

TL;DR:
Customer education has become a critical factor in converting browsers into buyers. For wellness brands like Cornbread Hemp, where customers need to understand ingredients, dosages, and benefits before making a purchase, education has a direct impact on sales. The challenge is scaling personalized education when support teams are stretched thin, especially during peak sales periods.
Katherine Goodman, Senior Director of Customer Experience, and Stacy Williams, Senior Customer Experience Manager, explain how implementing Gorgias's AI Shopping Assistant transformed their customer education strategy into a conversion powerhouse.
In our second AI in CX episode, we dive into how Cornbread achieved a 30% conversion rate during BFCM, saving their CX team over four days of manual work.
Before diving into tactics, understanding why education matters in the wellness space helps contextualize this approach.
Katherine, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Cornbread Hemp, explains:
"Wellness is a very saturated market right now. Getting to the nitty-gritty and getting to the bottom of what our product actually does for people, making sure they're educated on the differences between products to feel comfortable with what they're putting in their body."
The most common pre-purchase questions Cornbread receives center around three areas: ingredients, dosages, and specific benefits. Customers want to know which product will help with their particular symptoms. They need reassurance that they're making the right choice.
What makes this challenging: These questions require nuanced, personalized responses that consider the customer's specific needs and concerns. Traditionally, this meant every customer had to speak with a human agent, creating a bottleneck that slowed conversions and overwhelmed support teams during peak periods.
Stacy, Senior Customer Experience Manager at Cornbread, identified the game-changing impact of Shopping Assistant:
"It's had a major impact, especially during non-operating hours. Shopping Assistant is able to answer questions when our CX agents aren't available, so it continues the customer order process."
A customer lands on your site at 11 PM, has questions about dosage or ingredients, and instead of abandoning their cart or waiting until morning for a response, they get immediate, accurate answers that move them toward purchase.
The real impact happens in how the tool anticipates customer needs. Cornbread uses suggested product questions that pop up as customers browse product pages. Stacy notes:
"Most of our Shopping Assistant engagement comes from those suggested product features. It almost anticipates what the customer is asking or needing to know."
Actionable takeaway: Don't wait for customers to ask questions. Surface the most common concerns proactively. When you anticipate hesitation and address it immediately, you remove friction from the buying journey.
One of the biggest myths about AI is that implementation is complicated. Stacy explains how Cornbread’s rollout was a straightforward three-step process: audit your knowledge base, flip the switch, then optimize.
"It was literally the flip of a switch and just making sure that our data and information in Gorgias was up to date and accurate."
Here's Cornbread’s three-phase approach:
Actionable takeaway: Block out time for that initial knowledge base audit. Then commit to regular check-ins because your business evolves, and your AI should evolve with it.
Read more: AI in CX Webinar Recap: Turning AI Implementation into Team Alignment
Here's something most brands miss: the way you write your knowledge base articles directly impacts conversion rates.
Before BFCM, Stacy reviewed all of Cornbread's Guidance and rephrased the language to make it easier for AI Agent to understand.
"The language in the Guidance had to be simple, concise, very straightforward so that Shopping Assistant could deliver that information without being confused or getting too complicated," Stacy explains. When your AI can quickly parse and deliver information, customers get faster, more accurate answers. And faster answers mean more conversions.
Katherine adds another crucial element: tone consistency.
"We treat AI as another team member. Making sure that the tone and the language that AI used were very similar to the tone and the language that our human agents use was crucial in creating and maintaining a customer relationship."
As a result, customers often don't realize they're talking to AI. Some even leave reviews saying they loved chatting with "Ally" (Cornbread's AI agent name), not realizing Ally isn't human.
Actionable takeaway: Review your knowledge base with fresh eyes. Can you simplify without losing meaning? Does it sound like your brand? Would a customer be satisfied with this interaction? If not, time for a rewrite.
Read more: How to Write Guidance with the “When, If, Then” Framework
The real test of any CX strategy is how it performs under pressure. For Cornbread, Black Friday Cyber Monday 2025 proved that their conversational commerce strategy wasn't just working, it was thriving.
Over the peak season, Cornbread saw:
Katherine breaks down what made the difference:
"Shopping Assistant popping up, answering those questions with the correct promo information helps customers get from point A to point B before the deal ends."
During high-stakes sales events, customers are in a hurry. They're comparing options, checking out competitors, and making quick decisions. If you can't answer their questions immediately, they're gone. Shopping Assistant kept customers engaged and moving toward purchase, even when human agents were swamped.
Actionable takeaway: Peak periods require a fail-safe CX strategy. The brands that win are the ones that prepare their AI tools in advance.
One of the most transformative impacts of conversational commerce goes beyond conversion rates. What your team can do with their newfound bandwidth matters just as much.
With AI handling straightforward inquiries, Cornbread's CX team has evolved into a strategic problem-solving team. They've expanded into social media support, provided real-time service during a retail pop-up, and have time for the high-value interactions that actually build customer relationships.
Katherine describes phone calls as their highest value touchpoint, where agents can build genuine relationships with customers. “We have an older demographic, especially with CBD. We received a lot of customer calls requesting orders and asking questions. And sometimes we end up just yapping,” Katherine shares. “I was yapping with a customer last week, and we'd been on the call for about 15 minutes. This really helps build those long-term relationships that keep customers coming back."
That's the kind of experience that builds loyalty, and becomes possible only when your team isn't stuck answering repetitive tickets.
Stacy adds that agents now focus on "higher-level tickets or customer issues that they need to resolve. AI handles straightforward things, and our agents now really are more engaged in more complicated, higher-level resolutions."
Actionable takeaway: Stop thinking about AI only as a cost-cutting tool and start seeing it as an impact multiplier. The goal is to free your team to work on conversations that actually move the needle on customer lifetime value.
Cornbread isn't resting on their BFCM success. They're already optimizing for January, traditionally the biggest month for wellness brands as customers commit to New Year's resolutions.
Their focus areas include optimizing their product quiz to provide better data to both AI and human agents, educating customers on realistic expectations with CBD use, and using Shopping Assistant to spotlight new products launching in Q1.
The brands winning at conversational commerce aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the largest teams. They're the ones who understand that customer education drives conversions, and they've built systems to deliver that education at scale.
Cornbread Hemp's success comes down to three core principles: investing time upfront to train AI properly, maintaining consistent optimization, and treating AI as a team member that deserves the same attention to tone and quality as human agents.
As Katherine puts it:
"The more time that you put into training and optimizing AI, the less time you're going to have to babysit it later. Then, it's actually going to give your customers that really amazing experience."
Watch the replay of the whole conversation with Katherine and Stacy to learn how Gorgias’s Shopping Assistant helps them turn browsers into buyers.
{{lead-magnet-1}}
TL;DR:
Rising customer expectations, shoppers willing to pay a premium for convenience, and a growing lack of trust in social media channels to make purchase decisions are making it more challenging to turn a profit.
In this emerging era, AI’s role is becoming not only more pronounced, but a necessity for brands who want to stay ahead. Tools like Gorgias Shopping Assistant can help drive measurable revenue while reducing support costs.
For example, a brand that specializes in premium outdoor apparel implemented Shopping Assistant and saw a 2.25% uplift in GMV and 29% uplift in average order volume (AOV).
But how, among competing priorities and expenses, do you convince leadership to implement it? We’ll show you.
Shoppers want on-demand help in real time that’s personalized across devices.
Shopping Assistant recalls a shopper’s browsing history, like what they have clicked, viewed, and added to their cart. This allows it to make more relevant suggestions that feel personal to each customer.
The AI ecommerce tools market was valued at $7.25 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach $21.55 billion by 2030.
Your competitors are using conversational AI to support, sell, and retain. Shopping Assistant satisfies that need, providing upsells and recommendations rooted in real shopper behavior.
Conversational AI has real revenue implications, impacting customer retention, average order value (AOV), conversion rates, and gross market value (GMV).
For example, a leading nutrition brand saw a GMV uplift of over 1%, an increase in AOV of over 16%, and a chat conversion rate of over 15% after implementing Shopping Assistant.
Overall, Shopping Assistant drives higher engagement and more revenue per visitor, sometimes surpassing 50% and 20%, respectively.

