AI is good at answering where's-my-order emails so you don't have to. A three-person skincare store now clears them in about 20 minutes a morning, with a person still pressing send.
AI is good at answering the same question for the hundredth time, so you don’t have to. We work with a three-person online skincare store where the founder spent most evenings on order emails, and about half of them asked where a parcel was.
Every answer took the same steps. Open the store, find the order, copy the tracking link, and paste it into a friendly reply. None of it was hard, but it happened dozens of times a week, and it always landed after the packing was done.
What we set up
We set up an AI helper (the industry calls it an agent) that reads each new email in the store’s Gmail inbox. When the email is about an order, the AI helper looks the order up in Shopify and drafts a reply with the tracking link already in it. The founder reads the draft, changes anything that needs it, and sends it.
Most of the three-week setup went on connecting the store’s tools (the industry calls these links data pipelines), so the AI helper could see the inbox and the orders together. Writing the instructions for the replies took far less time than getting the order lookups right.
What happened when it sent replies on its own
Our first version sent the simple replies on its own. For a few days that worked. Then a customer wrote in because a jar had arrived broken, and the AI helper answered with a cheerful tracking link.
The customer was writing about a broken product and was owed a real answer. The ACCC’s guide to consumer guarantees sets out what a business owes a customer when goods arrive faulty, and a tracking link isn’t on the list. The founder called the customer, and we switched auto-send off that same week. Now every reply waits for a person.
Why we keep a person on send
The usual advice is to put a chatbot on your website and let it answer order questions by itself. For a small store, we think that’s the wrong place to start. Your customers already email you, so the drafts belong in your inbox, where you can see every one. And the seconds saved by auto-send aren’t worth the one reply that lands on an upset customer.
Reading a good draft takes the founder a few seconds. That’s still most of the saving, because the slow part was always the lookup.
Where the store landed
The founder now clears the order emails in about 20 minutes each morning instead of across the evening. That’s the founder’s own timing over the first four weeks, measured against a two-week log kept before we started.
Returns still go through by hand. Each one needs a call about the product that the AI helper can’t make, and the founder still handles any complaint personally.
If your inbox looks like this, get your AI Starter Plan. You’ll tell it where your week goes, and it’ll show you where to start.
