How Barrel and Gorgias Drive More Value For Their Ecommerce Clients

Founded in 2006, Barrel creates omnichannel commerce experiences for CPG brands in food & beverage, health & beauty, and household goods industries. These brands typically make $10M-$500M+ in total revenue and have teams of 10 to 500+ employees. 

Barrel offers core services like designing and building websites for Shopify Plus brands, auditing existing websites and roadmapping improvements, and optimizing customer journeys. 

Most of Barrel’s clients sell through a mix of DTC, retail, and wholesale, ranging from digitally native brands to those just starting to build their online strategy. Barrel aims to help its clients prioritize their digital presence and drive measurable growth. 

Barrel’s clients include:

• Growing brands looking to enhance their digital footprint (i.e. Sweet Loren’s)
• Established brands optimizing their website and marketing. (i.e. Once Upon A Farm)
• Large retailers trying to modernize to stay competitive (i.e. McCormick)

How Barrel services its clients

Barrel’s focuses on website optimization, email, and retention strategies, ensuring customers get a great experience at every touchpoint.

Some of Barrel’s main services include: 

• Building and designing Shopify Plus websites from scratch, or redesigning existing sites
• Auditing and improving website performance to drive more conversions
• Optimizing every touchpoint in the customer journey—email, SEO, and digital marketing—to boost sales and retain customers
• Connecting online and retail strategies for a seamless customer experience
• Strengthening brand storytelling to make every touchpoint more effective

Barrel’s challenge: Modernizing online customer experiences for traditional CPG brands 

Many CPG brands struggle with managing customer inquiries efficiently across multiple channels—email, chat, social media, and SMS. Without a centralized system, responses can be slow, repetitive questions take up valuable time, and customer interactions become disjointed. 

Partnering with Gorgias makes it easy for Barrel to help ecommerce brands drive sales and resolve support inquiries through an all-in-one Conversational AI platform. This provides a faster, more personalized customer experience for shoppers while reducing repetitive manual support tasks and driving more sales for their clients. 

Ecommerce brands using Gorgias’s AI Agent can: 

• Resolve up to 60% of email support volume with cost-effective AI
• Delight customers with instant and personalized answers, 24/7
• Give agents time back, saving up to 65% of their time spent on repetitive tickets 
• Lifting revenue by 5% through smart product recommendations

Gorgias unlocks cost savings, new revenue opportunities, and greater efficiency for ecommerce brands, directly supporting the growth goals of the brands they serve.

The Gorgias and Barrel connection: A better customer journey from first touchpoint to post-purchase   

As Shopify experts, working with the platform since 2009 and becoming a Shopify Plus Partner in 2017, Barrel needed a partner that was just as experienced. That’s why Gorgias was the right fit. 

“Working with Gorgias contributed to account expansion across 20% of our client list in 2024, and we collaborated with Gorgias on strategic planning across nearly half of our clients in 2024.” 

—Lucas Ballasy, CEO and Partner of Barrel 

Gorgias is built for Shopify ecommerce brands, with 100+ key integrations with tools like Klaviyo, Recharge, Rebuy, Okendo, and more. Since Barrel has strong relationships with these ecommerce tools, partnering with Gorgias allows them to bring the highest level of service to their clients. 

Barrel is focused on creating the best web experience for scaling ecommerce brand, and Gorgias makes that seamless. Shopify brands can streamline their sales and support efforts by editing orders, running promotional campaigns, and recommending products from their catalog—all from within Gorgias. 

"As CPG brands scale, their ability to create thoughtful, consistent customer experiences becomes a real differentiator. Gorgias helps turn support from a reactive function into a driver of loyalty, growth, and revenue. We’ve seen how pairing the right tools with the right mindset around CX can make a real impact."

