who are not active applicants. We call the targets of talent sourcing “passive talent,” which excludes candidates who apply traditionally, through a job posting.

For us, the goal of talent sourcing is to build a pipeline of talent that operates throughout the year as a proactive approach to the company’s hiring needs. Sourcing allows us to connect with potential fits long before a need develops.  Considering that hiring a new employee can take anywhere from a week to several months, getting a head start on promising candidates is a great long-term strategy.

Why do we believe talent sourcing is an essential best practice?

In Q1 2022, it took our team an average of 53 days to extend an offer. In Q2, we were able to send out offers in 39 days thanks in part to talent sourcing. Therefore, we managed to speed up the process of extending an offer by 26% thanks to talent sourcing.

We looked at some statistics outside of Gorgias and here’s what we found: 70% of the world's workforce are passive candidates, and 86% of the most qualified candidates for your open positions are already employed, hence not actively looking for a job. That said, LinkedIn has found that 90% of the professionals active on their platform would like to hear about career opportunities.

Talent sourcing helps bridge the gap between the companies hiring and passive candidates (which, again, make up 70% of the workforce). We can build relationships with promising talent well before we’re urgently looking to make a hire. 

Gem found that talent sourcing is the second most important recruiting trend (after diversity recruiting), according to their 2022 Recruiting Trends: Data-Driven Recruiting. 

The impact of talent sourcing on key hiring metrics

Why exactly is talent sourcing such a prominent trend? Because it’s a strategic approach to improve many of the most important metrics a recruiting team pays attention to.

Time to hire

Talent sourcing can improve your time to hire because you can start refining a pool of candidates well before you have a live job ad. For us, one of the best tactics was to use outreach to identify a pool of talent that uses our tech stack. That way, when you post an engineering, product management, or non-tech role, you don’t have to source from scratch and filter out candidates because of basic misalignments.

Once a job posting goes live, our team has a huge headstart (and can therefore crush previous time-to-hire metrics). Instead of going to LinkedIn and starting a search from scratch, I would go to our refined pool of (currently, but forever growing) 111K candidates that match our company’s needs, tech stack, or overall preferences and start my search there.

Candidate quality

Talent sourcing helps us create a pool of pre-vetted candidates, so we’re never in a situation of having to accept a mediocre candidate because of a time crunch and lack of inbound interest.

Also, when a high-potential candidate doesn’t end up receiving (or accepting) an offer, they go back into our talent pool so we can potentially find another opportunity to work with that high-quality candidate.

Diverse hiring

We use Gem for robust top-of-funnel diversity reporting. The tool lets us deep dive into our natural sourcing tendencies and analyze passthrough rates across demographics like gender. This helps us point out some of the unconscious biases we each might have, so we can keep diversity and inclusivity in mind, implement action items, and source a diverse and strong team.

Our approach to building a Talent Pool

Explore our ATS for candidates we want to re-engage

As you likely know, a candidate’s potential (and journey with your company) doesn’t necessarily come to an end after a rejection. To make the most of high-quality candidates who have already gone through our screening once, we check out junior candidates we talked to 2+ years ago and marked as under-qualified. We do the same with candidates who have kept warm after rejection and candidates who withdrew from the process because they took another offer.

These candidates have already expressed an interest in our company and therefore get consideration to introduce into our ongoing talent pool.

Optimize our recruiting tech stack for searchability

One of our most helpful tools is HireSweet. The tool enables us to explore all of the 4,000 candidates who live in our ATS much easier than just searching the database. One of the best features is that HireSweet allows us to find candidates that may have switched careers completely but live in our ATS under an old position.

But the question still stands: how do we expand our talent pool to 111K people?

Source, scrape, and upload a massive number of leads

We don’t reach out to leads by hand: we contact them in bulk by sourcing and scraping. Before we explain our process, the important thing to keep in mind is that your search and bulk leads import should always resonate with the company’s hiring strategy. Simply put, we don’t do volume sourcing for the sake of doing high volume.

Bulk imports can help you in a few ways:

1. While searching for candidates, you want to keep profiles that are not an exact fit so you can find them when a better-fit role comes along
2. You want to reach out to a higher volume of leads
3. You want to anticipate and pre-source for the future

Here’s an example of how we might pre-source our industry to collect a high volume of good-fit names:

• Find a list of start-ups (related to your industry if you want to be more precise)
• Break it down per country
• Find the companies’ LinkedIn pages (with automation, if possible)
• Scrape the “people” section of said pages
• Clean the data, and import it into your 3rd party tool to enrich it
• All employees that mentioned working for the companies you’re targeting are now in your talent pool

We use the following four tools to execute the process described above:

LinkedIn will limit the number of profiles you can scrape each day. If that’s the case, you can set up bot automation to run multiple times a day. With fewer profiles scrapped more frequently, you can stay under the radar.

Additional ways to improve your talent sourcing and recruitment marketing

Did you know that 66% of people who changed jobs were aware of the company they joined before they applied? That’s why we encourage you to do everything you can (with the resources and buy-in you have) to take a proactive approach to your talent strategy. Some more tactics include:

Create clear, engaging outbound messaging 

A well-written message tailored to each candidate (or at least each role) is a terrific approach to draw top talent in, keep them interested, and persuade them to discover more about the company.

At Gorgias, we do our best to include the relevant information without plopping an entire job ad in the first message. We typically try and highlight a couple of unique features (including compensation, which we share with our SaaS calculator).

Encourage your non-recruiting team to source talent

Talent sourcing doesn’t just need to be a recruiter activity. We encourage employee ambassadorship, wherein the entire company is invited to source talent for live and upcoming roles. (They aren’t scraping LinkedIn, but can refer candidates our way and spread the word.)

When employees establish a direct relationship with candidates, they can provide a meaningful testimonial and sneak peek into the company’s culture.

Engaging passive candidates involves more effort than engaging active candidates because you have to persuade someone to be interested. But the effort is worthwhile: at the very least, you spread the word about the company.

Speaking of engaging your team, check out our article of five tips to engage a hybrid or distributed team. 

Let us know your take on talent sourcing

At Gorgias, we managed to reach a 26%-46% response rate for our outreach emails for Engineering positions.

Even though recruiting and sourcing tactics constantly evolve, the mindset is still the same:

• Grab candidates’ attention
• Engage with them in a clear, helpful way
• Build relationships that make great placements easier in the longterm

Top talent is in high demand, and competition for their attention is severe. That’s why we need to establish a presence wherever potential candidates are — starting with their Inbox.

We’re hungry for lifelong learning and growth, so we want to hear from all the recruiters and sourcers out there. What’s your take on talent sourcing? How are you approaching it in your company? What can we learn from your practice?

Send me an email and let us know!

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