Shopping Assistant engages, personalizes, recommends, and converts. It provides proactive recommendations, smart upsells, dynamic discounts, and is highly personalized, all helping to guide shoppers to checkout.
After implementing Shopping Assistant, leading ecommerce brands saw real results:
Industry |
Primary Use Case |
GMV Uplift (%) |
AOV Uplift (%) |
Chat CVR (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Home & interior decor 🖼️ |
Help shoppers coordinate furniture with existing pieces and color schemes. |
+1.17 |
+97.15 |
10.30 |
Outdoor apparel 🎿 |
In-depth explanations of technical features and confidence when purchasing premium, performance-driven products. |
+2.25 |
+29.41 |
6.88 |
Nutrition 🍎 |
Personalized guidance on supplement selection based on age, goals, and optimal timing. |
+1.09 |
+16.40 |
15.15 |
Health & wellness 💊 |
Comparing similar products and understanding functional differences to choose the best option. |
+1.08 |
+11.27 |
8.55 |
Home furnishings 🛋️ |
Help choose furniture sizes and styles appropriate for children and safety needs. |
+12.26 |
+10.19 |
1.12 |
Stuffed toys 🧸 |
Clear care instructions and support finding replacements after accidental product damage. |
+4.43 |
+9.87 |
3.62 |
Face & body care 💆♀️ |
Assistance finding the correct shade online, especially when previously purchased products are no longer available. |
+6.55 |
+1.02 |
5.29 |
Shopping Assistant drives uplift in chat conversion rate and makes successful upsell recommendations.
“It’s been awesome to see Shopping Assistant guide customers through our technical product range without any human input. It’s a much smoother journey for the shopper,” says Nathan Larner, Customer Experience Advisor for Arc’teryx.
For Arc’teryx, that smoother customer journey translated into sales. The brand saw a 75% increase in conversion rate (from 4% to 7%) and 3.7% of overall revenue influenced by Shopping Assistant.

Because it follows shoppers’ live journey during each session on your website, Shopping Assistant catches shoppers in the moment. It answers questions or concerns that might normally halt a purchase, gets strategic with discounting (based on rules you set), and upsells.
The overall ROI can be significant. For example, bareMinerals saw an 8.83x return on investment.
"The real-time Shopify integration was essential as we needed to ensure that product recommendations were relevant and displayed accurate inventory,” says Katia Komar, Sr. Manager of Ecommerce and Customer Service Operations, UK at bareMinerals.
“Avoiding customer frustration from out-of-stock recommendations was non-negotiable, especially in beauty, where shade availability is crucial to customer trust and satisfaction. This approach has led to increased CSAT on AI converted tickets."

Shopping Assistant can impact CSAT scores, response times, resolution rates, AOV, and GMV.
For Caitlyn Minimalist, those metrics were an 11.3% uplift in AOV, an 18% click through rate for product recommendations, and a 50% sales lift versus human-only chats.
"Shopping Assistant has become an intuitive extension of our team, offering product guidance that feels personal and intentional,” says Anthony Ponce, its Head of Customer Experience.

Support agents have limited time to assist customers as it is, so taking advantage of sales opportunities can be difficult. Shopping Assistant takes over that role, removing obstacles for purchase or clearing up the right choice among a stacked product catalog.
With a product that’s not yet mainstream in the US, TUSHY leverages Shopping Assistant for product education and clarification.
"Shopping Assistant has been a game-changer for our team, especially with the launch of our latest bidet models,” says Ren Fuller-Wasserman, Sr. Director of Customer Experience at TUSHY.
“Expanding our product catalog has given customers more choices than ever, which can overwhelm first-time buyers. Now, they’re increasingly looking to us for guidance on finding the right fit for their home and personal hygiene needs.”
The bidet brand saw 13x return on investment after implementation, a 15% increase in chat conversion rate, and a 2x higher conversion rate for AI conversations versus human ones.

Customer support metrics include:
Revenue metrics to track include:
Shopping Assistant connects to your ecommerce platform (like Shopify), and streamlines information between your helpdesk and order data. It’s also trained on your catalog and support history.
Allow your agents to focus on support and sell more by tackling questions that are getting in the way of sales.
{{lead-magnet-2}}
TL;DR:
Most shoppers arrive with questions. Is this the right size? Will this match my skin tone? What’s the difference between these models? The faster you can guide them, the faster they decide.
As CX teams take on a bigger role in driving revenue, these moments of hesitation are now some of the most important parts of the buying journey.
That’s why more brands are leaning on conversational AI to support these high-intent questions and remove the friction that slows shoppers down. The impact speaks for itself. Brands can expect higher AOV, stronger chat conversion rates, and smoother paths to purchase, all without adding extra work to your team.
Below, we’re sharing real use cases from 11 ecommerce brands across beauty, apparel, home, body care, and more, along with the exact results they saw after introducing guided shopping experiences.
When you’re shopping for shoes similar to an old but discontinued favorite, every detail counts, down to the color of the bottom of the shoe. But legacy brands with large catalogs can be overwhelming to browse.
For shoppers, it’s a double-edged sword: they want to feel confident that they checked your entire collection, but they also don’t want to spend time looking for it.
How Shopping Assistant helps:
Shopping Assistant accelerates the process, turning hazy details into clear, friendly guidance.
It describes shoe details, from colorways to logo placement, compares products side by side, and recommends the best option based on the shopper’s preferences and conditions.
The result is shoppers who feel satisfied and more connected with your brand.

Results:
Big events call for great outfits, but putting one together online isn’t always easy. With thousands of options to scroll through, shoppers often want a bit of styling direction.
How Shopping Assistant helps:
Shoppers get to chat with a virtual stylist who recommends full outfits based on the occasion, suggests accessories to complete the look, and removes the guesswork of pairing pieces together.
The result is a fun, confidence-building shopping experience that feels like getting advice from a stylist who actually understands their plans.

Results:
Shade matching is hard enough in-store, but doing it online can feel impossible. Plus, when a longtime favorite gets discontinued, shoppers are left guessing which new shade will come closest. That uncertainty often leads to hesitation, abandoned carts, or ordering multiple shades “just in case.”
How Shopping Assistant helps:
Shoppers find their perfect match without any of the guesswork. The assistant asks a few quick questions, recommends the closest shade or formula, and offers smart alternatives when a product is unavailable.
The experience feels like chatting with a knowledgeable beauty advisor — someone who makes the decision easy and leaves shoppers feeling confident in what they’re buying.
Katia Komar, Sr. Manager of Ecommerce and Customer Service Operations at bareMinerals UK says, “What impressed me the most is the AI’s ability to upsell with a conversational tone that feels genuinely helpful and doesn't sound too pushy or transactional. It sounds remarkably human, identifying correct follow-up questions to determine the correct product recommendation, resulting in improved AOV. It’s exactly how I train our human agents and BPO partners.”

Results:
When shoppers are buying gifts, especially for someone else, they often know who they’re shopping for but not what to buy. A vague product name or a half-remembered scent can quickly make the experience feel overwhelming without someone to guide them.
How Shopping Assistant helps:
Thoughtful guidance goes a long way. By asking clarifying questions and recognizing likely mix-ups, Shopping Assistant helps shoppers figure out what the recipient was probably referring to, then recommends the right product along with complementary gift options that make the choice feel intentional.
It brings the reassurance of an in-store associate to the online experience, helping shoppers move forward with confidence.

