Gorgias Virtual Assistant: a VA who knows a Macro from a Rule

Nobody searches “gorgias virtual assistant” at 2pm on a quiet Tuesday. You search it at 10:40pm, after you’ve closed the laptop, opened it again to check the unassigned View one more time, and watched the queue refill while you were clearing it. Gorgias is good software. The queue is still a queue, and right now the agent is you.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Gorgias

Start of the Australian business day, because that’s the entire point: first response on the hours your customers are actually awake, not whenever a night-shift somewhere gets to it. The unassigned View gets worked oldest-first. WISMO, which will be a third to half of everything if your store is typical, gets answered properly: order open in the Shopify sidebar, tracking checked against AusPost or your courier before replying, because “your order is on its way” is a lie if the parcel has been sitting in a Chullora facility for six days. The reply says where it actually is and when to expect movement.

Refunds and replacements happen inside the ticket. The Shopify sidebar lets your VA refund with the restock toggle and a reason logged, cancel, duplicate an order to send a replacement, or fix a shipping address from the Edit button on the order widget, all without opening Shopify admin, all within a written policy with a dollar threshold above which it escalates to you.

Socials get worked like email: Facebook and Instagram comments, DMs and story mentions land as tickets, so the public comment under your ad gets answered fast, where everyone can see it was.

Then the quiet work that compounds. Macros kept current with live Shopify variables so order status and tracking fill themselves in. One detail only a real Gorgias user knows: when the data is missing, the variable renders as a blank space, not an error, so a WISMO Macro fired on an unfulfilled order sends a sentence with a hole in it. Your VA checks fulfilment first, and prunes the library monthly. Rules built on Gorgias’s intent and sentiment detection do the tagging and routing, and then get QA’d weekly, a hand-checked sample of auto-tagged tickets, because a Rule that mis-tags returns as order-status quietly poisons every report downstream.

Weekly: the SLA report under Statistics > Support Performance, against the first-response and resolution goals you set per channel, plus a ticket-driver report by tag. That second one is where the leverage is. If sizing questions are 14% of volume, the fix isn’t a faster Macro, it’s a size guide on the product page, and your VA is the only person positioned to notice.

The honest bit

Gorgias bills by the ticket, not the seat, which is genuinely pleasant: your VA’s login costs nothing. (One asterisk: the entry-level Starter plan caps you at 3 seats; Basic and up give you 500, which is unlimited for any store busy enough to need a VA.) But every conversation a human, a Rule or AI Agent replies to becomes a billable ticket, at roughly 36-40 US cents over your plan’s allowance. An over-keen auto-reply Rule isn’t engagement, it’s a per-send fee. Part of your VA’s Rule QA is making sure you’re not paying for replies nobody needed.

And the Edit order action, the items-and-quantities one, has limits: nothing archived, nothing over 60 days old, nothing in a different currency to your store’s. Those fixes happen in Shopify admin itself, which is why a Gorgias VA without Shopify skills is half a VA. Ours come from the same bench as our Shopify VAs, and most placements end up covering the wider inbox too.

What stays with you

The refund policy itself, every dollar threshold in it, discount authority, chargebacks and anything that smells legal, 3PL and supplier escalation calls, and any Rule that touches money, which the VA drafts and you approve before it goes live. Permissions enforce the split: a Lite agent can’t perform Shopify actions at all, and Macro and Rule management needs Lead agent. The walls are Gorgias’s, we just use them.

What it costs and where to start

Admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, typically 15-20 hours a week. Placement takes 7-10 business days with 5-7 days supervised in your helpdesk before solo work, a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. The wider picture is on the ecommerce industry page, and the VA cost guide has full pricing. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn, who has placed 48+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024. Bring your SLA report and last month’s ticket count. She’ll tell you straight whether you need a VA, AI Agent, or both.