Illustration by Sonny Ross

Written by Jamie Vassar

Before choosing a new support tool, it’s essential to understand which features are most important to your business — and to your customers.

Below, we’ve listed 11 standout eCommerce customer service software platforms, along with notes on each platform’s best features. Use this list to find the right support tool for your company’s needs.

1. Help Scout

Best for all-in-one ecommerce customer support.

Because smaller teams don’t often have the luxury of massive budgets or amounts of time to invest in setting up and learning a new tool, they need something sophisticated enough to cover all the bases, simple enough to get up and running quickly, and flexible enough to grow with them over time.

Help Scout checks all of these boxes.

Help Scout’s clutter-free shared inbox easily keeps everyone on the same page and cultivates a more collaborative environment through features like private notes and collision detection.

You also get access to productivity tools like workflows and saved replies to automate routine tasks and provide lightning-fast responses to common questions.

Along with these reactive customer service features, Help Scout also offers proactive support solutions. Create a knowledge base quickly and easily with Docs, or use Beacon to provide customers with answers immediately via live chat.

To top it all off, Help Scout also offers 24-hour service six days a week to all customers, while other competitors only offer full support for clients in higher tiers.

Price: Starts at $20/user per month.

2. Avochato

Best for text messaging-based live chat.

According to Avochato, texting has not only become the preferred way to communicate with friends and family, but 89% of consumers said they would also like to use SMS to communicate with businesses.

Avochato is a text messaging platform for teams utilizing live chat to maintain meaningful, real-time conversations with customers far past promotional emails.

Without required programming, teams can set up their Avochato phone number and import and broadcast to customers. The software also integrates with platforms such as Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.

Price: Starts at $19/user per month.

3. Wix Answers

Best for omnichannel support for Wix users.

Wix Answers is cloud-based help desk software specialized for Wix websites. It caters to small-to-midsize businesses that handle a high volume of users. The platform allows teams to set up a help center, ticketing system, call center, and live chat all in one place.

One of Wix Answers’ key features is the ability for teams to create help widgets to display articles and guides contextually along the user journey anywhere on their website or product.

Price: Starts at $24/month.

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4. Sprout Social

Best for ecommerce social media support.

Sprout Social is a social media management and optimization platform for brands and agencies of all sizes. The platform provides an overall hub to publish and monitor content across multiple social networks.

The ability to see patterns in social media comments can give your support team more opportunities to recognize what needs to be adjusted. Additionally, interacting with the customers on social media can cut down on the number of requests that make it to your support queue, allowing you to prioritize more complex issues.

With Sprout’s suite, you can manage up to five social media profiles with the Standard plan and up to 10 with the Professional or Advanced plans.

Although practical, Sprout has a hefty price tag for larger teams. Unlike other tools in the space, Sprout Social doesn’t have a team plan. Instead, you pay per user, per month. The good news is that there’s a free trial, so you can test out whether or not it works for you before committing.

Price: Starts at $89/user per month.

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5. Hiver

Best for ecommerce companies that are already using Gmail for customer service.

Hiver helps teams deliver customer service from a tool they are already familiar with — Gmail. This means they can assign, track, and collaborate on customer emails and run analytics and automation from the Gmail interface without sacrificing time to learn new software.

With Hiver, teams can collaborate on shared email accounts like support@ or sales@ without leaving their Gmail accounts.

Price: Starts at $12/user per month.

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6. Zendesk

Best for large ecommerce businesses with technical setups.

Zendesk is generally associated with larger teams because of the relative complexity of the product, the resources needed for initial set up, and the overall cost, though they do have a few lower-cost plans.

Those lower-cost plans lack features like chat, phone support, and custom reporting — but should cover the basics for those primarily needing email support.

Alternatively, because it’s a massive product, it tends to lean toward an enterprise focus, and its higher-tier options might overflow with features you don’t need.

Price: Starts at $19/agent per month.

7. Hubspot Service Hub

Best for large businesses that already use Hubspot.

You might be familiar with Hubspot as a marketing tool or resource. Their Service Hub brings all your customer service data and channels together in one place to assist your support team through automation and self-service.

However, there is a difference between flexible pricing and confusing pricing. With so many different plans and pricing options to choose from, Hubspot’s pricing setup can become overwhelming for some customers looking to scale.

Price: Starts at $45/month.

8. LiveAgent

Best for automating live chat.

LiveAgent combines communication from email, calls, and social media into a unified dashboard, offering simple setup and integration with the rest of their platform and tools to help team productivity.

What sets LiveAgent apart from all the other tools we’ve mentioned is its gamification approach to customer support. Teams can earn points and rewards for completing tasks, making customer support fun for your team.

Price: Starts at $15/agent per month.

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9. Gorgias

Best for ecommerce merchants on Shopify.

By managing all support tickets from one place and automating responses to frequent requests, Gorgias provides ecommerce support agents with a unified view of their customers. It helps speed up processes like returns and follow-ups.

While their basic plan allows for unlimited users, their inclusion of a ticket limit may cause things to get a little murky in terms of clear month-to-month spending. Their simplest tier allows for 350 monthly tickets, but users pay $25 for every 100 tickets after that.

Simply put, 350 tickets are pretty easy to reach in a single day, so the additional costs are inevitable. Even at their highest tier, which offers 6,000 monthly tickets, having just two support agents complete 100 tickets a day would put you over that number, and at that tier, you’d already be spending $750 a month.

This muddy setup can make things tricky as a company grows.

Price: Starts at $60/month.

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10. Acquire

Best for connecting to social accounts through live chat screen sharing.

Acquire is another live chat tool with a twist: It allows screen sharing between your customer service team and your customers in real time, without customers needing to download any software.

This feature cuts down on communication time and allows for more transparency on both sides of the chat.

Acquire could be a contender for teams that communicate heavily through chat and social media sites like Instagram and TikTok. However, it’s a higher-cost tool, which is something to consider.

Price: Starts at $300/month, plus $40/month per additional agent.

11. Typeform

Best for customer satisfaction surveys.

Interacting with and tracking customer satisfaction is essential in any business, so surveys are a vital tool to utilize. Typeform specializes in online form building and online surveys without needing to write a single line of code.

Customer satisfaction surveys are easy to set up through Typeform’s drag and drop builder, and it offers a cleaner UI than some of its alternatives.

Price: Starts at $25/month.

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Find what fits your needs

We hope this list supplies a few new names to investigate — or shines a light on some features you didn’t realize you need to consider. Remember, the software you choose should fit you where you are now, as well as how you plan to grow.

No matter which software you decide to use, it’s the service you provide that will set you apart from your competitors.