Results:
Finding the right bra size online is notoriously tricky. Shoppers often second-guess their band or cup size, and even small uncertainties can lead to returns — or abandoning the purchase altogether.
Many customers just want someone to walk them through what a proper fit should actually feel like.
How Shopping Assistant helps:
Searching for products is no longer a time-consuming process. Shopping Assistant detects a shopper’s search terms and sends relevant products in chat. Like an in-store associate, it uses context to deliver what shoppers are looking for, so they can skip the search and head right to checkout.

Results:
For shoppers buying personalized jewelry, the details directly affect the final result. That’s why customization questions come up constantly, and why uncertainty can quickly stall the path to purchase.
How Shopping Assistant helps:
Shopping Assistant asks about the shopper’s style preferences and customization needs, then recommends the right product and options so they can feel confident the final piece is exactly their style. The experience feels quick, helpful, and designed to guide shoppers toward a high investment purchase.

Results:
Decorating a home is personal, and shoppers often want reassurance that a new piece will blend with what they already own. Questions about color palettes, textures, and proportions come up constantly. And without guidance, it’s easy for shoppers to feel unsure about hitting “add to cart.”
How Shopping Assistant helps:
Giving shoppers personalized styling support helps them visualize how pieces will work in their home.
Shoppers receive styling suggestions based on their existing space as well as recommendations on pieces that complement their color palette.
It even guides them toward a 60-minute virtual styling consultation when they need deeper help. The experience feels thoughtful and high-touch, which is why shoppers often spend more once they feel confident in their choices.

Results:
When shoppers discover a new drink mix, they’re bound to have questions before committing. How strong will it taste? How much should they use? Will it work with their preferred drink or routine? Uncertainty at this stage can stall the purchase or lead to disappointment later.
How Shopping Assistant helps:
Clear, friendly guidance in chat helps shoppers understand exactly how to use the product. Shopping Assistant answers questions about serving size, flavor strength, and pairing options, and suggests the best way to prepare the mix based on the shopper’s preferences.

Results:
Shopping for health supplements can feel confusing fast. Customers often have questions about which formulas fit their age, health goals, or daily routine. Without clear guidance, most will hesitate or pick the wrong product.
How Shopping Assistant helps:
Shopping Assistant detects hesitation when shoppers linger on a search results page. It proactively asks a few clarifying questions, narrows down product options, and points shoppers to the best product or bundle for their needs.
The entire experience feels supportive and gives shoppers confidence they’ve picked the right option.

Results:
Shopping for kids’ furniture comes with a lot of “Is this the right one?” moments. Parents want something safe, sturdy, and sized correctly for their child’s age. With so many options, it’s easy to feel unsure about what will actually work in their space.
How Shopping Assistant helps:
Shopping Assistant guides parents toward the best fit right away. It asks about their child’s age, room layout, and safety considerations, then recommends the most appropriate bed or furniture setup. The experience feels like chatting with a knowledgeable salesperson who understands what families actually need as kids grow.

Results:
Even something as simple as choosing a toothbrush can feel complicated when multiple models come with different speeds, materials, and features. Shoppers want to understand what matters so they can pick the one that fits their routine and budget.
How Shopping Assistant helps:
Choosing between toothbrush models shouldn’t feel like decoding tech specs. When shoppers can see the key differences in plain language, including what’s unique, how each model works, and who it’s best for, they can make a decision with ease.
Suddenly, the whole process feels simple instead of overwhelming.

Results:
Across all 11 brands, one theme is clear. When shoppers get the guidance they need at the right moment, they convert more confidently and often spend more.
Here’s what stands out:
What this means for you:
Look closely at your most common pre-purchase questions. Anywhere shoppers hesitate from fit, shade, technical specs, styling, bundles is a place where Shopping Assistant can step in, boost confidence, and unlock more sales.
If you notice the same patterns in your own store, such as shoppers hesitating over sizing, shade matching, product comparisons, or technical details, guided shopping can make an immediate impact. These moments are often your biggest opportunities to increase revenue and improve the buying experience.
Many of the brands in this post started by identifying their most common pre-purchase questions and letting AI handle them at scale. You can do the same.
If you want to boost conversions, lift AOV, and create a smoother path to purchase, now is a great time to explore guided shopping for your team.
Book a demo or activate Shopping Assistant to get started.
{{lead-magnet-2}}
The best in CX and ecommerce, right to your inbox

TL;DR:
Conversational commerce finally has a scoreboard.
For years, CX leaders knew support conversations mattered, they just couldn’t prove how much. Conversations lived in that gray area of ecommerce where shoppers got answers, agents did their best, and everyone agreed the channel was “important”…
But tying those interactions back to actual revenue? Nearly impossible.
Fast forward to today, and everything has changed.
Real-time conversations — whether handled by a human agent or powered by AI — now leave a measurable footprint across the entire customer journey. You can see how many conversations directly influenced a purchase.
In other words, conversational commerce is finally something CX teams can measure, optimize, and scale with confidence.
If you want to prove the value of your CX strategy to your CFO, your marketing team, or your CEO, you need data, not anecdotes.
Leadership isn’t swayed by “We think conversations help shoppers.” They want to see the receipts. They want to know exactly how interactions influence revenue, which conversations drive conversion, and where AI meaningfully reduces workload without sacrificing quality.
That’s why conversational commerce metrics matter now more than ever. This gives CX leaders a way to:
These metrics let you track impact with clarity and confidence.
And once you can measure it, you can build a stronger case for deeper investment in conversational tools and strategy.
So, what exactly should CX teams be measuring?
While conversational commerce touches every part of the customer journey, the most meaningful insights fall into four core categories:
Let’s dive into each.
If you want to understand how well your conversational commerce strategy is working, automation performance is the first place to look. These metrics reveal how effectively AI is resolving shopper needs, reducing ticket volume, and stepping into revenue-driving conversations at scale.
The two most foundational metrics?
Resolution rate measures how many conversations your AI handles from start to finish without needing a human to take over. On paper, high resolution rates sound like a guaranteed win. It suggests your AI is handling product questions, sizing concerns, shade matching, order guidance, and more — all without adding to your team’s workload.
But a high resolution rate doesn’t automatically mean your AI is performing well.
Yes, the ticket was “resolved,” but was the customer actually helped? Was the answer accurate? Did the shopper leave satisfied or frustrated?
This is where quality assurance becomes essential. Your AI should be resolving tickets accurately and helpfully, not simply checking boxes.
At its best, a strong resolution rate signals that your AI is:
When resolution rate quality goes up, so does revenue influence.
You can see this clearly with beauty brands, where accuracy matters enormously. bareMinerals, for example, used to receive a flood of shade-matching questions. Everything from “Which concealer matches my undertone?” to “This foundation shade was discontinued; what’s the closest match?”
Before AI, these questions required well-trained agents and often created inconsistencies depending on who answered.
Once they introduced Shopping Assistant, resolution rate suddenly became more meaningful. AI wasn’t just closing tickets; it was giving smarter, more confident recommendations than many agents could deliver at scale, especially after hours.

