AI customer service for DTC & e-commerce brands.
Answer 85% of "where is my order?" tickets with zero human touch. Cut the tickets that need a person by 70%. Recover 22% of abandoned carts — about $79,200 a year for one $500K brand. We build custom AI support agents wired into Shopify, Klaviyo, your carrier, and your returns portal.
Free 30-minute call. Written report in 48 hours. No pitch.
Some of the businesses we work with
The problem you're trying to solve
If you sell direct to consumers online, your support inbox isn't really a support inbox. It's a tracking-lookup queue. When we broke down ticket volume for a 3-person DTC brand doing $500K a year, about 50% of incoming tickets were order-status inquiries — where is my order, when will it ship, my tracking isn't updating. Another 20% were returns and exchanges. Only the remaining 30% were the product questions, complaints, and edge cases that genuinely needed a person.
Meanwhile the carts kept walking. Baymard Institute's 2024 research puts the average e-commerce cart abandonment rate at 70.19%, and this brand had no recovery system running at all. The founders were burning 2-3 hours a day on reactive work that required no expertise — just the ability to look up a tracking number or forward a return label. Then peak season arrives, volume multiplies, and the response times go with it.
The brands that fix this don't hire a support rep for Q4. They split tickets by whether the answer needs judgment, automate everything on the no-judgment side, and point the reclaimed hours at the carts that never converted — like the DTC brand in our case study below, which cut human-handled tickets by 70% in 90 days. For the wider set of store workflows we automate, including post-purchase sequences and review collection, see our e-commerce and retail automation solutions.
What We Build
What we build for e-commerce brands
Every system is custom-built around your catalogue, shipping windows, and return policy. These are the building blocks we usually deploy for DTC brands, online retailers, subscription boxes, and marketplace sellers.
WISMO answers from live tracking
Where-is-my-order questions were about 50% of ticket volume at the brand in our case study. The AI matches the customer by email or order number, pulls current status from your store and carrier, and replies with the status plus tracking link. It handled 85% of status queries with no human touch.
Self-serve returns and exchanges
Customer enters an order number, picks items and a reason, and gets a return label by email in seconds. The refund fires automatically when the carrier scans the package. Returns needing manual handling fell from 100% of cases to roughly 15%.
Abandoned cart recovery that converts
Three messages across 72 hours: a product-specific email at 1 hour, a conversational SMS at 24, and a 10% code with a clear expiry at 72. Combined recovery hit 22%. Drop any single message and total recovery falls 25-50% — the sequence compounds.
One brain across email, chat, SMS and DMs
The same system answers in your helpdesk inbox, the on-site widget, SMS, and Instagram or TikTok DMs. A customer who asks about a delivery window in a DM gets the same answer they'd get by email, and every escalation lands in one queue with the full thread.
Peak season without seasonal hiring
Status lookups, return initiations, and FAQ answers cost the same whether you're doing 40 orders a day or 400. Only genuine escalations grow with Black Friday volume, so response times hold instead of stretching to 18 hours in week one of Q4.
Post-purchase follow-up and reviews
Delivery confirmations, care instructions, and review requests timed to when the product actually arrived. Unhappy customers get routed to you privately before they post; happy ones get a one-tap review link for the product they bought.
How it works
What working with Builts AI looks like
Audit your ticket mix and cart data
A senior automation engineer pulls 90 days of support tickets and sorts them by whether they need judgment. Then we look at your cart abandonment volume, average order value, and current recovery rate. That gives us two numbers: how much of your inbox is automatable, and what an unrecovered cart is costing you monthly.
Build the AI on your store stack
AI support agent trained on your catalogue, shipping windows, and return policy. Connects to Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce for order data, your carrier or ShipStation for live tracking, Klaviyo for email and SMS sequences, and your returns platform for label generation and refunds.
Launch in 4-6 weeks, then tune
First version live within two weeks so you can test it on real tickets. Over the next month we tune copy against open and conversion rates, adjust SMS send windows once timezone data comes in, and sharpen fallback responses for questions outside the trained vocabulary.
Real Result
How a 3-person DTC brand doing $500K a year recovered 22% of carts and cut human-handled tickets 70%
22%
Abandoned carts recovered (~$79,200/year)
-70%
Support tickets needing a human
85%
Order-status queries handled zero-touch
A 3-person DTC brand doing $500K in annual revenue had two problems feeding each other: a support inbox dominated by five repeat question types, and cart abandonment sitting at the industry average of 70% with no recovery system. Both had obvious fixes. The blocker was time, not awareness — at 3 people, every configuration task competes with whatever is urgent that day, and setup kept slipping to next week.
