Gorgias Rules and Macros: A Setup Guide for E-commerce Teams

Gorgias rules are if-then automations that tag, assign, prioritize, snooze, close or reply to tickets the moment something happens; macros are saved replies with actions attached that agents (or rules) apply in one click. Both come with every Helpdesk plan, from Starter up. An account can hold up to 70 rules and 5,000 macros, and only the owner, admins and leads build them. The one cost trap is simple. A rule that sends a reply makes the ticket billable, while rules that only tag or assign cost nothing. Start with tagging and routing rules, add macros for your top questions, and turn on auto-replies last.

How rules decide what happens to a ticket

Every rule has a trigger, conditions and actions. The triggers are ticket created, ticket updated, new message in ticket, ticket assigned to user, snooze delay ends and satisfaction survey responded.^[1] Order matters more than most teams expect. Rules run by trigger type first, with ticket created going before new message and ticket updated running last, then top to bottom inside each trigger. A tagging rule placed below the rule that reads the tag will miss it, so put labeling rules at the top of each group.

The cap is 70 rules per account, and Gorgias warns you once you pass 65. Active rules apply across all stores and channels. Conditions cannot mix AND and OR in one IF statement, so mixed logic needs a nested IF. The ticket updated trigger ignores changes to intents or message body, and the channel condition reads only the first message. There is no time-based trigger either. The workaround is a pair: one rule snoozes the ticket, and a second rule on snooze delay ends does the follow-up.

Five rules worth building in your first week

Gorgias installs rule templates from its Workflows template library, and two auto-tag rules (social questions and leads, intents and sentiments) are already on in every helpdesk. A sensible first set covers labeling, urgency, VIPs, noise and order status.

• Intent tagging: keep the intents and sentiments rule on, since intents also feed views and reports.
• Urgency: set ticket priority from keywords or customer data; priority runs Low, Normal, High, Critical, and new tickets start at Normal.
• VIP tagging: the template defaults to a total-spend threshold or 3 orders, and both can be changed.
• Noise: auto-close templates catch out-of-office replies, non-support notifications, Instagram story mentions and giveaway comments.
• Order status: the Shopify template replies with a tracking link and closes the ticket when the order is under 20 days old and has tracking.

Store data widens what conditions can read. With Shopify, rules match last-order fields (financial and fulfillment status, total price, tracking number, shipping country) and customer fields such as order count, tags and total spent. BigCommerce and Magento 2 expose shorter lists, and WooCommerce has no rule conditions at all. Social channels need restraint: Gorgias advises against auto-replies on Facebook and Instagram comments because they can be flagged as spam, while auto-tagging them is fine.

What an automatic reply costs you

Gorgias bills by tickets, not people, and a ticket becomes billable once the helpdesk sends at least one message, whether from an agent, AI Agent or a rule.^[2] An auto-reply shows as sent by Gorgias Bot and counts once, however many messages follow. Tagging, assigning and internal notes with no reply are not billable, and newsletters, spam and auto-responders are filtered out. So a rule acknowledging tickets your agents answer anyway adds nothing. The cost appears when a rule replies to tickets nobody would otherwise touch, such as order-status questions it closes on its own.

Past the plan limit, overage is $0.40 per ticket on Starter and Basic or $0.36 per ticket on Pro and Advanced. If auto-replies push a month from 300 to 400 tickets, Basic billed monthly reaches $100 a month by our arithmetic. The full meter sits in our Gorgias pricing guide. Gorgias does guard against loops: the same auto-reply goes to one customer at most once every 5 minutes, and auto-reply rules skip tickets that hold only an internal note.

Building macros your team will actually use

A macro holds reply text plus actions, and the actions run only when the macro is sent. A macro can also carry no text, so it applies tags, status or assignment without messaging the customer. Every account can hold up to 5,000 macros; the owner, admins and leads create them, and everyone can apply them.^[3] Archived macros can be restored. Deleted ones cannot.

Actions that touch the store

Default actions cover forwarding, attachments, tags, status, assignment, subject, snooze, priority, internal notes, ticket and customer fields, and an HTTP hook. With Shopify connected, macros can cancel an order, duplicate the last order, edit its shipping address, refund its shipping cost or partially refund it. Recharge adds cancel or activate the last subscription and refund the last charge or order. Gift cards from a macro work only on Shopify Plus. On Magento 2 the built-in actions do not work, so an HTTP hook to the Magento API takes their place.

Failures are handled openly. When an action fails, the message is not sent; the agent can retry, send without the action or cancel, and Gorgias reopens the ticket. If several macros with actions are applied, the actions run in the order they were added. With several Shopify stores connected, some actions fail for customers who have profiles in more than one store, so test multi-store macros on a real shared customer before rolling them out.

Variables, imports and macros inside rules

Variables pull in names, orders and tracking data; a missing value becomes a blank space, and store variables appear only once a store is connected. For bulk edits, export all macros to CSV and re-import; the import reads only the name, body_text, tags and id columns, needs UTF-8, drops formatting and leaves actions untouched. The top 3 AI-recommended macros sit at the start of the list. Rules can apply macros too, but not ones with Shopify, Recharge or HTTP hook actions,^[4] and every current_user variable in a rule-applied macro defaults to the account owner.

Views, auto-assignment and SLAs: routing the work

Views are saved ticket filters. Gorgias creates seven defaults (Assigned to me, Unassigned, All, Snoozed, Closed, Trash and Spam); admins and leads add up to 500 shared views, and each user up to 20 private ones. Filters can use channel, store, language, tags, ticket fields, priority, status, CSAT and Auto QA scores, which lets you build one view per language or per store.

Auto-assignment runs on every plan, but only the owner and admins manage it. It needs teams plus rules that assign tickets to a team, and it can cover new tickets, reopened tickets or both. Tickets go out highest priority first, then oldest, only to agents who are signed in and Available, favoring whoever has the fewest. Capacity limits are set separately for chat and messaging and for other text tickets; at capacity, tickets wait unassigned.

SLA policies are also on every plan. Goals run from 1 minute to 14 days, conditions use up to five tags, five ticket fields or a mix, and only the first matching policy in the list applies to a ticket. Business hours, available on Basic and higher, pause SLA timers outside working time. Editing a policy does not rewrite past tickets or past SLA reports, so set goals before launch.

Where AI Agent, Flows and Order Management fit

Rules come first. When a ticket arrives, rules finish before AI Agent acts, and the prebuilt Prevent AI Agent from answering rule adds an ai_ignore tag that keeps AI Agent from replying, acting, tagging or filling fields on that ticket. Handovers carry an ai_handover tag, which can feed a team auto-assignment rule. AI Agent does not use macros; it writes its own answers, reading only macros titled [AI Compatible] as knowledge. Skills cannot tag or assign, so that work stays with rules.

Flows and Order Management are self-service automations included with an AI Agent subscription, and Order Management works only with Shopify. An AI Agent resolution carries the ticket fee plus an automation fee, while a Flow or Order Management resolution carries only the automation fee, and past the included amount each automated interaction costs $1.50. Our Gorgias AI playbook covers setup. Older autoresponder rules are not available to accounts created after September 2024.

The bottom line

Rules and macros are where a Gorgias account earns its keep. Both are on every plan, the limits of 70 rules and 5,000 macros are generous for most stores, and Shopify actions inside macros let agents cancel, edit or refund without leaving the ticket. Build in this order: tagging and priority rules, views and auto-assignment, macros for your top ten questions, then auto-replies once you know how many extra billable tickets they will create. Keep store-action macros for humans, since rules cannot run them.