How do you rise above the noise and win customers (and their loyalty) in this new era of ecommerce? By working smarter, not harder. With the right strategies and cutting-edge tools, you can turn your customer service from a cost center into a competitive advantage.
In this article, I’ll introduce you to the best ecommerce customer service software options for creating unforgettable experiences for your customers. But before we dive in, let’s address one important question.
Why is customer service non-negotiable for your ecommerce business?
When building an ecommerce company, the focus often revolves around product development and marketing (if you’re selling your own product) or marketing and logistics (if you’re offering a widely available product and need a competitive edge).
And customer service? It often gets overlooked … until you’re drowning in support tickets.
The thing is, how you handle those tickets can make or break the future success of your ecommerce business. It’s never been easier for your customers to switch to another brand if their inquiry isn’t answered promptly.
A slow or poor-quality response can lead to negative reviews that scare off future buyers. That is why customer service should never be an afterthought. Here are three key reasons to prioritize getting it right from the start:
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Customer loyalty drives repeat purchases. For shops selling products that customers can repeatedly purchase (like skincare, apparel, or food), great service directly impacts repeat sales. I’ve also seen how exceptional customer service can create loyal advocates for brands selling one-time purchases like reusable water bottles. When people love both your product and your service, they’ll find reasons to return — to shop for gifts, get the items they love for all their friends, or simply purchase the same product in a different color or style.
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New customers and higher conversion rates. Good word spreads fast! Delightful customer experiences inspire positive reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations. This social proof builds trust and makes it easier to attract new customers, and it gives potential buyers the confidence they need to hit that “Add to Cart” button.
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Revenue growth. Finally, let’s talk numbers: Businesses that prioritize customer experience see up to 41% faster revenue growth. Investing in quality service isn’t just good for customers — it’s good for your bottom line.
The building blocks of ecommerce support
Now that we’ve established why customer service is crucial for your ecommerce business, you might still be wondering why ecommerce companies need customer service software. Can’t you just use Gmail?
Well, let me save you the trouble — I’ve been there, and no, you should not be using Gmail for ecommerce customer support. Between messy BCCs, internal comments accidentally sent to customers, zero automation, and many more pitfalls, Gmail just isn’t cut out for proper customer service.
So, how should you support customers instead? Here are six strategies to focus on:
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Set up live chat to capture and save sales that might otherwise slip through the cracks. Visitors may choose a competitor if they don’t get immediate assistance, and a live chat option can keep them engaged and drive conversions.
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Configure help desk automations and macros to streamline responses for common product and order questions. This will save your team time and provide quick answers to customers.
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Automate where possible, as returns, exchanges, and other routine requests shouldn’t require customers to wait in long chat queues. Make the process smoother and faster by handling these tasks automatically.
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Document your policies and product details to offer robust self-service options. Customers should be able to find answers to frequently asked questions without waiting for a reply from your team. You can refer people who are looking to submit a ticket to your FAQ page by adding a link to order confirmation emails or the Contact Us page with a message like: “Looking for help? The answer to your question is probably answered in our FAQs!”
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Gather feedback through automatic tagging, feedback forms, and CSAT surveys sent at the right time. These insights will help you refine the product and service offering to meet customer expectations, ensuring their loyalty and strong market position.
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Make it easy to reach support 24/7, especially when serving a global customer base. If you’re short on resources, no problem! AI bots can handle a large portion of typical ecommerce queries (and do it surprisingly well).
Now, how do you do all this? That’s where ecommerce customer support software comes in.
Key features to look for when choosing ecommerce support software
When running an ecommerce business, you’ll need a variety of support tools to handle different aspects of your customer service operations, including a help desk, chatbot software, knowledge base management tools, and more.
With these various tools in mind, here are the key features to look for when choosing customer support software for your ecommerce business:
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Integrations: Ideally, the software should integrate with your warehouse and order management systems. It should also support the channels you use, such as email, live chat, social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp, and perhaps voice calls if needed. Aim to find tools that you can interconnect with each other for a more robust tech stack.
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Platform vs. apps: Let’s face it, keeping track of 50 different apps can be a headache. Ideally, you want a handful of tools that offer broad functionality, covering all your needs in one place. Whether it’s a help desk, live chat, knowledge base, or an automation tool, look for solutions that can address multiple use cases without requiring a different app for every function.