That accuracy paid off.
AI-influenced purchases at bareMinerals had zero returns in the first 30 days because customers were finally getting the right shade the first time.
That’s the difference between “resolved” and resolved well.
The zero-touch ticket rate measures something slightly different: the percentage of conversations AI manages entirely on its own, without ever being escalated to an agent.
This metric is a direct lens into:
More importantly, deflection widens the funnel for more revenue-driven conversations.
When AI deflects more inbound questions, your support team can focus on conversations that truly require human expertise, including returns exceptions, escalations, VIP shoppers, and emotionally sensitive interactions.
Brands with strong deflection rates typically see:
If automation metrics tell you how well your AI is working, conversion and revenue metrics tell you how well it’s selling.
This category is where conversational commerce really proves its value because it shows the direct financial impact of every human- or AI-led interaction.
Chat conversion rate measures the percentage of conversations that end in a purchase, and it’s one of the clearest indicators of whether your conversational strategy is influencing shopper decisions.
A strong CVR tells you that conversations are:
You see this clearly with brands selling technical or performance-driven products.
Outdoor apparel shoppers, for example, don’t just need “a jacket” — they need to know which jacket will hold up in specific temperatures, conditions, or terrains. A well-trained AI can step into that moment and convert uncertainty into action.
Arc’teryx saw this firsthand.

Once Shopping Assistant started handling their high-intent pre-purchase questions, their chat conversion rate jumped dramatically — from 4% to 7%. A 75% lift.
That’s what happens when shoppers finally get the expert guidance they’ve been searching for.
Not every shopper buys the moment they finish a chat. Some take a few hours. Some need a day or two. Some want to compare specs or read reviews before committing.
GMV influenced captures this “tail effect” by tracking revenue within 1–3 days of a conversation.
It’s especially powerful for:
In Arc’teryx’s case, shoppers often take time to confirm they’re choosing the right technical gear.
Yet even with that natural pause in behavior, Shopping Assistant still influenced 3.7% of all revenue, not by forcing instant decisions, but by providing the clarity people needed to make the right one.
This metric looks at the average order value of shoppers who engage in a conversation versus those who don’t.
If the conversational AOV is higher, it means your AI or agents are educating customers in ways that naturally expand the cart.
Examples of AOV-lifting conversations include:
When conversations are done well, AOV increases not because shoppers are being upsold, but because they’re being guided.
ROI compares the revenue generated by conversational AI to the cost of the tool itself — in short, this is the number that turns heads in boardrooms.
Strong ROI shows that your AI:
When ROI looks like that, AI stops being a “tool” and starts being an undeniable growth lever.
Related: The hidden power and ROI of automated customer support
Not every metric in conversational commerce is a final outcome. Some are early signals that show whether shoppers are interested, paying attention, and moving closer to a purchase.
These engagement metrics are especially valuable because they reveal why conversations convert, not just whether they do. When engagement goes up, conversion usually follows.
CTR measures the percentage of shoppers who click the product links shared during a conversation. It’s one of the cleanest leading indicators of buyer intent because it reflects a moment where curiosity turns into action.
If CTR is high, it’s a sign that:
In other words, CTR tells you which conversations are influencing shopping behavior.
And the connection between CTR and revenue is often tighter than teams expect.
Just look at what happened with Caitlyn Minimalist. When they began comparing the results of human-led conversations versus AI-assisted ones over a 90-day period, CTR became one of the clearest predictors of success. Their Shopping Assistant consistently drove meaningful engagement with its recommendations — an 18% click-through rate on the products it suggested.
That level of engagement translated directly into better outcomes:
When shoppers click, they’re moving deeper into the buying cycle. Strong CTR makes it easier to forecast conversion and understand how well your conversational flows are guiding shoppers toward the right products.

Discounting can be one of the fastest ways to nudge a shopper toward checkout, but it’s also one of the fastest ways to erode margins.
That’s why discount-related metrics matter so much in conversational commerce.
They show not just whether AI is using discounts, but how effectively those discounts are driving conversions.
This metric tracks how many discount codes or promotional offers your AI is sharing during conversations.
Ideally, discounts should be purposeful — timed to moments when a shopper hesitates or needs an extra nudge — not rolled out as a one-size-fits-all script. When you monitor “discounts offered,” you can ensure that incentives are being used as conversion tools, not crutches.
This visibility becomes particularly important at high-intent touchpoints, such as exit intent or cart recovery interactions, where a small incentive can meaningfully increase conversion if used correctly.
Offering a discount is one thing. Seeing whether customers use it is another.
A high “discounts applied” rate suggests:
A low usage rate tells a different story: Your team (or your AI) is discounting unnecessarily.
This metric alone often surprises brands. More often than not, CX teams discover they can discount less without hurting conversion, or that a non-discount incentive (like a relevant product recommendation) performs just as well.
Understanding this relationship helps teams tighten their promotional strategy, protect margins, and use discounts only where they actually drive incremental revenue.
Once you know which metrics matter, the next step is building a system that brings them together in one place.
Think of your conversational commerce scorecard as a decision-making engine — something that helps you understand performance at a glance, spot bottlenecks, optimize AI, and guide shoppers more effectively.
In Gorgias, you can customize your analytics dashboard to watch the metrics that matter most to your brand. This becomes the single source of truth for understanding how conversations influence revenue.
Here’s what a powerful dashboard unlocks:
Some parts of the customer journey are perfect for AI: repetitive questions, product education, sizing guidance, shade matching, order status checks.
Others still benefit from human support, like emotional conversations, complex troubleshooting, multi-item styling, or high-value VIP concerns.
Metrics like resolution rate, zero-touch ticket rate, and chat conversion rate show you exactly which is which.
When you track these consistently, you can:
For example, if AI handles 80% of sizing questions successfully but struggles with multi-item styling advice, that tells you where to invest in improving AI, and where human expertise should remain the default.
Metrics like CTR, CVR, and conversational AOV reveal the inner workings of shopper decision-making. They show which recommendations resonate, which don’t, and which messaging actually moves someone to purchase.
With these insights, CX teams can:
For instance, if shoppers repeatedly ask clarifying questions about a product’s material or fit, that’s a signal for merchandising or product teams.
If recommendations with social proof get high engagement, marketing can integrate that insight into on-site messaging.
Conversations reveal what customers really care about — often before analytics do.
This is the moment when the scorecard stops being a CX tool and becomes a business tool.
A clear set of metrics shows how conversations tie to:
When a CX leader walks into a meeting and says, “Our AI Assistant influenced 5% of last month’s revenue” or “Conversational shoppers have a 20% higher AOV,” the perception of CX changes instantly.
You’re no longer a support cost. You’re a revenue channel.
And once you have numbers like ROI or revenue influence in hand, it becomes nearly impossible for anyone to argue against further investment in CX automation.
A scorecard doesn’t just show what’s working, it surfaces what’s not.
Metrics make friction obvious:
Metric Signal |
What It Means |
|---|---|
Low CTR |
Recommendations may be irrelevant or poorly timed. |
Low CVR |
Conversations aren’t persuasive enough to drive a purchase. |
High deflection but low revenue |
AI is resolving tickets, but not effectively selling. |
High discount usage |
Shoppers rely on incentives to convert. |
Low discount usage |
You may be offering discounts unnecessarily and losing margin. |
Once you identify these patterns, you can run targeted experiments:
Compounded over time, these moments create major lifts in conversion and revenue.
One of the biggest hidden values of conversational data is how it strengthens cross-functional decision-making.
A clear analytics dashboard gives teams visibility into:
Suddenly, CX isn’t just answering questions — it’s informing strategy across the business.
With the right metrics in place, CX leaders can finally quantify the impact of every interaction, and use that data to shape smarter, more profitable customer journeys.
If you're ready to measure — and scale — the impact of your conversations, tools like Gorgias AI Agent and Shopping Assistant give CX teams the visibility, accuracy, and performance needed to turn every interaction into revenue.
Want to see it in action? Book a demo and discover what conversational commerce can do for your bottom line.
{{lead-magnet-2}}
TL;DR:
When Rhoback introduced an AI Agent to its customer experience team, it did more than automate routine tickets. Implementation revealed an opportunity to improve documentation, collaborate cross-functionally, and establish a clear brand tone of voice.
Samantha Gagliardi, Associate Director of Customer Experience at Rhoback, explains the entire process in the first episode of our AI in CX webinar series.
With any new tool, the pre-implementation phase can take some time. Creating proper documentation, training internal teams, and integrating with your tech stack are all important steps that happen before you go live.
But sometimes it’s okay just to launch a tool and optimize as you go.
Rhoback launched its AI agent two weeks before BFCM to automate routine tickets during the busy season.
Why it worked:
Before turning on Rhoback’s AI Agent, Samantha’s team reviewed every FAQ, policy, and help article that human agents are trained on. This helped establish clear CX expectations that they could program into an AI Agent.
Samantha also reviewed the most frequently asked questions and the ideal responses to each. Which ones needed an empathetic human touch and which ones required fast, accurate information?
“AI tells you immediately when your data isn’t clean. If a product detail page says one thing and the help center says another, it shows up right away.”
Rhoback’s pre-implementation audit checklist:
Read more: How to Optimize Your Help Center for AI Agent
It’s often said that you should train your AI Agent like a brand-new employee.
Samantha took it one step further and recommended treating AI like a toddler, with clear, patient, repetitive instructions.
“The AI does not have a sense of good and bad. It’s going to say whatever you train it, so you need to break it down like you’re talking to a three-year-old that doesn’t know any different. Your directions should be so detailed that there is no room for error.”
Practical tips:
Read more: How to Write Guidance with the “When, If, Then” Framework
For Rhoback, an on-brand Tone of Voice was a non-negotiable. Samantha built a character study that shaped Rhoback’s AI Agent’s custom brand voice.
“I built out the character of Rhoback, how it talks, what age it feels like, what its personality is. If it does not sound like us, it is not worth implementing.”
Key questions to shape your AI Agent’s tone of voice:
Once Samantha started testing the AI Agent, it quickly revealed misalignment between Rhoback’s teams. With such an extensive product catalog, AI showed that product details did not always match the Help Center or CX documentation.
This made a case for stronger collaboration amongst the CX, Product, and Ecommerce teams to work towards their shared goal of prioritizing the customer.
“It opened up conversations we were not having before. We all want the customer to be happy, from the moment they click on an ad to the moment they purchase to the moment they receive their order. AI Agent allowed us to see the areas we need to improve upon.”
Tips to improve internal alignment:
Despite the benefits of AI for CX, there’s still trepidation. Agents are concerned that AI would replace them, while customers worry they won’t be able to reach a human. Both are valid concerns, but clearly communicating internally and externally can mitigate skepticism.
At Rhoback, Samantha built internal trust by looping in key stakeholders throughout the testing process. “I showed my team that it is not replacing them. It’s meant to be a support that helps them be even more successful with what they’re already doing," Samantha explains.
On the customer side, Samantha trained their AI Agent to tell customers in the first message that it is an AI customer service assistant that will try to help them or pass them along to a human if it can’t.
How Rhoback built AI confidence:
Read more: How CX Leaders are Actually Using AI: 6 Must-Know Lessons
Here is Rhoback’s approach distilled into a simple framework you can apply.
Watch the full conversation with Samantha to learn how AI can act as a catalyst for better internal alignment.
📌 Join us for episode 2 of AI in CX: Building a Conversational Commerce Strategy that Converts with Cornbread Hemp on December 16.
{{lead-magnet-1}}

