The support tool that finishes the work

Look at what your support tool produces

Not what it promises. What it hands you at the end of an email.

Most produce a queue. Some produce a draft. The better ones produce a summary, a suggested reply and a priority tag. Each of those describes the work. None of them is the refund arriving in the customer's account.

A ticket is a promise to do work later. A resolution is the work being done.

The gap between the two is where the money goes. The customer who asked for a refund on Tuesday still does not have it on Friday. Sift's Q4 2025 Digital Trust Index found that delayed refunds account for 18% of consumer disputes, and missing or late deliveries another 17%. More than a third of disputes are caused by a merchant being slow, not by a customer being dishonest. The Chargebacks911 2025 Cardholder Dispute Index found that nearly half of consumers who dispute never contact the merchant at all. They go straight to the bank.

That is an expensive place for a queue to send them. In the United States, Shopify takes a $15 chargeback fee out of your payout the moment the dispute is filed, before anyone has judged the case, and returns it only if you win. Card networks do not consider outcomes either, so every chargeback counts against your ratio, including the ones you win.

A queue fixes none of that. A queue is where the answer waits.

What done actually looks like

Aiders reads the email, checks the order in Shopify, and then performs the action.

• Refunds. Partial or full, in cash, issued through Shopify into the original payment method. No human in the middle.
• Refunds that depend on a return. It does not pay on a promise. It waits for the carrier to confirm the parcel actually arrived, then refunds and emails the customer.
• Store credit. Straight into the customer's Shopify store credit account. Spendable at checkout, no code to type. It can issue a real Shopify gift card instead.
• Address changes. It changes the address on the live order, then verifies the change landed before it tells the customer it is done.
• Exchanges. A size, colour or product swap is a real edit to the real Shopify order. Shopify restocks the old item, deducts the new one, and emails a payment link if the new one costs more. It checks the target against live stock before it offers, and it refuses to promise a variant that does not exist.
• Order status. Answered from live order and carrier data, kept current by carrier events, not from a copy that stopped being true last week.
• Language. It replies in the language the customer wrote in, detected per email. Nothing to configure. You can pin it to one language instead.

Every item on that list is a write to Shopify. Not a note on a ticket. Not a macro waiting for someone to press send. The refund exists. The order is edited. The credit is spendable.

It runs around the clock, which matters most for the email that arrives at 02:00 and mentions the bank.

Why most tools stop at the draft

Not because drafting is the hard part. Because doing it for real means being trusted with money, and no sensible merchant hands money to software they cannot bound.

So the controls are not a disclaimer at the end of a sales page. They are the thing that makes autonomy possible.

• A refund ladder you set. Each rung is an offer, in the order you choose: a cash percentage, a full refund on return, store credit only. The ladder is enforced in code, not suggested in an instruction. It cannot jump to a full refund without walking the rungs you set first. Any rung can be offer but never pay.
• A cash ceiling you set. Under it, Aiders pays immediately. Over it, the refund queues for your team. The customer hears the same wording either way, so nobody learns where your line sits.
• A choice of three, per request type. Aiders handles it. Aiders drafts it and you approve. Or Aiders stops and alerts you. Set per request type, not one switch for everything.
• Windows and limits. Cancellation windows, address change windows, item change windows, and a price difference limit on automatic order changes. Anything larger, or anything that owes the customer money back, goes to a human.
• A sandbox. Rehearse any scenario against the same logic with every real action simulated, before it goes near a customer.
• A record. Every action is written down: what it did, whether policy allowed it, and what came back.

The rules that only come from getting burned

A general purpose tool has never had to explain a double refund to the person paying for it.

• It will not compensate the same order twice. Before any offer it checks the negotiation record, the compensation ledger, and the raw refund and credit data.
• A customer with a recent chargeback cannot be handed more money by the agent.
• It will not offer a keep the item discount on an order that never shipped. That is a cancellation and a full refund.
• By default it will not pay a customer to keep something they have not received. A cancellation on a shipped but undelivered order becomes a return on arrival.
• It will not tell customers to refuse delivery unless you confirm your carrier actually returns refused parcels. Most do not, and that advice loses the parcel and the money.
• Refunds are idempotent. A retry after a dropped connection either performs the refund once or replays the original result. It cannot pay twice.

What finishing the work does to the price

If a tool produces tickets, it charges for tickets. If it produces resolutions, it charges for resolutions. That is consistent, and it is also the problem. A tool paid per resolution has no reason to want your inbox to get smaller.

Gorgias deserves a close read. It is ecommerce and Shopify specific, and billing on tickets rather than seats is a better model than seats. Their billing documentation says a ticket becomes billable when at least one message in it is sent from the Gorgias helpdesk, whether that message comes from a human agent, the AI Agent, or an automatic reply from a rule. Separately, an automated interaction is charged when the AI resolves without a human. So a conversation the AI handles end to end is charged twice. In fairness, when the AI hands over to a human, only the ticket fee applies. Plans on their Shopify App Store listing run $10 for 50 tickets, $60 for 300, $360 for 2,000 and $900 for 5,000.

Aiders charges per store. Your bill does not move when one customer sends three emails instead of one, and it does not move when the agent finishes a case instead of passing it on. If your inbox gets smaller, that is your gain, not our lost revenue.

Built by Shopify sellers, on Shopify's own mechanisms

We sell on Shopify, so Aiders uses Shopify's machinery instead of building a parallel version of it. Store credit is Shopify store credit, not a coupon we invented. An exchange is a Shopify order edit, so Shopify handles the restock, the inventory and the payment link. A refund goes back through Shopify into the original payment method, so your payouts and your books agree.

Aiders implements Shopify's mandatory privacy webhooks, so a customer redaction request and a shop redaction request are honoured the way Shopify requires.

Start with your own inbox

Install Aiders on Shopify for free. The first 100 emails are free, once, not per month.

Point it at your support address, set your ladder and your ceiling, and rehearse a few real scenarios in the sandbox before anything sends.

Install Aiders on Shopify.