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Ecommerce focus: Having worked in both SaaS and ecommerce, I can tell you that specialization matters. SaaS support focuses on troubleshooting bugs, gathering logs, and resolving technical issues, while ecommerce support is about streamlining the order process, providing proactive tracking and product details, and automating common questions about shipping, discounts, and bulk orders.
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Reporting: Gut feelings might be helpful when meeting a stranger, but in business, you need hard data. Make sure the tools you choose allow you to report on the KPIs that matter to your team — they probably include response and resolution times, ticket volume and distribution (by channel, agent, customer segment, theme, etc.), agent productivity, order return and replacement metrics (reasons, volume, segments), and so on.
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Pricing structure: Ecommerce businesses often deal with a high volume of relatively simple tickets, which smaller support teams can handle. Many requests can also be deflected by bots. If this is the case and you have a smaller team handling a high ticket volume, per-agent pricing can be cost-effective. If you run a larger team dealing with lower volume and more complex tickets, per-ticket pricing can be a better fit for you.
10 best customer service software for ecommerce
Here’s a list of the top ecommerce customer service tools to consider if you’re running an online store or managing an ecommerce support team and want to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
1. Help Scout – Best for omnichannel customer support
Help Scout is a help desk that allows ecommerce businesses to manage customer conversations across popular channels like email, live chat, and social media all in one place. Here’s how it can optimize your customer support operations and why it’s a go-to choice for many ecommerce companies.
Support channels
Help Scout integrates directly with the channels and tools your customers already use:
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Email: You can connect multiple mailboxes and handle tickets for each separately, which is especially helpful if you manage bulk order inquiries and B2C orders separately, for example.
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Messaging: Help Scout offers Beacon, the platform’s live chat widget. Beacon is easy to install and included in every plan — use it to support customers in real time, surface your knowledge base content and send AI-generated answers, advertise sales, or survey customers with proactive messages while they browse your site.
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Social media: Beyond email and live chat, Help Scout integrates with Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs — key customer touchpoints for many ecommerce brands today.
Shared inbox
All messages from connected channels flow into a shared inbox, where you can group them into folders, assign them to agents, tag them, and leave internal notes while viewing customer details directly on the conversation page. You can also set up saved replies for common customer queries to save time and ensure consistent communication.
Internal notes are particularly handy for asking quick questions or escalating tickets to other teams. For example, if a customer has a specific question about shipping, you can escalate the ticket directly to the fulfillment team to answer.
Unlike some tools that charge per seat, Help Scout allows unlimited users, so everyone in your business can join the system and collaborate.
Ecommerce integrations
Switching between apps can be a pain, especially for ecommerce teams that need order and inventory information to resolve most tickets. Help Scout simplifies this by integrating with popular ecommerce platforms:
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Shopify: You can view customer and order details (like order history, fulfillment status, and tracking numbers) directly on the conversation side as well as process refunds, duplicate or edit orders, and review order history without ever leaving Help Scout. What a game changer!
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WooCommerce and Magento: Access customer and order details from the conversation sidebar by installing widgets. (Note: WooCommerce charges $8.25 for its plugin.)
Automation and AI:
Most support teams are looking to eliminate as many manual tasks as possible. Help Scout makes this easy.
With workflows, you can automate repetitive tasks like assigning, tagging, or escalating conversations. For example, if you have a specific team in charge of issuing refunds, you can have emails with the term “refund” in their subject lines automatically assigned to that team. Additionally, all Help Scout plans include AI tools designed to boost agent performance and streamline support operations, including:
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Summarize: Create concise summaries of long conversations, making it easier for teammates to understand the context when escalating tickets without reading the entire back-and-forth about a lost delivery or a product issue.
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Assist: Need to double-check grammar, translate a message, or adjust the tone of your draft? Help Scout’s AI can do it all with just one click. If you’re working with an international customer base, you can offer support in the customer’s language even if your agents only speak English. The grammar checking feature helps agents create drafts faster, reducing response and resolution times.
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Drafts: Leverage the power of GPT-4 to generate high-quality draft responses based on prior conversations and your help center articles, enabling agents to craft quality replies in seconds. Help Scout’s Drafts is especially effective for ecommerce, where many inquiries are repetitive and most teams are dealing with the same shipping details, tracking info, and product FAQ inquiries.