TL;DR:
In 2024, Shopify merchants drove $11.5 billion in sales over Black Friday Cyber Monday. Now, BFCM is quickly approaching, with some brands and major retailers already hosting sales.
If you’re feeling late to prepare for the season or want to maximize the number of sales you’ll make, we’ll cover how food and beverage CX teams can serve up better self-serve resources for this year’s BFCM.
Learn how to answer and deflect customers’ top questions before they’re escalated to your support team.
💡 Your guide to everything peak season → The Gorgias BFCM Hub
During busy seasons like BFCM and beyond, staying on top of routine customer asks can be an extreme challenge.
“Every founder thinks BFCM is the highest peak feeling of nervousness,” says Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder of supplement brand Obvi.
“It’s a tough week. So anything that makes our team’s life easier instantly means we can focus more on things that need the time,” he continues.
Anticipating contact reasons and preparing methods (like automated responses, macros, and enabling an AI Agent) is something that can help. Below, find the top contact reasons for food and beverage companies in 2025.
According to Gorgias proprietary data, the top reason customers reach out to brands in the food and beverage industry is to cancel a subscription (13%) followed by order status questions (9.1%).
Contact Reason |
% of Tickets |
|---|---|
🍽️ Subscription cancellation |
13% |
🚚 Order status (WISMO) |
9.1% |
❌ Order cancellation |
6.5% |
🥫 Product details |
5.7% |
🧃 Product availability |
4.1% |
⭐ Positive feedback |
3.9% |
Because product detail queries represent 5.7% of contact reasons for the food and beverage industry, the more information you provide on your product pages, the better.
Include things like calorie content, nutritional information, and all ingredients.
For example, ready-to-heat meal company The Dinner Ladies includes a dropdown menu on each product page for further reading. Categories include serving instructions, a full ingredient list, allergens, nutritional information, and even a handy “size guide” that shows how many people the meal serves.

FAQ pages make up the information hub of your website. They exist to provide customers with a way to get their questions answered without reaching out to you.
This includes information like how food should be stored, how long its shelf life is, delivery range, and serving instructions. FAQs can even direct customers toward finding out where their order is and what its status is.

In the context of BFCM, FAQs are all about deflecting repetitive questions away from your team and assisting shoppers in finding what they need faster.
That’s the strategy for German supplement brand mybacs.
“Our focus is to improve automations to make it easier for customers to self-handle their requests. This goes hand in hand with making our FAQs more comprehensive to give customers all the information they need,” says Alexander Grassmann, its Co-Founder & COO.
As you contemplate what to add to your FAQ page, remember that more information is usually better. That’s the approach Everyday Dose takes, answering even hyper-specific questions like, “Will it break my fast?” or “Do I have to use milk?”

While the FAQs you choose to add will be specific to your products, peruse the top-notch food and bev FAQ pages below.
Time for some FAQ inspo:
AI Agents and AI-powered Shopping Assistants are easy to set up and are extremely effective in handling customer interactions––especially during BFCM.
“I told our team we were going to onboard Gorgias AI Agent for BFCM, so a good portion of tickets would be handled automatically,” says Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi. “There was a huge sigh of relief knowing that customers were going to be taken care of.”
And, they’re getting smarter. AI Agent’s CSAT is just 0.6 points shy of human agents’ average CSAT score.

Here are the specific responses and use cases we recommend automating:
Get your checklist here: How to prep for peak season: BFCM automation checklist
With high price reductions often comes faster-than-usual sell out times. By offering transparency around item quantities, you can avoid frustrated or upset customers.
For example, you could show how many items are left under a certain threshold (e.g. “Only 10 items left”), or, like Rebel Cheese does, mention whether items have sold out in the past.

You could also set up presales, give people the option to add themselves to a waitlist, and provide early access to VIP shoppers.
Give shoppers a heads up whether they’ll be able to cancel an order once placed, and what your refund policies are.
For example, cookware brand Misen follows its order confirmation email with a “change or cancel within one hour” email that provides a handy link to do so.

Your refund policies and order cancellations should live within an FAQ and in the footer of your website.
Include how-to information on your website within your FAQs, on your blog, or as a standalone webpage. That might be sharing how to use a product, how to cook with it, or how to prepare it. This can prevent customers from asking questions like, “how do you use this?” or “how do I cook this?” or “what can I use this with?” etc.
For example, Purity Coffee created a full brewing guide with illustrations:

Similarly, for its unique preseasoned carbon steel pan, Misen lists out care instructions:

And for those who want to understand the level of prep and cooking time involved, The Dinner Ladies feature cooking instructions on each product page.

