How to Migrate from Front to Gorgias (2026): The Ecommerce Move

Why teams move from Front to Gorgias

The pull is order context, not inbox features. Front and Gorgias both do the collaborative shared-inbox job well — assignment, internal comments, canned replies. Where they diverge is the storefront. Gorgias surfaces the customer's Shopify (or BigCommerce/Magento) order history, fulfilment status, and refund controls inside the ticket sidebar, and lets an agent issue a refund or cancel an order without leaving the conversation. For a support team whose tickets are overwhelmingly "where's my order" and "I want to return this," that native commerce data is the whole reason to switch.

The trade-off is honesty about what you're leaving. Front's collaborative shared inbox — shared drafts, message-level comments, its particular rules engine — is genuinely good, and some of it has no one-to-one equivalent in Gorgias. Going in clear-eyed about that is the difference between a smooth cutover and an angry team in week two.

Step 1 — Export your data out of Front

Start here, because this is the step people underestimate. You cannot self-serve a full Front export. Per Front's own help documentation, you must contact Front's Support team to export your account data, and you must hold company admin permissions to request it. Front delivers the export as CSV files organised by inbox folder (roughly 700MB per file), with EML message files available on request.

Read the fine print before you plan around it. Front's export includes conversations, messages, discussions, and comments from your shared inboxes, shared-inbox attachments (EML, on request), and knowledge base files. It excludes — in Front's words — "attachments, comments, conversations, or discussions from individual inboxes or contact data," and it "will not export message templates and tags." So individual-inbox history, your contact database, your templates, and every tag are simply not in the box. Our companion guide on how to export data from Front covers the request in detail.

Step 2 — Choose your migration route

Gorgias does not have a native Front importer, so the realistic path is a third-party migration tool. Help Desk Migration (whose Gorgias-specialist partner ClonePartner is Gorgias's approved migration partner) is the common choice: it connects to your source and target platforms via credentials, maps fields, and moves records automatically. This is the route the "Data import to Gorgias" tooling below describes.

Before you run anything, do the Gorgias-side prep the importer expects. Per Help Desk Migration's Gorgias migration checklist, you should disable your Gorgias automation rules first (so they don't fire on tickets as they land and change statuses mid-import), gather your Gorgias admin credentials, and pre-create agents, groups, and custom fields so records have somewhere to map to.

Step 3 — Map records and run a demo

Never trust a full migration you haven't previewed. Help Desk Migration offers a free demo that moves 20 sample tickets into Gorgias so you can inspect how comments, tags, attachments, and requester data actually land before committing. Map your Front agents to Gorgias agents during this step so ticket ownership survives, then check a handful of migrated tickets against the originals. When the demo looks right, run the full transfer — with Delta migration to sweep up anything created or updated during the run, and Interval migration if you need to pause and resume across sessions.

What moves vs what you rebuild

This table is the heart of the migration. Roughly, ticket data travels; automation and presentation logic does not. The transfer columns reflect what Help Desk Migration documents moving into Gorgias.

The honest part: downtime and what does not port

Plan for a dual-running window, not an instant switch. Migration tools advertise "zero downtime" — and it's largely true, because the importer copies data while both systems keep running; your team doesn't lose access. The realistic disruption is the cutover you choose: the period where new tickets could arrive in either system, which you manage by pointing your inbound email and channels at Gorgias on a planned date and letting Delta migration catch the stragglers.

The bigger cost is rebuild, not downtime. Because Front's rules, shared drafts, message templates, and reporting history do not survive to Gorgias, everything that made your Front automation feel effortless has to be recreated. Your Front rules become Gorgias Rules and Flows — a re-authoring job, not a copy. Templates come back as Gorgias macros. Analytics baselines reset. And the importer itself has edges worth naming: tickets with roughly 30–40+ comments, attachments over 10MB, inline images, CC fields, and organizations are documented as needing custom handling or not transferring at all. Budget time to spot-check high-volume threads.

None of this is a reason to stay — the Shopify context is a real gain — but it is a reason to scope the project honestly rather than treating it as an overnight import.

Where Macha fits (whichever inbox you land on)

Here's the part worth saying plainly: the reason a migration feels painful is that the deterministic automation — rules, macros, templates — is exactly the layer that doesn't travel. That layer is also the one an AI agent is built to make less brittle.

Macha is an AI agent layer that sits on top of the help desk you already use — Front before your move, Gorgias after it — not a replacement for either. It does not compete with Gorgias's inbox; it adds reasoning on top of it. Rather than porting a hundred keyword rules, you connect Macha to Gorgias and let its agent read intent: it pulls the customer's real Shopify order through a custom tool that turns your commerce API into something the agent can call, then drafts or sends a grounded reply. If you're comfortable in code, the same reasoning works against your own endpoints — the Front API pattern carries over to any REST integration. Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution — because automation and reasoning genuinely cost different amounts, and it's honest to price them that way. The migration moves your history; the agent handles the next ticket.

FAQ

Does Gorgias have a native Front importer? No. Gorgias does not read Front data directly, so the practical route is a third-party migration tool such as Help Desk Migration, whose partner ClonePartner is Gorgias's approved migration partner. It connects to both platforms, maps fields, and moves records automatically.

Can I export my Front data myself? Not fully. Front requires you to contact its Support team to export account data, and you need company admin permissions. The self-serve-style export also excludes individual-inbox history, contact data, message templates, and tags — the importer reads contacts and tags via API instead.

What won't survive a Front to Gorgias migration? Front rules, shared drafts, message templates, and reporting history don't port and must be rebuilt (rules become Gorgias Rules and Flows; templates become Gorgias macros). The importer also flags tickets with ~30–40+ comments, attachments over 10MB, inline images, CC fields, and organizations as needing custom handling.

Is there downtime? Broadly no — the importer copies data while both systems stay live. The disruption you manage is the cutover date, when you repoint inbound channels to Gorgias and let Delta migration capture anything created during the transfer.

Can I add AI to Gorgias after migrating? Yes. Macha is an AI agent layer that runs on top of Gorgias (or Front) rather than replacing it. It reads a ticket, pulls real Shopify order context through a custom tool, and drafts or sends a grounded reply — useful precisely because your Front automation logic has to be rebuilt anyway.

Landing on Gorgias and want the automation to feel less like a rebuild? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your inbox in minutes.