Why it is most of the queue
A customer who has paid and is waiting has one question, and they ask it the moment the tracking page stops updating. Order status questions, plus returns and exchanges, make up the bulk of tickets at direct-to-consumer brands; Fini, which builds support tooling for Shopify Plus stores, puts them at two thirds of volume in its 2026 guide. Every one of those tickets has an answer nobody on your team knows by heart and every system already does.
That is what makes it different from a product question or a complaint. The work is a lookup and a plain sentence, and a person doing it is a person copying from one screen to another.
What the automation has to do
Identify the customer. An order number is best. An email address or phone number usually finds it. A name alone rarely does. On the phone the customer reads the number out, so the system has to cope with "eleven ninety-four" as well as "1194".
Read the order. Fulfilment status from the store, then the carrier tracking behind it. "Shipped" leaves the customer where they started. "Left the Reno facility on Tuesday, due Thursday" ends the call.
Say it plainly, then handle the follow-up. Most order-status conversations have a second question: can the address change, can it be held, what if it says delivered and it is not here. The first two are actions in the order system. The third is a claim, and it belongs with a person.
What changes by channel
On chat, the customer can be sent the tracking link and the conversation is over. On the phone, a link is useless; the answer has to be spoken, and the date matters more than the carrier name. Over SMS, the thread has to pick up where it left off when the customer replies an hour later. Over email, the reply has to land in the same thread as the question or the customer will write again.
The same lookup drives all four. What differs is how the answer is phrased and how the conversation resumes, which is why it helps to have one system that speaks every channel.
What to keep with a person
Delivered-but-not-received claims, damaged goods, refunds above a threshold you set, and anything the customer is upset about. These need judgement and sometimes a carrier claim. The automation should recognise them, gather what a person will need (order, photos, the customer's account of it) and hand over with a summary, so the customer does not repeat the story.
How Merrows handles it
Merrows connects to your Shopify store and, where you use them, your subscription and returns tools. When a customer asks where an order is, on the phone, in chat, by text or by email, it finds the order, reads the fulfilment and tracking status and answers in that channel. Address changes and holds are done in the order system during the conversation. Claims are handed to your helpdesk with the order attached and a summary of what was said.
You can read every transcript. The numbers to watch are how many order-status conversations end without a person and how many customers come back within a day with the same question.