—Lucas Ballasy, CEO and Partner of Barrel 

A few features stand out to Barrel’s clients when it comes to their CX:

Gorgias’s AI Agent frees up time to focus on higher-value interactions and revenue growth

When an ecommerce brand starts to scale (Barrel’s ultimate goal), customer support can quickly get overwhelmed. More orders mean more inquiries, and without the right systems, response times slow down, potential sales are left on the table, and the customer experience suffers. 

By integrating Gorgias, Barrel helps clients free up their teams to focus on higher-value interactions and strengthen their service offerings with a proven, scalable Conversational AI platform that supports growth without adding complexity. 

Gorgias’s AI Agent is the conversational AI that engages the customer in brand-authentic, personalized conversations to automate support and drive sales. 

AI Agent automates support across email and chat, instantly resolving common requests like:

• Live order tracking 
• Subscription management
• Order modifications or cancellations
• Shipping address changes

However, AI Agent is more than a support tool—it also drives sales through personalized, one-to-one conversations before and after purchase. Ecommerce brands can leverage AI Agent to: 

• Offer proactive assistance through AI-driven prompts that guide product discovery
• Transform search into revenue, without extra clicks, filters, or website navigation
• Use real-time data to deliver personalized recommendations based on a customer’s intent
• Provide dynamic discounts to encourage hesitant customers 

An all-in-one platform that centralizes all customer touchpoints 

Barrel shares that their CPG clients love having all their inbound communications in one platform, enabling them to work more efficiently and unify their ecommerce tech stack. 

“Clients love how it keeps support organized by bringing all customer interactions—email, chat, social, and SMS—into one place. Instead of bouncing between platforms, teams can manage everything more efficiently and effectively.”

—Lucas Ballasy, CEO and Partner of Barrel 

A joint customer success story: while on earth™

For a performance wellness brand like while on earth™, launching a new product line meant building a strong ecommerce presence and customer experience from day one. With footwear, apparel, and accessories “designed for those who move, go, and do,” the activewear brand needed a scalable way to handle support efficiently. 

while on earth™ had a buzzworthy founding team comprised of a former NOBULL executive and two popular CrossFit athletes with large followings. This generated a lot of hype from day one, with new customers discovering the brand through social media, press, and word of mouth. 

Combining this with a growing lineup of products made support a key piece of the puzzle—answering product questions, managing pre- and post-purchase inquiries, and ensuring a smooth experience as the brand scaled.

“Gorgias allows our team to review all chat, email, and social media channels in one place. This creates a seamless home base for our CS team to focus resources.” 

—Chris Yonuss, VP of Operations at while on earth™

By integrating Gorgias early, they were able to keep support organized, automate common questions, and make sure customers got fast, helpful responses across all channels. Paired with a site expertly built by Barrel for storytelling and conversion, this created a seamless experience from first touch to post-purchase. 

“The automation engine has allowed us to cut our first response time in half, and the performance metrics overview shows us improvement opportunities and trends. Taking advantage of this data has helped us drive higher customer satisfaction—our CSAT is now at 4.81/5.” 

—Chris Yonuss, VP of Operations at while on earth™

The partnership between Gorgias and Barrel gave while on earth™ a solid foundation to allow a fast-growing brand to scale while prioritizing customer experience.

Future goals: Making the most of Gorgias’s Conversational AI for ecommerce clients

The Gorgias and Barrel partnership is a two-way street. 

“Gorgias has been a great partner and collaborator, helping us bring more value to our clients. Whether sharing insights, providing hands-on support, or ensuring smooth implementation, their team is always proactive, responsive, and looking for ways to improve and support our shared clients.”

—Lucas Ballasy, CEO and Partner of Barrel 

Barrel is excited to explore integrating Gorgias’s AI Agent into its service offerings to drive even more value for growing brands. With the addition of sales skills for Gorgias’s AI Agent, Barrel will help its clients offer personalized shopping assistance that will reduce cart abandonment, increase conversion rates, and drive long-term retention.  

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‍Ready to help clients transform CX from a cost center to a profit generator? Become a Gorgias partner!