How to Migrate from Gorgias to Zoho Desk

The two jobs hiding inside one migration

Everything in your Gorgias account is either a record or a piece of configuration, and knowing which is which decides your whole plan.

Records are the facts of your support history: tickets, the customers who opened them, the agents who handled them, and the help center articles you wrote. These are rows of data, and rows of data move. A migration reads them out of Gorgias and writes them into Zoho Desk, preserving the relationships between a customer, their orders' worth of tickets, and the replies on each.

Configuration is the logic that acted on those records — the Gorgias Rules that auto-tagged and routed tickets, the macros your agents fired to answer "where's my order," the views and stat dashboards. This is behaviour, not data, and Zoho Desk's automation grammar is different enough that even a "matching" rule has to be rebuilt by hand. There is no export file that turns a Gorgias Rule into a Zoho Desk workflow.

If you are still deciding whether the move is worth it, our primer on what Gorgias is is a useful gut-check on what you're leaving behind.

What moves vs what you rebuild

Here is the mapping that matters. The record side is drawn from Help Desk Migration's Gorgias data documentation — the most widely used third-party service for Gorgias transfers — and the target side from Zoho Desk's assisted data migration guide.

The record rows are the automated half. The bold rows — rules, macros, views, and stats — are the fresh-implementation half, and they are usually the larger effort. Treat that rebuild as an intentional redesign of your workflow inside Zoho Desk, not a line-for-line copy of a system you're leaving for a reason.

Field, agent, and KB mapping in practice

Field mapping is where an ecommerce migration earns its accuracy. Gorgias supports custom fields in several types — string, boolean, date, number, single- and multi-select — and each needs a corresponding Zoho Desk field before the run, or the values land nowhere. Zoho Desk's guide is strict about structure: child entity timestamps must be later than their parent's, so a comment can't predate its ticket, and if a parent entity fails to import, all its sub-entities are skipped — one malformed ticket row can silently drop its whole thread. Map deliberately and validate on the demo before you trust the full run.

Agent mapping reassigns each Gorgias agent to a Zoho Desk user. One ecommerce-specific gotcha: Zoho Desk only lets active agents be assigned to migrated records, so provision and activate your team in Zoho before importing, or historical tickets arrive unassigned.

Knowledge base mapping brings across help center articles and their categories, but the folder hierarchy and SEO metadata usually need tidying on the Zoho side. If you've built out an order-tracking or returns help center in Gorgias, plan an afternoon to re-nest categories and re-check slugs so search equity survives the move.

Native CSV import vs a paid migration tool

Zoho Desk's built-in path is assisted, CSV-based data migration: you hand its migration team CSV files following a required naming and field pattern (Agents_XX.csv, Tickets_XX.csv, and so on), and Zoho ingests Agents, Accounts, Contacts, Tickets, Threads, Ticket Comments, Products, and Tasks. It's the free route, and it's fine when your data is clean and your volumes are modest. The catch is on the export side: getting Gorgias data into well-formed CSVs — and honest about what's inside them — is the hard part.

Per Gorgias' export documentation, a CSV export handles up to 1 million tickets (anything beyond is truncated at the limit) and can take up to an hour per 100,000 tickets, up to 10 hours for a full million. More importantly, the export excludes internal notes, ticket events, Facebook wall posts, and Instagram media and ad messages — only public messages come out. When you include full message content, Gorgias caps it at the most recent 30 days of the selected period and 100,000 tickets, and the download link stays live for 14 days. For an ecommerce team with years of social-channel conversations, that's a real gap: your Instagram DMs and internal handoff notes don't come out through the native CSV path at all. (Our guide on how to export data from Gorgias covers the mechanics.)

A paid migration tool — Help Desk Migration is the one Gorgias itself lists — reads Gorgias through its API rather than the CSV export, so it can carry ticket comments with their author, privacy setting, attachments, and recordings, plus tags, custom fields, groups, and knowledge base articles, mapping them into Zoho Desk automatically. It also offers a free demo of 20 random tickets and 20 knowledge base articles so you can inspect field mapping before paying, and delta migration — a second pass that picks up records created or updated while the full migration ran, which is what makes a near-zero-downtime cutover possible. A fair rule of thumb: a few hundred contacts and no history worth keeping, native CSV is fine; years of threaded, multichannel tickets, a paid tool usually pays for itself in engineering time and in tickets that don't arrive mangled.

