Freshdesk works for an online store, but the fit depends on where your customers write. Standalone Freshdesk is an email-first ticket desk: email, web forms, Facebook and, on Pro, eBay buyer messages become tickets, and a Shopify app lets agents look up, refund and cancel orders from the ticket sidebar. Freshdesk's pricing page lists Growth, the cheapest plan that runs the Shopify app, at $19 per agent per month billed annually or $23 per agent per month billed monthly.[1] Billing is per agent and every agent sits on the same plan; the pricing breakdown covers add-ons and renewal. For new accounts, live chat, WhatsApp and Instagram are missing. They belong to Omni.
What the Shopify app does inside a ticket
The Shopify app installs on Growth, Pro and Enterprise, not on the legacy Free program. An agent reading a ticket sees the customer's current and past orders, order status and shipping information in the sidebar, and can act on them without opening Shopify.[2] Refunds can be full or partial, with options to restock items and notify the customer. Cancellation has a firm limit. An order can be cancelled only while unpaid, or paid but not yet ready for shipping; once it ships or is fulfilled, the cancel option is disabled.
Since 1 January 2026, new Shopify connections need a custom app built in the Shopify Dev Dashboard with the scopes read_customers, read_orders and write_orders; older connections are unaffected. One Freshdesk account can serve several Shopify stores with the same client ID and secret, which suits a brand with regional storefronts. Canned responses can pull eight Shopify placeholders, among them last order number, tracking number, tracking URL and shipping status. So a where is my order reply fills itself in.
The help widget carries the knowledge base and a contact form, with no live chat, and it embeds in a Shopify theme through the footer.liquid file. Form submissions arrive as tickets. Freshdesk ships a sample automation rule that routes refund and return tickets to a billing group, and on Pro, custom objects can hold order-refund records that rules update when an agent sets a ticket's type to Refund.
Build canned responses with the Shopify placeholders for tracking number, tracking URL and shipping status, so a where-is-my-order reply needs no lookup.
Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and eBay get less
The Magento app supports only Magento Community Edition 1.7 to 1.9.3, links one instance per help desk, and installs on Growth and above. It matches customers by requester email alone and shows invoices, purchase history and shipping addresses beside the ticket; the Magento Contact Us form can create tickets too. Check your version first. The BigCommerce integration goes further: agents can view, cancel and refund BigCommerce orders inside Freshdesk. WooCommerce sits elsewhere. AI Agent Studio workflows connect to Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce and Wix, chaining calls such as fetching an order, then refunding it.
The Magento app supports only Community Edition 1.7 to 1.9.3 and one instance per help desk, so confirm your store version before buying for it.
The eBay channel is a Pro and Enterprise feature that support switches on by request.[3] Buyer messages become tickets with the source eCommerce, auto-tagged with the listing's top three categories, and SLA policies and automation rules apply. The limits come from eBay. Replies cap at 2,000 characters and five files totalling 7 MB, with no rich text, and requesters get no notification emails. Buyer contact details appear only after payment, and only for Buy Now purchases, not auction sales. eBay tickets cannot be answered from the mobile apps, only time-sheet integrations work on them, and the authorization token expires every 18 months.
Growth or Pro for a store's support team
| Plan | Price per agent per month | What it adds for a store team |
|---|---|---|
| Growth | $19 billed annually, $23 billed monthly | Shopify and Magento apps, Email AI Agent with 500 one-time sessions, one default SLA policy, occasional agents on day passes |
| Pro | $55 billed annually, $66 billed monthly | Automatic round-robin and load-based assignment, multiple SLA policies, collaborators, custom objects, eBay channel, Proactive Outreach, Copilot add-on |
| Enterprise | $89 billed annually, $107 billed monthly | Skill-based routing, sandbox, audit log, Freddy AI Insights, PCI vault field |
The real line between the first two plans is assignment. On Growth, agents pick tickets from the shared queue or a lead assigns them by hand; automatic round-robin and load-balanced assignment start on Pro, along with multiple SLA policies and escalations. Freshworks' customer story says Crocus cut first response time from 24 hours to two hours with automatic ticket assignment. Two or three agents can live without it. Eight cannot. For five agents billed annually, the step costs $1,140 a year on Growth against $3,300 a year on Pro, a $2,160 difference by our arithmetic.
Pro also brings Proactive Outreach for Shopify, with two triggers: abandoned carts and feedback after a fulfilled order. Recipients can be filtered by order count, locale, currency or total price. Outreach is capped at 30 a month on Pro and 50 on Enterprise, and Freshdesk has no bulk email or mailing lists. It is a nudge, not a newsletter tool. Copilot costs $29 per agent per month billed annually or $35 per agent per month billed monthly, on Pro and Enterprise only; its Live Translate handles about 40 languages, up to 100 translated tickets per license a month.
Holiday peaks: day passes or extra seats
Seasonal staffing is where per-agent billing bites. On an annual plan, an agent added in November is charged pro rata at once and cannot be removed until the term ends; cancellation also takes effect only at the end of the term, and payments are non-refundable (see our pricing guide). On monthly billing, a reduction takes effect after the current cycle, once the extra agents are deactivated. Occasional agents are the cheaper route for short help: they need no license, and each login uses a day pass valid until 23:59. Every plan includes 3 free day passes; after that, passes cost $2 on Growth, $7 on Pro and $12 on Enterprise per pass.
