Gorgias Ticketing System Explained (The Complete Overview)

One ticket object, every channel

The core idea behind the Gorgias ticketing system is that there is only one ticket type. Per Gorgias' Handle incoming tickets documentation, "when a customer reaches out with a support inquiry, Gorgias creates a ticket and routes it to your team, regardless of which channel the request originated from." There is no separate inbox for email and another for chat — it is all one object, sitting in one queue.

The channels that feed that queue are:

• Email — the classic support channel, threaded into a ticket.
• Live chat — the on-site widget; each conversation becomes a ticket.
• Social — Facebook and Instagram comments and DMs.
• SMS — text conversations, including replies to shipping and marketing texts.
• Voice — phone calls, available through the Voice add-on rather than the base plan.

The payoff of this model is continuity. A customer can email on Monday, chat on Tuesday, and call on Friday, and — because Gorgias ties conversations to the customer — your rep sees the history in one place instead of three disconnected records. For an ecommerce team fielding WISMO ("where is my order"), returns, refunds, and subscription changes across half a dozen surfaces, that unified view is the whole point. If you want the wider tour of what the product is and who it's for, what is Gorgias sets the scene; this piece stays focused on the ticket itself.

The ticket lifecycle: open, closed, snoozed

Every ticket lives in one of three working statuses. As the Gorgias docs put it plainly, "a ticket can be in one of three statuses: open, closed, or snoozed." (Alongside these, the system also carries Spam and Trash views for tickets you've filtered out, which we'll come to.)

• Open means the ticket needs attention — it's live in someone's queue.
• Closed means it's resolved, or simply doesn't need a reply, and has been moved out of the working view.
• Snoozed means you've set it aside on purpose while you wait — on the customer, on a restock, on a supplier — and it will resurface later.

The transitions are where the model earns its keep. You close a ticket with the Close button in the ticket header, or by choosing Send & Close when you send a reply — and you can close at any point, with or without replying. Snooze lives in the header too, offering quick options from 1 hour up to 1 week, or a custom date, after which the ticket pops back to Open.

The behaviour worth internalising: if a customer replies to a closed ticket, Gorgias automatically reopens it. You never have to worry that a "resolved" refund thread will silently die when the customer writes back with one more question — the reply drags it back into the queue on its own.

Merging: keeping one issue in one thread

Ecommerce customers are prolific. The same shopper will email about a delayed order, then two hours later start a chat about the same delayed order because they forgot they'd emailed. Now you have two tickets for one problem. Merge fixes that.

Per Gorgias' Other ticket management features documentation, you merge from the three-dots icon in the ticket header, combining "tickets about the same issue from the same customer to keep the conversation flow easier." Merges can be done manually one at a time, and an admin can enable auto-merge so that qualifying tickets from the same customer are combined automatically without an agent lifting a finger.

That same three-dot menu is where the rest of the tidy-up tools live:

1. Mark as read/unread — a per-agent flag, so what you've reviewed is personal to you.
2. Show all events — the full chronological audit of the ticket (status changes, assignments, rule runs, merges), covering the last 12 months.
3. Mark as spam — moves the ticket to the Spam view; future replies from that customer won't ping you.
4. Move to trash — sends it to Trash, where it sits for 30 days before permanent deletion.
5. Print ticket — opens a printable version in a new tab.

How tickets get worked: rules, macros, and views

A status model is only half the story; the other half is how tickets move through it. Two native features do most of that work. Macros are saved actions — a templated reply that can also change status, add tags, and assign the ticket, all in one click — and they're the backbone of consistent, fast responses; we go deep on them in Gorgias macros explained. Rules are the automation engine that reacts to incoming tickets (tag a WISMO question, route a wholesale email to a specific agent, auto-close an order confirmation).

Layer on Views — saved, filtered slices of the queue like "unassigned chat" or "returns waiting on customer" — and the flat one-queue model becomes something a team of ten can actually work without stepping on each other. Live chat has its own considerations around availability and routing, covered in Gorgias chat explained.

