Gorgias Customer Sidebar & Shopify Order Widget Explained

What the customer sidebar actually shows

The right-hand rail on a Gorgias ticket is organized under Ticket details, and it has a few distinct blocks stacked down the page. At the top you'll usually find the ticket's tags and any custom fields your team has configured — things like Contact reason, Product, and Resolution — the structured metadata that turns a free-text conversation into something you can report on and route (we go deeper on the tagging side in Gorgias tags explained).

Below that sits the customer block: the contact's Customer Type, an internal Note field, their Email, and Phone. And beneath that, a small but genuinely useful piece of context — the ticket history line, which tells an agent at a glance whether they're looking at a brand-new contact ("This is Ava Thompson's first ticket") or someone who's written in before. That single line changes the tone of a reply. The full contact record — every past interaction, ticket status, and customer field — lives one click away in the customer profile, which we cover separately in Gorgias contacts and profiles explained.

The screenshot above is the real sidebar on a trial account — and it's honest about a gap. There's no Shopify order widget in it, because no store is connected on this demo. That widget is the headline feature for ecommerce teams, so it's worth being precise about what it adds and when it appears.

What the Shopify order widget adds when a store is connected

Connect a Shopify store — Gorgias is, first and foremost, a Shopify-native help desk — and the sidebar gains an order widget that renders the shopper's commerce context inline. Per Gorgias' Shopify integration docs, "when a customer contacts you, you'll see their profile and orders in the sidebar on the right-hand side of each ticket."

Concretely, the widget surfaces:

1. Order history — the customer's recent orders, with line items, totals, and status. Gorgias displays the 10 most recent orders in the sidebar, which is usually plenty for a WISMO reply and keeps the rail from becoming a wall of history.
2. Fulfillment and tracking — a timeline of order events (order shipped, in transit, delivered) synced directly from Shopify, so an agent answering "where's my order?" reads the tracking state without leaving the ticket.
3. Cart and connected-app data — the customer's current cart plus data from connected apps like Recharge, AfterShip, and Yotpo, so subscription and loyalty context sits next to the conversation.

The point of all of it is a single pane: the agent reads the question, glances right, and has the order in front of them — no tab-switching into the Shopify admin to answer a routine WISMO.

The Shopify actions an agent can take from the sidebar

The widget isn't read-only. Gorgias' Shopify Actions let an agent refund, cancel, duplicate, edit, or create a Shopify order directly from the sidebar — without ever opening Shopify.

The refund flow is the one worth understanding in detail, because Gorgias designed it defensively:

• Refund quantity defaults to 0 so nobody accidentally issues a full refund with a stray click, and shipping is auto-set to 0.
• You set the quantity, optionally add a custom refund amount, write a reason for your team's record, toggle whether to restock the items back into inventory, and choose whether to notify the customer.

Cancellations follow the same shape — set quantities to refund, specify a shipping refund, add a reason, restock, and notify. For a returns conversation, that means an agent can process "I want to send back one of the two mugs" as a partial refund with a restock, all inside the ticket.

Subscriptions show up here too. If you run recurring orders through Recharge, its widget displays a customer's subscriptions next to the ticket, and agents can cancel or reactivate a subscription or refund a charge — so a "please pause my monthly coffee subscription" request is a two-click job in the sidebar rather than a login to a second tool.

A quick decision table: sidebar vs Shopify admin

For teams weighing how much work to keep in Gorgias versus bouncing to Shopify, here's the honest split.

The pattern to copy isn't the exact list — it's the principle: keep the routine, high-volume actions in the sidebar where the conversation is, and reserve the Shopify admin for the edge cases the widget deliberately doesn't handle.

The honest limits — and where an AI layer picks up

The Shopify order widget is genuinely one of the best reasons ecommerce teams pick Gorgias: it puts commerce context and safe, scoped actions right where the reply happens. But it has real edges worth naming.

First, it's Shopify-gated by definition — the widget only appears once a store is connected, which is exactly why the screenshot above has no order block. On a fresh trial with no store, the sidebar is just tags, fields, and ticket history. Second, the sidebar shows the 10 most recent orders, so a long-tenured customer's older history isn't there. Third, refunds are limited to orders paid through a single payment gateway — a split-tender order won't refund from the sidebar and has to be handled in Shopify. And Gorgias' newer AI features that read this same context — its AI Agent (Automate) — are currently Shopify-only and add-on-gated, and Gorgias bills its resolution-based AI per automated resolution, so the more the AI does, the more each closed ticket costs.

More fundamentally, the widget shows the order and lets a human act on it — but it doesn't read the ticket, decide which action is right, and take it. An agent still has to look, judge, and click. That's the seam where an AI agent layer fits, and it's worth being clear-eyed about it before you reach for one.

This is where Macha comes in — not as a Gorgias replacement, but as the AI agent layer on top of the Gorgias you already use. The Macha↔Gorgias connector is live: Macha reads and writes the same tickets your agents do, so it can look at the same Shopify order context the sidebar surfaces and draft or send a grounded WISMO reply, a returns answer, or a subscription-status response before a human ever opens the ticket. Where the order data lives behind your own systems, a custom tool turns a REST API into something the agent can call and reason over — which is part of why Gorgias, for all its commerce depth, isn't really a CRM and benefits from a layer that can join the dots. You can compare how Gorgias' own AI Agent works alongside it. Importantly, Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution — an honest contrast with per-resolution AI billing — and there are no surprise per-ticket costs baked in (see the pricing breakdown).

The clean division of labour: let Gorgias' sidebar stay the source of truth for order context and safe agent actions, and layer an agent on top for the reasoning-and-answering the widget itself can't do.

FAQ

What does the Gorgias customer sidebar show? On any ticket, the right-hand Ticket details rail shows the ticket's tags and custom fields (like Contact reason, Product, Resolution), a customer block (Customer Type, Note, Email, Phone), and a ticket-history line telling you whether it's the contact's first ticket. With a connected Shopify store, it also shows a live order widget.

What does the Shopify order widget display? The customer's profile plus their latest orders (the sidebar shows the 10 most recent), a fulfillment/tracking timeline synced from Shopify, cart data, and connected-app data such as Recharge subscriptions and loyalty points — all without leaving the ticket.

Can agents issue refunds from the Gorgias sidebar? Yes. Gorgias' Shopify Actions let agents refund, cancel, duplicate, edit, or create an order from the sidebar. The refund modal defaults quantity to 0 and shipping to 0 as a safeguard, with restock and notify-customer toggles and a reason field. Note: it can only refund orders paid through a single payment gateway — split-tender orders must be refunded in Shopify.

Why doesn't my sidebar show a Shopify order widget? Because the order widget requires a connected Shopify store. On a trial or an account with no store integration, the sidebar shows only tags, fields, and ticket history — no order block appears until Shopify is connected.

Can I add AI to my Gorgias sidebar without replacing Gorgias? Yes. Macha connects to Gorgias as a native connector and runs on top of your existing help desk — it reads the same ticket and order context the sidebar surfaces and drafts or sends grounded replies, while Gorgias stays the system of record. Credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution.

Ready to let your agents act on order context instead of just staring at it? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Gorgias in minutes.