Interactive quizzes, buying guides, and gift guides can help ensure shoppers choose the right items for them––without contacting you first.
For example, Trade Coffee Co created a quiz to help first timers find their perfect coffee match:

The more information you can share with customers upfront, the better. That will leave your team time to tackle the heady stuff.
If you’re looking for an AI-assist this season, check out Gorgias’s suite of products like AI Agent and Shopping Assistant.
{{lead-magnet-2}}

.avif)
Most customers are loyal to brands because they know what level of service they can expect. As a result, providing an above-average customer experience is key to increase repeat in sales.
It’s relatively easy to provide great support when you get started with your store: your team gets a few dozens of support requests a day, and they respond to them almost instantly. The thing is, this level of service is very hard to maintain as you scale. Response time usually drops, and most brands start using standardized macros to keep up with the pace, which is a poor customer experience.
Your sales have increased, good. Now, you need to get your customer support up to speed

Source: Gorgias customers during the Thanksgiving peak
At Gorgias, we’ve been chatting with 400 stores over the past year, and we’ve seen a lot of them working on crossing this “chasm”.
This post shares learning on how you can build a customer support organization that will scale with your business, and provide best-in-class customer service, which will drive customer retention.
A good place to start is to list the most common reasons customers are contacting you about. Go ahead and manually classify 200 tickets from your support inbox. This should take you about an hour. You can build categories from scratch, or use this spreadsheet of the most common requests for e-commerce companies we built.

Now, you should be able to understand what problems are causing the most pain to customers.
If a specific type of request is above 10% of requests, then it’s a good candidate for optimization. For instance, if you’re getting a lot of “where is my order” questions, here are a few things you can do to deflect those:
Now that you have a good understanding of the reasons customers are contacting you for, you can map the customer journey, and identify what actions your agents need to take to respond to tickets.
Later, you can use this for training purposes, and to identify optimization opportunities.
At Piper, we basically studied the whole customer journey and tried to identify all reasons why someone could contact us (based on previous history). This helped us quickly identify where customers were "blocked"
Finally, let’s analyze the efficiency of your team. Of course, every business is different, but you can use this table to figure out how efficient your agents are compared to other stores. A good metric to track it is ticket closed per month. Just make sure that satisfaction remains consistent.

Related: Learn more about the impact of live chat on sales. And see how Gorgias live chat can help you turn more browsers into buyers with chat campaigns.
Now, let’s work on creating “wow moments” for your customers. If you manage to exceed customers expectations when they contact you, you’re most likely to increase their loyalty and have them refer your store to their friends.
Here are a few ways you can create “wow moments”.
You should be where your customers are. For example, if you have a Facebook page with a large audience, consider it as a real customer support channel. The point is, you should provide the same level of assistance across all support channels that your customer will use.
Also, don't be afraid to contact customers first, especially when they have items in their shopping cart. Offering help or a discount code at the right time could make the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.
Example: providing high quality support on Facebook
70% of customers consider Facebook as a live chat support. To maximize customer satisfaction, your response time should be no more than 1 min. You’ll then be listed as a very responsive page, which will encourage your customers to respond.

You can also leverage public posts to build relationship with your customers. Another easy way to facilitate customer communication is to remove the need for customers to repeat themselves. On your support platform, make sure your merge Facebook conversations with email tickets. This way, if the customer switches channel, your team will have access to the context of what the customer said before.
Related: Check out our trends and best practices for customer support.
You should leverage every data point you have about the customer to personalize the way you communicate with them:
For how long they have been a customer
Their order preference
Their location
The days of the “we value your business” are over.
Always go an extra mile for your customers. If the customer asks for the status of their order, don’t respond only with the tracking number. Go get the order status on UPS so the customer doesn’t have to do it themselves when they’ll receive your email in the subway with poor network connection.

Another good thing to do is to use a specific tone with your customer, that matches the brand image you want to convey.
If you’re into gifs, you can use them to build a brand tone your own set of gifs, designed for your own brand, and use them in your support emails. You can hire an illustrator on Upwork for that, or build them yourself.
Related: Tips to respond to angry customer emails.
Now that you know the level of support you aim at giving your customers, and you know what actions your agents need to take to get the delivery info, create an RMAs, etc., you can start optimizing the process for them.
To personalize messages, your agents need to have access to customer data. You can leverage the standard Shopify integration from your help desk as a starting point.
Though, it can be relevant to connect other data points to your help desk:
If you’re on Zendesk, enabling the Shopify integration is a good start: it shows how much the customer has spent, and the past orders.
Some Gorgias customers have pretty advanced widgets that display data from Shopify, Stitch & Shipstation. This way, all the customer information is available.
You can create custom widgets for your help desk, so that your agents can trigger actions from your help desk. Here are the most helpful actions:
This is a bit more tricky to implement. You need to build a custom app with buttons that will trigger actions - there are some good tutorials for Zendesk, Freshdesk & Help Scout. At Gorgias, we’ve built integrations with Stitch, Shipstation to embed these actions in the product, and enable you to add your own.
Other 3rd party apps like Chargedesk enable you to refund customers in one click.

Our goal here is to improve the customer experience to drive sales. A good way to track the efficiency of your support work is to compare the behavior of customers that have been in contact with customer support from those who have not.
Shopify helps you easily to this. You can create an integration between your help desk and Shopify to tag customers who reach out to support, using the Shopify API. Say you add a “customer_support” tag to them.

Then, you can use Shopify statistics to monitor how the cohort of customers who have been in touch with your support team behaves, and assess the impact of your efforts with customer support.

Another way to proceed is to tag orders that generated a support tickets. This way, if you work on improving delivery notifications, you can monitor the impact.
Building a scalable support team that provides an amazing customer experience takes time.
Try to test different “wow moments”, iterate on the way you personalize messages, on the tone you’re using, and always track your progress. Among the teams we surveyed, several mentioned they managed to increase sales repeat by 30% after implementing these tactics.
Want to learn more about how customer support can improve your conversion rate and lead to more purchases? Check out our guides to ecommerce upselling and Shopify abandoned cart recovery.

Celery just released their API on Github, currently in beta. Here are some of the cool stuff you can do with it in Gorgias.
When you receive an email from a customer, you can connect your Celery account and see customer information (orders, shipping address, etc.). Here’s what it looks like:

To configure it, grab your Celery access_token, head to integrations, and add an HTTP integration using this URL:
https://api.trycelery.com/v2/orders?buyer.email={ticket.requester.email}
Then you can customize the sidebar to only show the Celery data you need to respond to customers. Click the cog and simply drag and drop elements you want to show.

Celery’s API enables you to perform a few actions from your favorite helpdesk:
Here’s an example of how you can cancel an order from Gorgias itself. Say you already have a macro to cancel an order. Add an HTTP action to it, in this case:
https://api.trycelery.com/v2/orders/{ticket.requester.customer.data[0].number}/order_cancel
Then, when you use this macro and send it to the customer, it will automatically cancel the last order at the same time:

We hope this integration with Celery can save you time. If you'd like to try Celery with Gorgias, shoot us a note! At support@gorgias.com.