The downtime plan

Good news first: a modern migration is not a lights-out event. Because a paid tool reads from Gorgias' API and writes into Zoho Desk's, Gorgias keeps serving your storefront queue while records copy across, and delta migration catches anything created mid-run. There's no mandatory blackout.

The real risks are subtler, and they're worth sequencing around:

1. Provision Zoho Desk first. Create and activate your agents, set up custom fields to match your Gorgias schema, and build the KB category shells — because only active agents can be assigned and unmapped fields drop data.
2. Run the free demo and reconcile. Migrate the 20-ticket sample, then check that public replies, custom fields, and attachments landed where you expect. Fix mapping before the full run, not after.
3. Turn off Zoho automations before the full import. Just as with any migration, active workflows can wake up on imported historical tickets and email customers about a two-year-old order. Disable notifications and workflows first.
4. Run the full migration, then a delta pass. Let the bulk copy run against live Gorgias, then use delta migration to sweep up tickets created during it. Point your channels at Zoho Desk only once the delta is clean.
5. Re-enable automations one at a time. On the way back up, switch workflows and notifications on gradually so a misfiring rule hits one ticket, not ten thousand. Note Zoho keeps migration backups for 30 days and allows external-ID-based residual updates for about two weeks — but ticket creation times, external IDs, and thread data can't be edited after import, so get those right the first time.

That "one at a time" discipline on re-enable is what separates a calm cutover from an inbox full of angry replies to ghosts.

Where an AI layer fits — on whichever desk you land

Here's the reframe worth sitting with. The most laborious part of this move is rebuilding behaviour — the rules and macros that ran your Gorgias queue. If you're recreating that logic from scratch inside Zoho Desk anyway, it's the ideal moment to ask whether every rule needs to be a brittle deterministic automation, or whether some of that work belongs to an AI agent that reasons over the ticket instead — and it's worth weighing the build-versus-buy tradeoff before you commit.

That's the seam Macha fills. Macha is an AI agent layer that sits on top of the help desk you already run — it is not a help desk itself and not a Zoho Desk or Gorgias alternative. Whichever platform you land on, Macha reads and resolves the same tickets: drafting grounded replies from the knowledge base you migrated, triaging by intent so the right team gets the right ticket, and looking up order or shipping status through a custom tool that turns your Shopify or 3PL REST API into something the agent can call — the difference between porting your queue and actually automating it. Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution, so the meter reflects work done; the pricing page has the full breakdown.

The clean division: let a migration tool move your records, rebuild the deterministic workflows that genuinely must be rules, and let an agent take the reasoning-heavy work that used to eat your team's day.

FAQ

Does migrating from Gorgias to Zoho Desk move my Rules and macros? No. Rules, macros, views, and stat dashboards are configuration, not records — they don't transfer between platforms and must be rebuilt inside Zoho Desk. Only historical data (tickets, contacts, accounts, agents, tags, custom fields, and knowledge base articles) migrates.

What doesn't come out of Gorgias in a CSV export? Gorgias' CSV export excludes internal notes, ticket events, Facebook wall posts, and Instagram media and ad messages — only public messages are included. Full message content is also capped at the most recent 30 days and 100,000 tickets, so a paid tool using Gorgias' API is the better path for complete multichannel history.

Will the migration cause downtime for my store's support? Not inherently. A migration tool reads from Gorgias' API and writes to Zoho Desk while Gorgias keeps serving customers, and a delta pass catches records created mid-run. The bigger risk is Zoho automations firing on imported historical tickets — disable them before import and re-enable one at a time.

Can I do it for free with Zoho Desk's native import? Zoho Desk's assisted migration is CSV-based and free, and it's fine for clean contacts and modest volumes. But because Gorgias' CSV export drops notes and social messages and caps message content, teams with years of threaded, multichannel tickets usually use a paid tool that reads Gorgias' API instead.

Can I add AI to Zoho Desk after migrating without replacing it? Yes. An AI agent layer like Macha runs on top of your help desk rather than replacing it, resolving tickets with the knowledge base you brought across while the desk stays the system of record.

Rebuilding your automation from scratch after the move? Start a free trial of Macha and layer AI agents onto your help desk in minutes.