The short version.

• Requesting it: click "Book a demo" on Gorgias, pick a time, and a salesperson walks you through the helpdesk and AI Agent. Prefer to skip the call? Start the 7-day free trial, no credit card.
• Getting your money's worth: bring the 10 questions below, run your worst tickets, and do the bill math at your real volume before you decide.
• What it won't show: Gorgias Voice still needs a human to answer the phone. If you run a $10M-$100M Shopify brand with a number on your site, that gap is the thing to ask about.

Requesting a Gorgias demo is the easy part. Getting a demo that tells you what you actually need to know, that's where most buyers leave value on the table. The sales team will show you a clean version of the product on a clean store, and you'll nod along, and three weeks later you'll find the thing nobody mentioned.

I booked the Gorgias demo, sat the sales call, and ran the 7-day trial on a test store. This is the prep I wish I'd had: how to request it, what to expect, the questions that separate a real evaluation from a canned walkthrough, and the one thing the demo won't show you.

If you're a founder, COO, or Head of CX at a $10M-$100M Shopify brand weighing a helpdesk, you already know the same questions come up over and over and the phone backlog never really clears. This is written for you, not for someone shopping a $30/month tool. If you want to talk it through with someone who has run the phone side for 50+ Shopify brands, book a 30-min call and we'll walk your numbers.

How to request a Gorgias demo

The path is short. Go to gorgias.com, click "Book a demo" (it sits on the homepage and the pricing page), fill in a quick form, and pick a time on the calendar. A salesperson then walks you through the helpdesk and the AI Agent and answers questions about your specific store. The demo is free.

The form asks the usual: name, work email, company, your store URL, your rough monthly ticket volume, and what you're running for support today. Fill in the store URL and ticket volume honestly, because that's what lets the rep tailor the demo to your store instead of a generic sandbox. A vague form gets you a vague demo.

If you'd rather not sit a sales call just to see the product, there's a faster path. Gorgias offers a 7-day free trial with no credit card, so you can run the real product on your own store and poke at it yourself. For a lot of operators that beats a guided tour, because you get to break things on your own tickets.

Here are the four ways to actually see Gorgias, side by side. We cover them in more depth in our guide on how to see a Gorgias demo. If you're still deciding whether Gorgias is even the right helpdesk, it's worth scanning the Gorgias alternatives before you book.

Most serious buyers do both: book the demo for pricing and the tailored view, then run a trial to pressure-test what they saw.

What to expect on the demo call

Plan for about 30 to 45 minutes. You'll usually get an account executive, sometimes paired with a solutions consultant for the technical questions. The call follows a predictable shape: a few discovery questions about your business, a product walkthrough, then a pricing conversation tied to your ticket volume.

Send your store URL and your real monthly ticket count ahead of time. A rep who has seen your store before the call can show order lookup and your real FAQs live, instead of demoing on a fake Acme store. That single move turns a generic pitch into something you can actually judge.

One thing to hold the line on: don't let the demo stay generic. When they show the AI Agent answering a question, ask them to run one of your real questions, on a real order, while you watch. The gap between the polished demo flow and your actual messy tickets is exactly what you're trying to measure.

10 questions to ask in your Gorgias demo

Most buyers ask about features. The questions that actually protect you are about cost, fit, and the channels the demo skips. Bring these, in roughly this order.

• What does this cost at my real ticket volume? Gorgias base plans look cheap, but overage and AI fees stack on top. Get the all-in number for your volume, not the sticker price.
• What's the AI Agent's resolution rate on stores like mine? Marketed automation rates and published case-study rates are not the same number. Ask for the real range.
• What exactly counts as a "resolved conversation" I'm billed for? The AI Agent is billed per resolved conversation ($0.90 to $1.00 each), separate from your ticket allocation. Make them define "resolved."
• How deep does the Shopify integration go? Can it look up and edit orders, manage subscriptions, and process returns inside the conversation, or just read order status?
• What happens to my phone calls? This is the one most buyers forget. Ask whether the AI answers the phone, or whether a human still has to pick up (more on this below).
• How does escalation and handoff work, and how much control do I keep? You want to decide what the AI handles and what routes to your team, not inherit a black box.
• What does migrating from my current helpdesk look like, and how long? Ask for a realistic timeline from signed contract to your team using it day to day.
• What are the trial-to-paid and downgrade terms? Some users have reported being billed for a higher package before they could downgrade, with a no-refund policy. Get the policy in writing.
• Who builds and onboards this, me or you? Self-serve setup and done-for-you onboarding are very different commitments.
• Can I talk to a reference customer my size, in my vertical? A brand with your ticket volume and your category will tell you more in ten minutes than the demo will in forty.

That fifth question, about the phone, is the one that surprises people. Hold onto it.

What to test before you decide

A demo shows you the happy path. A trial shows you the truth. If you take the 7-day trial, or ask for an extended one, test the things that actually break.

• Run your worst tickets, not the easy ones. The angry refund, the half-shipped order, the customer on their third email. Easy tickets always look great.
• Test order lookup on real orders. Push a few real WISMO questions through and see if the AI finds the order and gives the right answer. WISMO is 30-40% of most stores' volume, so this is the bulk of the work.
• Throw your real FAQs and a tricky return at it. Use your actual policy language, not a clean sample. A good knowledge base is what separates a confident answer from a guess.
• Do the bill math at your real volume. Base plan, plus overage on your monthly tickets, plus AI resolutions at $0.90 to $1.00 each. Write the all-in number down and compare it to what you pay now.

