Gorgias and Zowie both chase e-commerce support, but from opposite ends: Gorgias is a full Shopify-native help desk starting at $10 a month, while Zowie is a custom-quoted, outcome-based AI layer aimed at larger merchants. One gives you ticketing plus automation in a single tool; the other is a specialist resolution engine you point at the store you already run. Budget and scale usually settle it.
| Attribute | Gorgias | Zowie |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Paid · $10/mo | Per resolution · Custom |
| Founded | 2015 | 2019 |
| Categories | AI Agents & Chatbots E-commerce Support Help Desk & Ticketing | AI Agents & Chatbots E-commerce Support |
| Integrations | Shopify Klaviyo Instagram WhatsApp Slack Recharge | Shopify Zendesk Salesforce Gorgias Klaviyo Instagram |
Gorgias is a help desk built specifically for online stores, and it knows its lane cold. It integrates deeply with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento, so its AI Agent can answer customer emails and chats about orders, shipping, returns, and products using live store data, then take real actions like editing an order or issuing a refund right inside the ticket. A Copilot assists human agents with drafts and summaries, and because Gorgias tracks the revenue that support conversations drive, it treats your help desk as a place that can make money, not just spend it.
The origin story is delightfully accidental. Gorgias started in Paris in 2015 as a humble Chrome extension for email templates, until the founders noticed that support agents were the ones actually using it and pivoted the whole company toward them. It shares its name with Gorgias of Leontini, the ancient Greek orator immortalized in one of Plato's dialogues, a fittingly talkative namesake for a conversation platform. Today it is a certified B Corporation and Shopify's only Premier Partner for customer experience, powering a large share of the biggest Shopify brands.
That focus has won a who's who of direct-to-consumer names, including Steve Madden, Glossier, Dr. Bronner's, and Marine Layer, with more than sixteen thousand brands on board in total. Pricing starts at just ten dollars a month and is based on ticket volume with unlimited users, so growing teams are not punished for adding people, and the AI Agent is billed per resolved conversation.
Its 2.0 release added a shopping assistant, image analysis, and cart-recovery flows in more than eighty languages, pushing Gorgias further into the world of support-driven selling. For any e-commerce brand living on Shopify that wants an AI agent tuned to the specific rhythms of online retail rather than a generic one, Gorgias is the obvious specialist pick.
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Zowie is an AI agent built for online retail, and it is unusually comfortable wearing two hats at once. On the support side it resolves high-volume questions like order status, returns, and product availability across chat, email, and voice, claiming to automate a large majority of tasks in as many as 175 languages without wandering off into hallucination. On the sales side it goes where few support tools dare, running sales playbooks, recommending products, and guiding shoppers all the way to checkout inside the same conversation. An AI Copilot backs up human agents, and the whole thing plugs into Shopify, Magento, and Klaviyo.
The company's journey is a good one. It was founded in 2018 by Maja Schaefer and Maciej Ciolek, began life in Poland under a different name, and has since planted its headquarters in New York with backing from Tiger Global and Gradient Ventures, among others. That treating-support-as-a-revenue-channel angle is Zowie's signature move, and it is what separates the product from the many tools that only ever think about deflection.
Zowie deploys either on top of your existing help desk or as a standalone, and it recently landed on the Google Cloud Marketplace, a sign of its push toward larger, more demanding customers. Pricing is annual and outcome-based, structured around the work the agents actually deliver rather than a per-seat sticker, so expect a tailored quote rather than a public price list.
Brands like InPost, Decathlon, and GetYourGuide have put it to work across both support and commerce. If you run an e-commerce operation and want an AI agent that not only clears the ticket queue but also quietly nudges revenue upward while it is at it, Zowie's unusual dual focus on both resolving problems and selling products makes it a genuinely distinctive option that is well worth testing.
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