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Answers: With Help Scout’s newest AI feature, Answers, you can provide instant responses to common questions through your chat widget, Beacon. Answers pull information directly from your knowledge base, so having a well-organized Help Center is crucial. If you cater to a global audience across multiple time zones but don’t have resources for 24/7 support, Answers ensures your customers get the help they need — even while you sleep.
Help center
With Help Scout Docs, you can create a customized help center, making it easy to publish FAQs, promote self-service, and ensure customers can quickly find the information they need.
You can create public help center articles for customers as well as private collections for internal use only. What’s important is that all of your external-facing articles are optimized for search both within your help center and on Google so customers can easily find what they’re looking for.
Reports
Finally, Help Scout’s reports enable you to dive deep into your customer support metrics, tracking conversation volume, response and resolution times, and agent performance metrics as well as trending issues and your help center stats.
You can also create custom dashboards, apply filters, and segment data based on conversation tags or custom attributes to get a tailored view of your team’s performance and key support trends.
Price: Free plan and trial available. Paid plans start at $50 per month. All Help Scout plans come with unlimited users and full access to our AI features at no additional cost. Integration with ecommerce platforms like Shopify requires a paid plan.
2. Gorgias – Best for customer sentiment and intent detection
What sets Gorgias apart is its laser focus on ecommerce. Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all solution, Gorgias has been designed to address the specific challenges faced by ecommerce support teams.
Key features
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AI-powered sentiment and intent detection: Leveraging AI trained specifically on ecommerce tickets, Gorgias can classify sentiment (e.g., positive, negative, urgent) and detect common customer intents such as refund requests, order cancellations, and product inquiries. This allows you to trigger automations based on identified sentiment or intent — for example, to auto-tag Instagram comments based on sentiment.
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Ecommerce integrations: Gorgias offers two-way integrations with popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. It pulls customer and order information directly into the platform and allows you to add details like order numbers and tracking links into macros to solve common inquiries like tracking requests with a single click.
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Automations within macros: Gorgias offers robust automation options for macros that don’t require a developer or a consultant to configure. For instance, you can edit shipping addresses, apply discounts, issue refunds, or cancel orders by simply sending a macro that executes an automated action for you via API.
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Revenue impact report: Measuring customer support’s return on investment can be tricky, and Gorgias makes it easier with revenue statistics. It tracks converted tickets that lead to a sale within five days, allowing you to measure your support team’s direct impact on sales and conversions and prove support ROI to other stakeholders.
Who is Gorgias best suited for?
Gorgias is a great choice for ecommerce businesses that want to leverage AI to prioritize and manage support tickets more effectively. Its AI, trained specifically on ecommerce topics, excels at automatically detecting customer sentiment and intent for each ticket, making it easy to triage and route support requests.
That said, it may not be the best choice for more established teams as their reporting and analytics are somewhat limited. While many common KPIs are included, it lacks the ability to filter and create custom metrics. Their customer support can sometimes be slow as well.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $10 per month, with costs based on your ticket volume.
3. Zendesk – Best for enterprise ecommerce businesses
If you’re in customer support, you’ve likely heard of Zendesk. Known for its extensive feature set, Zendesk offers everything from live chat and phone support to AI-powered chatbot workflows.
However, the sheer breadth of its capabilities can be both a blessing and a challenge. Their help center is overflowing with pages upon pages of documentation, but configuring advanced features often requires the assistance of a consultant or a dedicated Zendesk specialist on your team.
Key features
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Comprehensive feature set: It’s an all-in-one solution for managing customer interactions, offering a shared inbox, analytics, a highly customizable knowledge base, and an array of triggers, rules, and AI automations.
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Multi-brand support: Zendesk is one of the few help desk tools built to handle multi-brand customer support. If you’re running several distinct brands, you can manage support for all of them from within a single interface (although the feature is only available on the Enterprise Support plan).
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Advanced customization: The platform offers advanced options to tailor workflows, automations, and integrations to your specific needs — this includes ticket views, language support, help center design, and more. This level of flexibility comes with a steep learning curve, though.
Who is Zendesk best suited for?
Zendesk is generally best suited for larger teams or enterprise-level ecommerce businesses. The complexity of the platform, the resources required for setup, and the overall cost make it a better fit for organizations with the budget and expertise to maximize its capabilities.
