Everything You Need to Know About Shopify Customer Service

Learn everything you need to know about getting quick and effective customer support for your Shopify store.

There are plenty of great website builders out there, but when it comes to ecommerce platforms, Shopify definitely reigns supreme (we’ve compared Wix and Shopify, so if you’re on the fence between the two, check out the article for some helpful insights).

If you’re using Shopify primarily to run an online store, you want to provide the best customer experience, since this may attract customers back to your Shopify store. On the other hand, even if you choose this website building platform for your content website, having qualified support is always useful.

Read on to find out what types of customer support are available, about their pros and cons, and how you can outsource support for your Shopify website.

Types of Shopify Customer Service

There are three main ways in which you can get the answers to your Shopify-related questions: community forums, help center, and contacting support service.

The support service is reachable through email, telephone and live chat. It’s important to note that a telephone help desk is available for online businesses in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. You can find the phone numbers by logging into your account via the support page.

You can also use the live chat service which is also available 24/7. This is probably the most efficient way to get a response over urgent matters like checkout issues, so if it’s time that’s your main concern, I would suggest using this channel.

Whereas phone support and especially the live chat option seem to provide a great customer experience, several users have noted that the response time with emails is not always great. It seems that emails were not the priority in Shopify’s customer service strategy, so if you are looking for a quick response, go for one of the other two options of customer support instead.

Shopify has a comprehensive help center where you can pretty much find any information you need related to running your small business on this platform.

Although you can also search for queries on popular forums like Reddit or Quora, Shopify’s community forum is a great place to start looking for the answers to some frequently asked questions, like checkout faqs, dropshipping, which credit cards are accepted, etc. There are posts from customers, as well as Shopify administrators and community managers. You can also search for groups on social media platforms such as Facebook or LinkedIn, where people share their experiences with Shopify customer service, as well as the webpage builder in general.

Finally, a great place to find key information about your ecommerce business is YouTube. There are tons of great tutorials on the Shopify channel as well as tutorials by other people who have used this ecommerce platform. These are especially helpful if you’re having some sort of tech issues with your webpages or Shopify payment since you can see sometimes see how to solve the issue yourself.

What do the reviews say about Shopify customer support?

Well, as you might suspect, the online reviews of Shopify paint a mixed picture. There are tons of great reviews of the technical support team, with customers claiming that the response to their issues was both prompt and helpful. Shopify has great customer service thanks to their so-called gurus: members of the support team with expertise in different fields. This means that you can get support beyond the technical stuff and get professional advice on how to build, manage and grow your ecommerce business.

However, the mixed reviews (or rather predominantly bad ones), concern people’s issues with the Risk Operations team. This team is responsible for payments services, fraud, risk detection and payment compliance. However, although it’s an important part of fraud prevention, various disputes seem to arise.

For example, one user had an issue with the Risk Management team claiming CBD (cannabidiol) products were being sold although they had removed them from the online store. Upon research, the user discovered that the team was finding another item under the tag CBD, which in this case meant “Charity By Design” and referred to jewelry.

Some instances of unexplained frozen accounts also seem to happen from time to time, potentially an issue you might face. If you want to see more product reviews, make sure you visit platforms like G2.

Outsourcing support for your Shopify store

Although you are always free to contact Shopify customer service with your queries, you might need a support system for your own customers. This is where you might consider outsourcing customer support for your Shopify store. There are plenty of these services available online.

Here’s a brief look at the pros and cons of doing this.

If you are just starting out and slowly building a relationship with new customers, responding to customer FAQs might even be a good opportunity for you to get a better insight into your buyer personas. You can create a template contact form on your website and take time to understand and resolve common issues with the help of Shopify customer service.

On the other hand, a CEO of an established business should not have to waste time responding to every single email asking about credit card issues or the like. Bear in mind that this might affect your Shopify pricing, in case you need additional staff accounts for people to have full access to your online store.

Finally, remember that there are loads of Shopify apps available from their app market; for example, Live Chat offers full integration with the platform, and there are many other help desk apps you may want to try.