By our arithmetic, counting only paid passes, a monthly-billed seat becomes cheaper from 12 login days a month on Growth ($24 a month in passes against $23 a month), from 10 days on Pro ($70 a month against $66 a month) and from 9 days on Enterprise. On monthly billing, a temp working all of December belongs on a seat. On an annual plan, that seat stays billed until renewal, so passes usually win for one busy month. A weekend helper never needs a seat. Day passes do not cover Copilot, and an occasional agent added as a watcher can follow a ticket by email without spending a pass.
On annual billing, agents added mid-term are charged pro rata and cannot be removed until the term ends; use occasional agents with day passes for short peaks.
Chat, WhatsApp and order bots live in Omni
If shoppers expect chat on the product page or answers on WhatsApp and Instagram, standalone Freshdesk is the wrong box. Omni adds web chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS through your own Twilio account and the Chat AI Agent. Its own pricing page lists Omni Growth at $29 per agent per month billed annually or $35 per agent per month billed monthly. Omni Pro and Enterprise add Shopify chatbot templates for order tracking, cancellations and payment issues; they work only once Shopify is connected to Freshmarketer or Freshsales Suite, separate Freshworks products. WhatsApp costs extra: Meta's per-message charges plus a 20% Freshworks markup. Our Omni guide covers the setup.
Freshworks' retail page presents a Retail and e-commerce AI Agent with more than 50 prebuilt workflows such as order tracking and delivery updates.[4] On standalone Freshdesk, the customer-facing piece is the Email AI Agent. It answers new email, portal and web-form tickets from your published articles, files and URLs, and a shadow mode drafts private notes first. The first 500 sessions are included once per account and last until used. After that, sessions cost $49 per pack of 100, added to the current billing cycle. An email session covers 72 hours. Unused purchased sessions do not carry over to the next cycle, and at zero the agent stops. By our arithmetic, 1,000 sessions past the free 500 cost $490.
Freshworks' customer story says Monos runs 31 agents across email, chat, Instagram and Facebook, handling 3,000 emails and 600 chats a day. Freshworks' customer story says Hobbycraft, a UK arts and crafts retailer, has AI handle up to 30% of questions and resolves 82% at first contact. Both setups lean on chat, Instagram or WhatsApp, which a new account gets only through Omni. Read them as Omni stories.
Per agent or per ticket: the Gorgias contrast
Gorgias charges by tickets a month, never per agent. Its pricing page lists Basic at $60 per month billed monthly or $50 per month billed annually with 300 tickets a month, and Pro at $360 per month billed monthly or $300 per month billed annually with 2,000 tickets. Gorgias says it is built for e-commerce and Shopify, and extra tickets past a plan's allowance are charged one by one.
The ratio of agents to tickets decides it. By our arithmetic on annual billing, a 3-agent team handling 2,000 tickets a month pays $57 a month on Freshdesk Growth against $300 a month on Gorgias Pro. Flip it: 12 agents sharing 300 tickets pay $228 a month on Freshdesk Growth against $50 a month on Gorgias Basic. Against Gorgias Basic, Freshdesk Growth stays cheaper only up to 2 agents; against Gorgias Pro, up to 15 agents on Growth or 5 on Freshdesk Pro. Lean, busy teams favor Freshdesk. Big, quiet teams favor Gorgias.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free Freshdesk plan for a small store?+
No self-serve free plan: new buyers get a 14-day trial of Enterprise features with no card. After the trial, Freshdesk can move a small account into its Free program (up to 2 agents) through Customer Success, but that program has no marketplace apps, so no Shopify app.
Can agents take card payments over a Freshdesk ticket?+
Standalone Freshdesk offers one PCI Level 1 vault field on Enterprise, enabled on request; card data in it is purged after 30 days. Freshdesk Omnichannel is not PCI compliant.
Where is a store's support data hosted?+
Freshdesk runs on AWS with data centers in the US, EU, India, Australia and the Middle East, chosen at sign-up. Moving to another region later needs a support ticket.
The bottom line
Freshdesk suits a store whose support runs on email and order questions: the Shopify app answers where is my order and handles refunds and early cancellations from the ticket, Growth covers two or three agents, and Pro earns its price once you need automatic assignment, the eBay channel or abandoned-cart outreach. On an annual plan, staff seasonal peaks with day passes, not extra seats. If shoppers live in chat, WhatsApp or Instagram, price Omni instead. If your team is large but your ticket count is small, compare a per-ticket desk first.
- [1] Freshdesk Customer Support Software Pricing & Plans (2026-10) https://www.freshworks.com/freshdesk/pricing/
- [2] Freshdesk Support: integrating shopify with freshdesk (2026-10) https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/195382-integrating-shopify-with-freshdesk
- [3] Freshdesk Support: how are ebay tickets created and how can you respond (2026-10) https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/214326-how-are-ebay-tickets-created-and-how-can-you-respond
- [4] AI Customer Service Solution For Retailers (2026-10) https://www.freshworks.com/freshdesk/omni/industry/retail-ecommerce/