Where the native ticket model stops

Give Gorgias its due: the ticketing core is excellent. One object per conversation, a clean three-status lifecycle, auto-reopen, and merge together solve the organisation problem better than most helpdesks that were never built for ecommerce. If your bottleneck is "our channels are scattered," Gorgias fixes it out of the box.

But notice the shape of what the ticket model does and doesn't do. It organises and routes conversations beautifully — it does not, by itself, answer them. A ticket sitting in the Open view is a well-labelled unit of work waiting for a human to read it, look up the order, and write the reply. The status is honest; the answer still isn't written.

Gorgias' own answer to that is the AI Agent, and it's a capable one — but it's worth being clear-eyed about how it's billed, because it changes the maths. Gorgias charges the AI Agent per resolution: roughly $1.00 per resolved conversation on Starter and $0.90 on other plans, with overages billed higher still, per breakdowns from myAskAI and Chatarmin. There's also a well-documented double-billing wrinkle: a clean AI resolution can count as both an AI charge and a helpdesk ticket unless a human touches it within 72 hours, per eesel's analysis. And several of the richest automations — Voice, and self-service order actions that lean on your Shopify connection — sit behind add-ons or specific setup, not the base ticket model. None of that makes the AI Agent bad; it makes it something to price carefully before you scale.

This is the seam where an AI agent layer fits — and it's worth understanding the wider AI agents for customer service category before you commit to any single approach. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Gorgias you already use through a live native connector — it does not replace Gorgias, your inbox, your macros, or your rules. You connect Macha to Gorgias, and it reads and writes the same tickets your team already works: drafting or sending grounded replies across channels, triaging by intent, and looking up live order or subscription status through a custom tool that turns your store's API into something the agent can actually call. The details of that hookup live in the Macha–Gorgias integration guide.

The honest contrast is in the billing model, and it's a real one. Gorgias' AI Agent is priced per resolution — an outcome. Macha's credits are consumed per AI action — each draft, each lookup, each reply — because automation and orchestration produce work whose value varies, and metering the action is more predictable than betting the bill on a "resolution" definition. Neither is universally cheaper; they're different philosophies, and you can see how Macha's shakes out on the pricing page. For a full teardown of Gorgias' own numbers, Gorgias pricing explained and Gorgias AI Agent explained go line by line.

The clean division of labour: keep Gorgias' ticketing as the system of record for what's open, closed, or snoozed and who owns it, and add an agent layer on top for the part the status model can't do — actually writing the answer fast enough that the ticket closes itself.

FAQ

How many ticket statuses does Gorgias have? Three working statuses: Open, Closed, and Snoozed. Open needs attention, Closed is resolved or needs no reply, and Snoozed is set aside until a time you choose. Beyond these, the system also has Spam and Trash views for tickets you've filtered out.

Does Gorgias create separate tickets for email, chat, and SMS? No — that's the core of the model. Email, chat, social (Facebook and Instagram), SMS, and phone (via the Voice add-on) all create the same kind of ticket in one unified queue, tied to the customer, so a rep sees one continuous history rather than three disconnected records.

What happens when a customer replies to a closed Gorgias ticket? Gorgias automatically reopens it. You can close a ticket at any time with or without a reply, and a later customer message pulls it back into the Open queue so nothing gets lost.

How do I merge tickets in Gorgias? Use the three-dots icon in the ticket header to merge tickets about the same issue from the same customer. Merges can be manual, or an admin can enable auto-merge so qualifying tickets combine automatically.

Can I add AI to Gorgias tickets without replacing Gorgias? Yes. An AI agent layer like Macha connects to Gorgias through a native connector and runs on top of your existing tickets, statuses, macros, and rules — it doesn't replace them. Note the billing difference: Gorgias' AI Agent charges per resolution, while Macha's credits are consumed per AI action.

Ready to put an answering layer on top of your Gorgias queue instead of just organising it? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Gorgias in minutes.