That said, they do offer a few lower-cost plans, though these lack features like chat, phone support, and custom reporting.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/agent per month.
4. Supermoon – Best for deflecting customer support tickets with AI
Supermoon is an AI-first customer support platform designed to automate and streamline customer service processes by reducing support volume. Supermoon’s AI stands out for its effectiveness in providing proactive support. For example, it can suggest alternative products along with sharing return policies when customers ask about making a return.
Key features
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AI-powered chatbot: Supermoon’s bot deflects tickets by leveraging information from your knowledge base, Shopify orders, and other connected sources. Unlike many other bots, it’s designed to anticipate the next question a customer might ask, providing proactive information to address it upfront.
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Smart Forms: For customers filling out support forms, Supermoon shows AI-generated answers in real-time as they type their questions. This automation can reportedly deflect up to 70% of incoming inquiries, reducing the need for human intervention.
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Omnichannel inbox and AI-drafted responses: For social media and email tickets, Supermoon generates drafts based on previous interactions, aiming to close customer issues on the first resolution.
Who is Supermoon best suited for?
Supermoon is well suited for teams focused on efficiency and automation as well as for businesses with limited support resources. For instance, it can be an excellent fit for dropshipping operations, where dedicated support personnel may not always be available.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $15 per month, with costs based on the number of AI replies sent.
5. Zowie – Best for improving customer experience with AI
Zowie offers a robust suite of automation tools designed to enhance the customer experience. Exclusively tailored to ecommerce, Zowie’s specialized large language model makes it highly effective at managing the types of scenarios and requests common in the industry. Unlike tools that focus purely on automation, Zowie takes a customer-centric approach, ensuring AI is used to both solve problems and improve the overall experience.
In reviews on sites like G2, users call out Zowie’s lightning-fast performance. While quick loading times might seem like a small detail, they make a noticeable difference for support teams working through high ticket volumes. A second saved on every interaction can add up to significant time savings over the course of a week or month.
Key features
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AI chatbot: Zowie’s bot uses conversational AI to handle up to 90% of customer inquiries. With a code-free setup and ecommerce integrations with tools like Shopify, it adapts to your brand’s voice and tone by learning from past chats, website content, and product catalogs.
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Emailbot: For customers who prefer email support, Zowie’s Emailbot recreates the speed and efficiency of chat support by recognizing the intent and inviting customers to follow a link to a live chat flow to resolve their issue quickly without waiting for an agent’s reply. While similar workflows can be configured in other help desk tools, it’s nice to have this solution out of the box.
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Shared inbox: Zowie’s inbox helps support teams manage more complex issues that require human intervention with smart ticket routing, automatic duplicate recognition, and AI-generated ticket summaries. It also comes with draft polishing and one-click translation, allowing agents to respond quickly while maintaining high-quality communication.
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Shopify integration: Agents are able to perform actions like refunds, cancellations, and order edits directly within Zowie, eliminating the need for switching between platforms.
Who is Zowie best suited for?
Zowie is great for established ecommerce brands that want to enhance efficiency and customer experience with AI. For larger support teams managing significant ticket volumes, Zowie can deliver substantial cost savings and productivity gains. But for smaller businesses like dropshipping companies, the investment in Zowie might be too high.
Price: Pricing is tailored to each business’s specific needs and implementation. Free trial available upon request.
6. Sprout Social – Best for managing social media comments
Managing social media interactions gets tricky when your support team grows beyond a single person. How do you ensure no comments or messages slip through the cracks? And how do you avoid duplicate replies when multiple agents are handling the same accounts?
With Sprout Social, you can pull comments and messages from platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube into a structured queue, complete with filters and sorting options. From that queue, your team will be able to:
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Tag messages and comments to generate insights.
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Use macros to respond faster to repetitive queries (instead of typing that “Could you share your order details so we can help?” message manually every time).
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Collaborate using internal conversations on specific posts or comments.
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Mark items as complete to track which interactions have been handled.
For some platforms, it also lets you ban problematic users directly from the tool.
Just a heads-up: Sprout Social logs you out if someone else logs into the same account. Shared logins won’t work, so be sure to purchase enough licenses for all agents who need access.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $199/seat per month.