If the all-in number scares you, that's useful information, and better to learn it now than on month-two's invoice.

What the Gorgias demo won't show you

Here's the gap. Gorgias is genuinely good at email and chat, and the AI Agent can resolve a real share of those tickets on its own. But the demo is built around the channels Gorgias automates, and your phone line probably isn't one of them.

Gorgias Voice exists. It does call routing, IVR, multiple numbers, and AI-generated call transcripts and summaries. What it does not do is answer the phone on its own. The native Gorgias Voice tool is not automated, so a human on your team still has to pick up every call (eesel's Gorgias Voice breakdown walks through this in detail). We dug into this in our own guide to Gorgias phone support too. The AI you see resolving tickets in the demo is working email and chat, not the ringing phone.

For most brands that's fine until you look at the call log. If you have a phone number on your site, every after-hours call still goes to voicemail, and 80% of voicemail-routed callers hang up without leaving a message (Eden). Worse, 85% of callers who can't reach a person never call back, and 62% switch to a competitor (PCN). The demo won't surface any of that, because the phone isn't what the AI Agent is doing.

This is the gap Ringly fills, and the two tools are built to sit together. Ringly.io is AI phone support for Shopify brands. Instead of a human answering every call, the AI customer support phone agent for Shopify handles inbound calls 24/7: order status, returns, product questions, abandoned-cart rescue. Across 50+ brands the AI resolves 73% of calls on its own at roughly $0.42 per resolved call, and the calls that need a person escalate cleanly to Gorgias, Richpanel, Reamaze, or whatever helpdesk you already run. You keep Gorgias for email and chat. You add AI phone support for the line that's ringing, including the after-hours calls nobody on your team is awake for. WashCo, a Shopify brand we launched, recovered $22,664 in its first 7 days on the phone.

So when you sit the Gorgias demo, ask the phone question directly. If the answer is "a person still answers," you've just found the work the helpdesk demo wasn't going to cover, and you can plan for it instead of discovering it in Q4.

What this costs vs adding AI phone support

The phone gap isn't free to ignore. Staffing it means hiring, and the math gets ugly fast. Here's the shape we see across Shopify brands that try to cover calls with people.

Take a $50M Shopify brand running a 6-rep support team to keep the phone and the queue covered:

That's roughly 70% of repeatable calls (order status, returns, the same questions over and over) routed to the AI. The genuinely hard calls still reach your team, who now have time to handle them well. You're not firing the helpdesk you came to evaluate. You're closing the channel it doesn't cover.

If you want to put your real numbers against that, book a 30-min call and we'll do the phone math with you live.

How to score the Gorgias demo afterward

Do a 15-minute debrief right after the call, while it's fresh. Score the demo against five things, and be honest about the ones they dodged.

• Did they show it on your store? Real order, real FAQ, or a generic sandbox?
• Is the all-in cost clear? Base plus overage plus AI resolutions at your volume, in one number.
• Did they answer the phone question straight? Or did "Gorgias Voice" get waved at without admitting a human still picks up?
• Is there a real migration plan? A timeline from contract to live, not a vague "our team handles it."
• Did you get a reference? A customer your size, in your vertical, you can actually call.

If the demo nailed email and chat but went quiet on the phone, that's not a dealbreaker, it's a to-do. Keep Gorgias for what it's good at, and solve the phone channel on purpose.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Gorgias demo free? Yes. Booking a demo costs nothing, and there's also a 7-day free trial with no credit card if you'd rather test the product yourself first.

Do I have to talk to sales, or can I just try Gorgias? You can do either. Book a demo for a tailored walkthrough plus pricing, or skip straight to the free trial and run the real product on your store. Most serious buyers do both.

How long is the Gorgias demo call? Plan for about 30 to 45 minutes. It usually runs discovery, then a product walkthrough, then a pricing conversation tied to your ticket volume.

How much does Gorgias actually cost? Plans run from $10/mo (Starter, 50 tickets) up to $900/mo (Advanced, 5,000 tickets), with Enterprise custom. The AI Agent is billed separately at $0.90 to $1.00 per resolved conversation, and overage stacks on top, so your all-in cost is usually higher than the base price. See our full Gorgias pricing breakdown.

Does Gorgias handle phone calls? Gorgias Voice handles call routing, IVR, and transcripts, but it is not an automated phone agent, so a human still has to answer every call. For an AI that actually answers the phone and resolves calls on its own, you need a dedicated phone tool sitting in front of your helpdesk. It matters most for Shopify Plus customer service teams fielding real call volume.

What should I ask in a Gorgias demo? Lead with cost at your real volume, the AI Agent's true resolution rate, what counts as a billed "resolved conversation," how the phone channel is handled, and your migration timeline. And ask for a reference customer your size.

Talk to us

If you run a $10M-$100M Shopify brand, Gorgias is a solid pick for email and chat. The piece it won't cover in the demo is the phone, and that's the channel quietly leaking revenue every night it goes to voicemail. A 30-min call is the fastest way to see what your missed calls are actually worth.

The 3-layer guarantee.

1. Live in 14 days or it's free until launched.
2. 65% resolution in 90 days or we refund the last 3 months of subscription fees.
3. We keep working free until we hit it.

Ruben (Ringly co-founder) takes these calls personally.

Book a 30-min call