Solutions / Ecommerce & DTC

Shared inbox for ecommerce that survives the drop

Order questions, returns and where’s-my-order — owned, drafted and answered before the queue from one launch buries the next.

The short answer

A shared inbox for ecommerce puts every order question — WISMO, returns, exchanges, address changes — into one queue the whole store team works together. In inrelay, every message gets an owner, an intent tag and a drafted reply in your brand voice, and a human approves each send. Pricing is flat per account, never per seat.

Support email in a DTC store has a shape of its own. It isn’t steady — it spikes with every drop, every shipping delay, every BFCM weekend — and most of it is the same handful of questions wearing different order numbers. Where’s my order. Can I still change the address. How do returns work. Wrong size, can I swap.

The failure mode is just as specific: during the spike, two people answer the same customer twice while a genuinely urgent message — the address change with a two-hour window — sits unread under forty WISMO emails. A shared inbox for ecommerce exists to make the routine questions cheap and the urgent ones loud.

01 · The requirements

What ecommerce teams actually need

Strip away the vendor noise and a store’s support inbox has five requirements. If a tool misses one, the gap shows up on launch day.

  • One customer, one thread, one owner. When three people work the queue, “answered twice” and “answered never” are the same disease. Every conversation needs a visible owner and a warning when someone else is already typing.
  • Urgent surfaced above routine. An address change or a damaged-item photo has a deadline; a WISMO email mostly doesn’t. The queue has to tell them apart on its own, because nobody triages by hand mid-drop.
  • Brand voice at volume. DTC brands win on voice, and canned macros read like canned macros. Replies need to sound like the founder wrote them — even when the founder didn’t.
  • Self-serve for the repeats. Sizing, shipping windows, the returns policy — questions asked so often the answer should exist once, on your own domain, findable before the email is ever written.
  • Seasonal help without seat math. BFCM staffing means adding two people in November and removing them in January. Per-seat pricing punishes exactly that; a store needs a bill that ignores headcount.
02 · The fit

How inrelay meets each one.

Requirement by requirement — with the one honest gap named instead of hidden.

What your store needs
How inrelay meets it
One customer, one thread, one owner
Every email becomes a conversation with an assignee, internal notes beside the thread, and collision detection that shows when a teammate is viewing or replying — duplicate answers stop before they’re typed.
Urgent surfaced above routine
The agent reads each message and tags intent — WISMO, return, address change — and triage and routing puts deadline-shaped messages in front of the right person while routine ones queue with drafts waiting.
Brand voice at volume
On every plan, the AI agent drafts replies in your store’s voice, from your past replies and policies. Nothing sends until a human approves it — speed without handing your brand to autopilot.
Self-serve for the repeats
A knowledge base on your own domain holds sizing, shipping and returns answers once; the live chat widget surfaces them on-site before a ticket exists, and a CSAT survey tells you how the answers land.
Seasonal help without seat math
Flat per-account pricing — Solo at $19 a month with a free tier, Team at $79 flat — and teammates are never priced: November hires cost $0 in software. Volume is never metered; the only number is the agent’s reply budget, which you set. Flat, even in Q4.
Order details beside the thread
The honest one: a native Shopify integration is in development, not shipped. Today the thread history and notes carry order context the customer gives you; the integration will put it there automatically when it lands.
03 · A launch day

One drop, end to end

What a launch morning looks like when the queue works itself while your team approves instead of composes.

The drop goes live, the queue fills

Order confirmations bounce questions back within the hour: a wave of where’s-my-order, a few size swaps, one “I used the wrong address”. As each lands, the agent reads it and tags the intent.

Routing sorts urgent from routine

The address change is flagged and routed to whoever owns fulfillment, with the shipping cutoff still open. The WISMO wave routes to the teammate on queue duty, each email already holding a draft in your voice.

The team approves, not composes

Queue duty becomes reading drafts, tweaking a line, pressing send. Collision detection keeps the founder from re-answering a thread that’s already being handled; notes hold the “check with the 3PL” conversation privately, next to the customer’s.

Tomorrow starts with a brief

The morning brief lists what was handled and the few conversations that genuinely need a human decision — a refund exception, a repeat complaint — instead of an unread count.

04 · Integrations

Integrations that matter here, stated honestly

Most tools in this category greet you with a logo wall. Here is the real list — what connects today, and what is in development and clearly marked as such.

  • Email — live. Gmail, Outlook or any IMAP mailbox behind your support@, connected once, whatever platform your store runs on.
  • Live chat — live. The chat widget drops onto any storefront — Shopify themes included — with browse-help built in.
  • Knowledge base — live. Help articles on your own custom domain, so the returns policy lives at help.yourstore.com, not ours.
  • Shopify integration — in development. Order context and order actions beside the thread are on the roadmap, not shipped. We won’t list it as live until it is.
  • Social commerce channels — in development. Instagram DM and TikTok Shop messages in the same queue are shipping soon; the changelog announces each launch.

If your store sells through social more than through a site, the creators & social sellers page covers that shape of the same problem — and the solutions index lists every vertical.

Start today

Ready before the next drop.

Connect your support@ in minutes — flat per account, teammates never priced, no card to start.

Ecommerce questions.

Does inrelay integrate with Shopify?
Not yet, and we won’t pretend otherwise. A native integration — order context and actions beside each thread — is in development. Today, email, live chat and the knowledge base work with any storefront, Shopify included, because none of them depend on the platform.
Can it handle BFCM volume?
Yes — and the bill doesn’t notice. Volume is never metered on inrelay’s flat plans: a customer message is never dropped, and there is no overage fee. The only number is the AI agent’s monthly reply budget, which you set and can see; if it runs out mid-spike, the agent pauses drafting and the inbox keeps working. Flat, even in Q4. Details on the pricing page.
Will the AI answer WISMO emails by itself?
No. The agent tags the intent and writes the draft; a human approves every send. That gate is deliberate — a wrong tracking answer costs more than the thirty seconds an approval takes. The approve-before-send page spells out exactly what the AI never does alone.
What does it cost for a store with a seasonal team?
Flat per account: $19 a month for Solo (with a free-forever tier), $79 flat for Team — and teammates are never priced, so your November hires and January goodbyes never touch the bill. No per-resolution fees. Ever. You set your AI budget; nothing else is metered.

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