The breakthrough was treating it as one 3-week project instead of parallel optimization work: roughly 22 hours of active build across three systems. A cart recovery sequence combining email and SMS over 72 hours. An order-status bot reading live tracking from Shopify and the shipping integration. A self-serve returns portal that issues labels and triggers refunds on carrier scan. Total software cost stayed under $400 a month.
Result inside 90 days: 22% of abandoned carts recovered — about 88 extra completed orders a month at a $75 average order value, or $6,600 monthly and roughly $79,200 a year from traffic the brand had already paid to acquire. Tickets needing a human dropped 70%. The bot handled 85% of order-status queries and returns needing manual handling fell to about 15%. Reactive support time went from 2-3 hours a day to under 45 minutes, and payback landed in week 4. Read the full case study for the sequence timing and escalation rules.
Book Your Free Audit
See exactly what we'd build for your store
Pick a 30-minute slot. We'll map your ticket mix against your cart abandonment data, then send a written report in 48 hours naming the sequences with the fastest payback for your brand. No pitch.
Honest Comparison
Why custom-built beats a stack of apps
You've probably already installed three apps for this. Here's how the options actually compare.
| Store apps & built-in flows | Generic chatbot | Builts AI custom build | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answers WISMO from live tracking | One app per channel, no shared context | Sends a link to your tracking page | Matches the order, returns status and link |
| Recovers abandoned carts | Email only, one template | No | Email plus SMS over 72 hours, product-specific |
| Handles returns end to end | Portal, then a support ticket anyway | No | Label issued, refund on carrier scan |
| Same answers on DMs and SMS | Separate tools, separate rules | Website widget only | One system across every channel |
| Escalates with a reason attached | N/A | Customer repeats everything | Tagged by why it escalated, full thread |
| Trained on your catalogue & policies | N/A | No — generic responses | Your SKUs, shipping windows, return policy |
FAQ
Common questions from DTC and e-commerce founders
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, and it's the highest-volume win in DTC support. The system matches the customer by email or order number, reads live tracking from your store platform and carrier, then replies with the current status and a tracking link. In our case study it handled 85% of status queries with zero human touch.
Yes. We integrate with Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and most cloud storefronts, plus Klaviyo for email and SMS, ShipStation and carrier APIs for tracking, and returns platforms like Loop. The AI reads real order data, so answers reflect what actually shipped instead of a generic status page link.
Klaviyo's 2024 E-commerce Benchmarks put a well-built 3-email sequence at 5-15%, rising to 15-25% when brands add SMS. The brand in our case study landed at 22% with email plus SMS referencing the specific product. On a $500K brand at a $75 average order value, that's roughly $79,200 a year.
Customers enter an order number, select items and a reason, and receive a return label by email instantly. Refunds trigger when the carrier scans the package. Only three situations still reach you: returns outside the window, damaged items needing photo review, and exchanges where the requested variant is out of stock.
Yes. One system runs across your helpdesk inbox, the on-site chat widget, SMS, and social DMs, so customers get the same answer wherever they ask. Order lookups, shipping windows, and return steps work identically on every channel, and anything escalated arrives in a single queue with the full thread.
The automated layer doesn't care about volume — status lookups and return initiations cost the same at ten times the traffic. Only genuine escalations grow, and those arrive tagged with why they escalated. Most brands stop hiring seasonal support staff after their first automated Q4.
It routes to your team inbox with a tag explaining why it escalated. Damaged or missing items, billing disputes, and out-of-stock exchange requests always reach a human. The founders in our case study cleared that queue twice a day and kept response time under 4 hours on genuine issues.
Only with proper consent, and we build to that standard. CASL requires express or implied consent for commercial email and SMS plus a working unsubscribe in every message. Customers who purchase after abandoning drop out automatically, opt-outs receive transactional messages only, and personal data handling follows PIPEDA.
More Industries
AI customer service for other businesses
We build customer service automation for product and service businesses across these verticals.
Stop looking up
tracking numbers.
Book a free 30-minute audit. We'll sort your ticket volume by what actually needs a person, price out your unrecovered carts, and name the system to build first — no obligation.
Written report in 48 hours. No pitch, no pressure.