How Shopify Plus brands deliver standout customer service

High-growth ecommerce brands on Shopify Plus face a CX challenge most platforms weren't designed to solve: customers who expect fast, personal service across every channel they use — and a support team that can actually deliver it without drowning in tabs, tickets, and disconnected tools.

Gladly is a certified Shopify Plus Partner and the only customer experience AI built around the customer, not the ticket. Here's what that means in practice for the brands that run their stores on Shopify Plus.

Shopify Plus merchants are scaling fast. But customer expectations are scaling faster. Our ongoing consumer research consistently finds that the majority of shoppers are more loyal to brands where they feel personally known — and that being made to repeat themselves is one of the single fastest ways to lose their trust. The stakes for getting customer service right on Shopify Plus have never been higher.

Why ticket-based service breaks down at scale

The faster a brand grows, the more its support volume scales with it. Ticket-based platforms respond to that growth by adding more tickets — more queue management, more routing rules, more places for context to get lost. Team members end up asking customers to repeat themselves, switching between Shopify and their service tool for order data, and closing tickets without ever really knowing who they're talking to.

That model optimizes for deflection. It measures success by tickets closed, not customers kept. For Shopify Plus merchants focused on loyalty, retention, and lifetime value, it's the wrong foundation.

Ticket-based vs. conversation-based: how they compare

Ticket-based platforms are built around the interaction, not the relationship. Each contact creates a new ticket — disconnected from the customer's history. Productivity is measured by throughput: tickets per hour, time to close, queue depth. When a customer emails twice, they get two tickets. When they call after chatting, their history doesn't follow them. Shopify order data lives in a separate tab. The platform is designed for closure, not connection.

Gladly organizes service around the customer, not the ticket. Every channel connects into a single, lifelong conversation timeline. AI handles common requests with full Shopify context already loaded. Team members see purchase history, prior contacts, and customer value before they type a single word. The result is faster resolution and a more personal experience, not a trade-off between the two.

What Shopify Plus merchants get with Gladly

One conversation thread, every channel

Most platforms bolt channels on as separate queues. Gladly connects them into a single, lifelong conversation thread per customer — email, chat, SMS, voice, social, and in-app, all in one view. Your team sees the full history no matter how a customer reaches out, and customers never have to repeat themselves.

Gladly is the only customer service solution on Shopify Plus with all channels natively built in, including voice.

Gladly provides a single, lifelong conversation view across every channel

Full customer context, surfaced instantly

Within the first few seconds of any conversation, your team can see who they're talking to, what they've ordered, their purchase history, and how they've contacted you before — all pulled directly from Shopify. No tab-switching. No order number requests. No asking customers to recap what they already told someone else.

That context changes how service feels on the receiving end. Customers experience it as personal and attentive. Your team delivers it without extra effort.

Surfacing key customer information helps team members keep every conversation personal

Take action without leaving Gladly

Your team can cancel orders, issue refunds, apply discounts, and access Shopify quick links — all from inside Gladly. No context switching, no multi-tab workflows, no delays while looking up order details in a separate window.

Combined with a built-in knowledge base, AI-suggested responses, and task collaboration tools, Gladly gives your team a single command center to resolve customer conversations faster than ever.

Gladly gives team members a single command center — no need to jump into Shopify

AI that resolves conversations, not just deflects them

Gladly customer experience AI is built around customer data, not ticket data. That means it can handle common Shopify service requests — order status, returns, refunds, FAQs — with the full context of who's asking and why that matters. When a conversation needs a person, the handoff is seamless and the context travels with it.

The result is a support operation that gets more efficient as volume grows, without trading away the personalization that keeps customers coming back.

Rothy's, a fast-growing DTC footwear brand on Shopify Plus, grew their chat-assisted conversation rate from 2% to 41% after switching to Gladly — while simultaneously reducing staffing costs 22% year-over-year. Their team now handles peak volume without growing headcount at the same rate, because AI handles what doesn't need a person.

AI that changes how you staff, not just how you respond

The promise of AI in customer service is usually framed around deflection: handle more tickets with fewer people. The Gladly approach is different — and the results show up in how brands actually run their CX teams.

Lauren Inman-Semerau, Head of Customer Experience at Rothy’s, put it plainly: before AI, peak season meant a staffing crisis. You hired ahead of volume, hoped you got the numbers right, and dealt with the aftermath either way. With Gladly AI handling routine conversations autonomously, that calculus changed entirely. Her team stopped hiring to absorb peak demand and started hiring only to replace natural attrition.

That’s not a subtle operational tweak. It’s a structural shift in how a CX team is built and budgeted.

For Shopify Plus brands dealing with seasonal spikes — holiday surges, product launches, flash sales — this matters more than any individual feature. AI that genuinely resolves conversations (not just deflects them to a human queue) means you’re not rebuilding your headcount every Q4.

Results Shopify Plus brands see with Gladly

Across the brands running on Gladly, the platform has powered over 240 million customer conversations and delivered more than $510 million in cumulative cost savings. Gladly has handled 15 million conversations independently, freeing team members to focus on the contacts that need a human touch. The common thread across top-performing Shopify Plus merchants isn't simply more technology — it's technology designed to treat customers as people, not tickets.

Up and running fast

Gladly is designed to look and feel like the modern messaging tools people use every day, so your team gets up to speed quickly — typically live within days. For Shopify merchants, setup is even faster: Gladly is available directly on the Shopify App Store, and the integration can be configured without technical support from your team.

Making the switch from Gorgias

For most Shopify Plus brands evaluating Gladly, the starting point is Gorgias. The good news: switching doesn't mean starting over.

During onboarding, Gladly migrates your historical customer data — names, emails, and conversation history — so your team has full context from day one. You're not rebuilding a customer database from scratch, and your team members aren't flying blind on accounts they've been handling for years.

For lean teams of ten or fewer, most brands go live in two to four weeks. Setup is no-code , so your CX manager can configure channels, build out AI guides, and connect your Shopify store without looping in a developer or an IT team. Our onboarding resources and guided working sessions walk you through the process step by step, so you know exactly where you are at every stage.

The switch doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing event either. Some brands phase it in — starting with core channels and expanding from there once the team is comfortable.

If you've heard migration horror stories from other platform switches, it's worth knowing that Gorgias-to-Gladly is one of the most common paths the implementation team handles. It's well-worn ground.

Gladly vs. Gorgias for Shopify Plus

Gorgias is purpose-built for ecommerce, which makes it the most common platform Shopify Plus brands are switching from. Here’s how the two compare on what actually matters.

The pricing model difference matters more than it looks. Gorgias charges per ticket created — so costs scale with volume regardless of whether those tickets actually get resolved. Gladly charges per resolution, which means the incentive is aligned with actually solving the customer’s problem.