7. Yotpo – Best for managing ecommerce customer reviews
While generating customer reviews often falls under the marketing umbrella, it’s typically the support team handling them day to day. Yotpo’s suite of features designed to boost customer engagement and streamline review management makes this process really efficient.
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With Yotpo, you can organize reviews and pull insights by tagging them.
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Bulk actions are supported — whether that means publishing or rejecting multiple reviews at once. You can also set up rules to auto-publish reviews that don’t require human preview (for example, positive reviews without attachments).
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Responding to reviews is also made simple. You can reply publicly, for example, to thank a customer for their kind words or send a private response if a review mentions an issue that requires you to share personal or order-specific information.
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For reviews that require escalation, Yotpo lets you forward them directly to your escalation email address for further handling.
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Once an issue has been resolved, you can re-request a review from the customer, giving them the opportunity to replace an outdated or inaccurate review with a new one.
Price: Plans start at $15 per month, with costs based on your monthly order volume.
8. Loop Returns – Best for automating ecommerce returns
Not too long ago, manually processing returns and replacements was a massive drain on time for ecommerce support teams. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case for modern teams, thanks to tools like Loop. With Loop, you can empower customers to handle returns through a self-service returns portal, eliminating the need for direct support intervention.
The setup is simple:
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Link your Loop portal in your return policy or order notifications.
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Customers enter their order number, and the system performs checks to determine if they qualify for a return.
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From there, the process is automated, as your team only needs to step in to approve returns once they’ve been marked as received.
The best thing is that you can configure Loop to encourage and incentivize customers to exchange products during the return process. As most ecommerce returns are due to wrong sizes or colors, I’m not surprised that Loop claims to convert 57% of returns into exchanges.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $155 per month.
9. Typeform – Best for collecting feedback
Nearly every ecommerce support team I’ve worked with uses some kind of form tool — whether it’s for tracking customer satisfaction, collecting feedback, or running troubleshooting surveys.
Typeform stands out in this space with a powerful online form builder and survey tool that doesn’t require any technical skills to configure. They offer pre-built CSAT templates, and you can use the drag-and-drop builder with branching logic to create custom forms. One of my favorite features is the ability to embed surveys directly into emails, allowing customers to rate their experiences with a simple click on a rating scale, straight from their inbox.
One creative use I’ve seen for Typeform is a troubleshooting survey designed to ask customers the exact questions your team would typically ask during an issue diagnosis.
For example, if you sell electronic devices, the survey can walk the customer through the troubleshooting steps they’d normally follow with an agent. While live chat workflows might replace this for some teams, for email support, sending a form link can still be a helpful self-serve option.
Typeform integrates with Zapier, so by spending a few minutes on a Zap, you can even pull survey results into internal notes on the customer’s ticket in your help desk. This way, if the customer reaches back out, your team will already have their responses for quick reference.
Even with all its other features, if you’re only planning to use Typeform for feedback surveys, it’s still an excellent choice.
Price: Free plan and trial available. Paid plans start at $25 per month.
10. Notion – Best for internal knowledge base management
When it comes to managing product information, it should ideally live in your public knowledge base, but there’s also a lot of internal knowledge that needs to stay private. This could include things like which reviews your team should publish, what voice and tone to use in responses, how to approve returns, or where to look up restock dates.
Sure, you could store this in a Google Drive document, but as that document grows to 50+ pages, it quickly becomes unmanageable. I’ve tried a variety of solutions over the years — Google Docs, Guru, and even building a WordPress wiki site for my team. After all this, I believe Notion is the best tool for managing an ecommerce internal knowledge base.
With Notion, you can:
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Create sections and subsections with granular control over permissions.
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Access page views and edit history.
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Drag and drop content blocks to easily organize information as your knowledge base expands.
One other thing I really appreciate about Notion is how well the search function works — much better than Guru’s search, for example. They also offer AI search, which can be useful for larger teams.
Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $10/seat per month.
Final thoughts
As you dig deeper into your search for the perfect customer service software for ecommerce, remember that the tools you choose should meet your current needs as well as scale with your business as it grows.
Help Scout is built for growth, offering unlimited seats and AI features across all plans. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re ready to scale, it integrates seamlessly into your ecommerce tech stack, helping you delight customers and streamline support operations. Sign up for a free trial today to give it a try!