TLDR: https://github.com/xarg/pghoard-k8s
This is a small tutorial on how to do incremental backups using pghoard for your PostgreSQL (I assume you’re running everything in Kubernetes). This is intended to help people to get started faster and not waste time finding the right dependencies, etc..
pghoard is a PostgreSQL backup daemon that incrementally backups your files on a object storage (S3, Google Cloud Storage, etc..).
For this tutorial what we’re trying to achieve is to upload our PostgreSQL to S3.
First, let’s create our docker image (we’re using the alpine:3.4 image cause it’s small):
FROM alpine:3.4
ENV REPLICA_USER "replica"
ENV REPLICA_PASSWORD "replica"
RUN apk add --no-cache \
bash \
build-base \
python3 \
python3-dev \
ca-certificates \
postgresql \
postgresql-dev \
libffi-dev \
snappy-dev
RUN python3 -m ensurepip && \
rm -r /usr/lib/python*/ensurepip && \
pip3 install --upgrade pip setuptools && \
rm -r /root/.cache && \
pip3 install boto pghoard
COPY pghoard.json /pghoard.json.template
COPY pghoard.sh /
CMD /pghoard.sh
REPLICA_USER and REPLICA_PASSWORD env vars will be replaced later in your Kubernetes conf by whatever your config is in production, I use those values to test locally using docker-compose.
The config pghoard.json which tells where to get your data from and where to upload it and how:
{
"backup_location": "/data",
"backup_sites": {
"default": {
"active_backup_mode": "pg_receivexlog",
"basebackup_count": 2,
"basebackup_interval_hours": 24,
"nodes": [
{
"host": "YOUR-PG-HOST",
"port": 5432,
"user": "replica",
"password": "replica",
"application_name": "pghoard"
}
],
"object_storage": {
"aws_access_key_id": "REPLACE",
"aws_secret_access_key": "REPLACE",
"bucket_name": "REPLACE",
"region": "us-east-1",
"storage_type": "s3"
},
"pg_bin_directory": "/usr/bin"
}
},
"http_address": "127.0.0.1",
"http_port": 16000,
"log_level": "INFO",
"syslog": false,
"syslog_address": "/dev/log",
"syslog_facility": "local2"
}
Obviously replace the values above with your own. And read pghoard docs for more config explanation.
Note: Make sure you have enough space in your /data; use a Google Persistent Volume if you DB is very big.
Launch script which does 2 things:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
if [ -n "$TESTING" ]; then
echo "Not running backup when testing"
exit 0
fi
cat /pghoard.json.template | sed "s/\"password\": \"replica\"/\"password\": \"${REPLICA_PASSWORD}\"/" | sed "s/\"user\": \"replica\"/\"password\": \"${REPLICA_USER}\"/" > /pghoard.json
pghoard --config /pghoard.json
Once you build and upload your image to gcr.io you’ll need a replication controller to start your pghoard daemon pod:
apiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
name: pghoard
spec:
replicas: 1
selector:
app: pghoard
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: pghoard
spec:
containers:
- name: pghoard
env:
- name: REPLICA_USER
value: "replicant"
- name: REPLICA_PASSWORD
value: "The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not with out your help. But you're not helping."
image: gcr.io/your-project/pghoard:latest
The reason I use a replication controller is because I want the pod to restart if it fails, if a simple pod is used it will stay dead and you’ll not have backups.
Future to do:
Hope it helps, stay safe and sleep well at night.
Again, repo with the above: https://github.com/xarg/pghoard-k8s

At Gorgias we recently switched our flask & celery apps from Google Cloud VMs provisioned with Fabric to using docker with kubernetes (k8s). This is a post about our experience doing this.
Note: I'm assuming that you're somewhat familiar with Docker.
The killer feature of Docker for us is that it allows us to make layered binary images of our app. What this means is that you can start with a minimal base image, then make a python image on top of that, then an app image on top of the python one, etc..
Here's the hierarchy of our docker images:
Piece of advice: If you used to run your app using supervisord before I would advise to avoid the temptation to do the same with docker, just let your container crash and let k8s handle it.
Now we can run the above images using: docker-compose, docker-swarm, k8s, Mesos, etc...
There is an excellent post about the differences between container deployments which also settles for k8s.
I'll also just assume that you already did your homework and you plan to use k8s. But just to put more data out there:
Main reason: We are using Google Cloud already and it provides a ready to use Kubernetes cluster on their cloud.
This is huge as we don't have to manage the k8s cluster and can focus on deploying our apps to production instead.
Let's begin by making a list of what we need to run our app in production:
We ran the above in a normal VM environment, why would we need k8s? To understand this, let's dig a bit into what k8s offers:
There are more concepts like volumes, claims, secrets, but let's not worry about them for now.
We're using Postgres as our main storage and we are not running it using Kubernetes.
Now we are running postgres in k8s (1 hot standby + pghoard), you can ignore the rest of this paragaph.
The reason here is that we wanted to run Postgres using provisioned SSD + high memory instances. We could have created a cluster just for postgres with these types of machines, but it seemed like an overkill.
The philosophy of k8s is that you should design your cluster with the thought that pods/nodes of your cluster are just gonna die randomly. I haven't figured our how to setup Postgres with this constraint in mind. So we're just running it replicated with a hot-standby and doing backups with wall-e for now. If you want to try it with k8s there is a guide here. And make sure you tell us about it.
RabbitMQ (used as message broker for Celery) is running on k8s as it's easier (than Postgres) to make a cluster. Not gonna dive into the details. It's using a replication controller to run 3 pods containing rabbitmq instances. This guide helped: https://www.rabbitmq.com/clustering.html
As I mentioned before, we're using a replication controller to run 3 pods, each containing uWSGI & NGINX containers duo: gorgias/web & gorgias/nginx. Here's our replication controller web-rc.yaml config:
apiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
name: web
spec:
replicas: 3 # how many copies of the template below we need to run
selector:
app: web
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: web
spec:
containers:
- name: web
image: gcr.io/your-project/web:latest # the image that you pushed to Google Container Registry using gcloud docker push
ports: # these are the exposed ports of your Pods that are later used by the k8s Service
- containerPort: 3033
name: "uwsgi"
- containerPort: 9099
name: "stats"
- name: nginx
image: gcr.io/your-project/nginx:latest
ports:
- containerPort: 8000
name: "http"
- containerPort: 4430
name: "https"
volumeMounts: # this holds our SSL keys to be used with nginx. I haven't found a way to use the http load balancer of google with k8s.
- name: "secrets"
mountPath: "/path/to/secrets"
readOnly: true
volumes:
- name: "secrets"
secret:
secretName: "ssl-secret"
And now the web-service.yaml:apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: web
spec:
ports:
- port: 80
targetPort: 8000
name: "http"
protocol: TCP
- port: 443
targetPort: 4430
name: "https"
protocol: TCP
selector:
app: web
type: LoadBalancer
That type: LoadBalancer at the end is super important because it tells k8s to request a public IP and route the network to the Pods with the selector=app:web.
If you're doing a rolling-update or just restarting your pods, you don't have to change the service. It will look for pods matching those labels.
Also a replication controller that runs 4 pods containing a single container: gorgias/worker, but doesn't need a service as it only consumes stuff. Here's our worker-rc.yaml:
apiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
name: worker
spec:
replicas: 2
selector:
app: worker
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: worker
spec:
containers:
- name: worker
image: gcr.io/your-project/worker:latest
With Kubernetes, docker finally started to make sense to me. It's great because it provides great tools out of the box for doing web app deployment. Replication controllers, Services (with LoadBalancer included), Persistent Volumes, internal DNS. It should have all you need to make a resilient web app fast.
At Gorgias we're building a next generation helpdesk that allows responding 2x faster to common customer requests and having a fast and reliable infrastructure is crucial to achieve our goals.
If you're interested in working with this kind of stuff (especially to improve it): we're hiring!

We've released a new version of the Chrome Extension, with sharing features and a new navigation bar. We hope you'll love it!
Before, the only way to share templates with your teammates was to login on Gorgias.io.
If you're on the startup plan, when you create a template, you can choose who has access to it: either only you, specific people, or your entire team.

The account management section is now available in the extension, under settings.
Tags are now available on the left. It's easier to manage hundreds of templates with them.
You can also navigate through your private & shared templates. Shared templates include templates shared with specific people or with everyone.

We hope you'll enjoy this new version of our Chrome Extension. As usual, your feedback & questions are welcome!

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised a $1.5 million Seed round led by Charles River Ventures and Amplify Partners, to help build our new helpdesk.
We’re incredibly grateful to early users, customers, mentors we’ve met both at and Techstars.
We started the journey with Alex at the beginning of 2015 with our Chrome extension, which helps write email faster using templates. We’ve been pleased all along with customers telling us about how helpful it was, especially for customer support.
While building the extension, we’ve realized that a big inefficiency in support lies in the lack of integration between the helpdesk, the payment system, CRM and other tools support is using. As a result, agents need to do a lot of repetitive work to respond to customer requests, especially when the company is big.

That’s why we’ve decided to build a new kind of helpdesk to enable customer support agents to respond 2x faster to customers. You can find out more and sign up for our private beta here.
When a company has a lot of customers, support becomes repetitive. We want to provide support teams with tools to automate the way they treat simple repetitive requests. This way, they have more time for complex customer issues.
We'll now focus on this helpdesk and on growing the team, oh, and if you'd like to join, we're hiring! We're super excited about this new helpdesk product. If you’re using the extension, don’t worry.
Romain & Alex

Last few months we got lots of feedback about our extension and found to our delight that most people are satisfied, but still a few recurrent issues came up:
We listened and now we're presenting:
WYSIWYG editors for the web are notoriously buggy and are just difficult to develop.
I have yet to see one that is bug free. There are few venerable editors that do a good job like TinyMCE, FKEditor or CKEditor.. but they are big and all have edge cases that break the intended formatting and add a lot of garbage html.
There are newer good quality editors in town such as Redactor. The one that got my attention and finally landed in Gorgias is this wonderful editor called which is super lightweight, uses modern content-editable (no i-frames) and 'just works' most of the time. That's not to say it's perfect, but it's good enough and I'm satisfied with it's direction in terms of development.
Enjoy it and as always send us bug-reports or feedback on: support@gorgias.com

TL;DR:
Rising customer expectations, shoppers willing to pay a premium for convenience, and a growing lack of trust in social media channels to make purchase decisions are making it more challenging to turn a profit.
In this emerging era, AI’s role is becoming not only more pronounced, but a necessity for brands who want to stay ahead. Tools like Gorgias Shopping Assistant can help drive measurable revenue while reducing support costs.
For example, a brand that specializes in premium outdoor apparel implemented Shopping Assistant and saw a 2.25% uplift in GMV and 29% uplift in average order volume (AOV).
But how, among competing priorities and expenses, do you convince leadership to implement it? We’ll show you.
Shoppers want on-demand help in real time that’s personalized across devices.
Shopping Assistant recalls a shopper’s browsing history, like what they have clicked, viewed, and added to their cart. This allows it to make more relevant suggestions that feel personal to each customer.
The AI ecommerce tools market was valued at $7.25 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach $21.55 billion by 2030.
Your competitors are using conversational AI to support, sell, and retain. Shopping Assistant satisfies that need, providing upsells and recommendations rooted in real shopper behavior.
Conversational AI has real revenue implications, impacting customer retention, average order value (AOV), conversion rates, and gross market value (GMV).
For example, a leading nutrition brand saw a GMV uplift of over 1%, an increase in AOV of over 16%, and a chat conversion rate of over 15% after implementing Shopping Assistant.
Overall, Shopping Assistant drives higher engagement and more revenue per visitor, sometimes surpassing 50% and 20%, respectively.

Shopping Assistant engages, personalizes, recommends, and converts. It provides proactive recommendations, smart upsells, dynamic discounts, and is highly personalized, all helping to guide shoppers to checkout.
After implementing Shopping Assistant, leading ecommerce brands saw real results:
Industry |
Primary Use Case |
GMV Uplift (%) |
AOV Uplift (%) |
Chat CVR (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Home & interior decor 🖼️ |
Help shoppers coordinate furniture with existing pieces and color schemes. |
+1.17 |
+97.15 |
10.30 |
Outdoor apparel 🎿 |
In-depth explanations of technical features and confidence when purchasing premium, performance-driven products. |
+2.25 |
+29.41 |
6.88 |
Nutrition 🍎 |
Personalized guidance on supplement selection based on age, goals, and optimal timing. |
+1.09 |
+16.40 |
15.15 |
Health & wellness 💊 |
Comparing similar products and understanding functional differences to choose the best option. |
+1.08 |
+11.27 |
8.55 |
Home furnishings 🛋️ |
Help choose furniture sizes and styles appropriate for children and safety needs. |
+12.26 |
+10.19 |
1.12 |
Stuffed toys 🧸 |
Clear care instructions and support finding replacements after accidental product damage. |
+4.43 |
+9.87 |
3.62 |
Face & body care 💆♀️ |
Assistance finding the correct shade online, especially when previously purchased products are no longer available. |
+6.55 |
+1.02 |
5.29 |
Shopping Assistant drives uplift in chat conversion rate and makes successful upsell recommendations.
“It’s been awesome to see Shopping Assistant guide customers through our technical product range without any human input. It’s a much smoother journey for the shopper,” says Nathan Larner, Customer Experience Advisor for Arc’teryx.
For Arc’teryx, that smoother customer journey translated into sales. The brand saw a 75% increase in conversion rate (from 4% to 7%) and 3.7% of overall revenue influenced by Shopping Assistant.

Because it follows shoppers’ live journey during each session on your website, Shopping Assistant catches shoppers in the moment. It answers questions or concerns that might normally halt a purchase, gets strategic with discounting (based on rules you set), and upsells.
The overall ROI can be significant. For example, bareMinerals saw an 8.83x return on investment.
"The real-time Shopify integration was essential as we needed to ensure that product recommendations were relevant and displayed accurate inventory,” says Katia Komar, Sr. Manager of Ecommerce and Customer Service Operations, UK at bareMinerals.
“Avoiding customer frustration from out-of-stock recommendations was non-negotiable, especially in beauty, where shade availability is crucial to customer trust and satisfaction. This approach has led to increased CSAT on AI converted tickets."

Shopping Assistant can impact CSAT scores, response times, resolution rates, AOV, and GMV.
For Caitlyn Minimalist, those metrics were an 11.3% uplift in AOV, an 18% click through rate for product recommendations, and a 50% sales lift versus human-only chats.
"Shopping Assistant has become an intuitive extension of our team, offering product guidance that feels personal and intentional,” says Anthony Ponce, its Head of Customer Experience.

Support agents have limited time to assist customers as it is, so taking advantage of sales opportunities can be difficult. Shopping Assistant takes over that role, removing obstacles for purchase or clearing up the right choice among a stacked product catalog.
With a product that’s not yet mainstream in the US, TUSHY leverages Shopping Assistant for product education and clarification.
"Shopping Assistant has been a game-changer for our team, especially with the launch of our latest bidet models,” says Ren Fuller-Wasserman, Sr. Director of Customer Experience at TUSHY.
“Expanding our product catalog has given customers more choices than ever, which can overwhelm first-time buyers. Now, they’re increasingly looking to us for guidance on finding the right fit for their home and personal hygiene needs.”
The bidet brand saw 13x return on investment after implementation, a 15% increase in chat conversion rate, and a 2x higher conversion rate for AI conversations versus human ones.

Customer support metrics include:
Revenue metrics to track include:
Shopping Assistant connects to your ecommerce platform (like Shopify), and streamlines information between your helpdesk and order data. It’s also trained on your catalog and support history.
Allow your agents to focus on support and sell more by tackling questions that are getting in the way of sales.
{{lead-magnet-2}}


