Where-is-my-order, returns and refunds, handled

Plans depend on hours, desks and coverage. Get a staffing plan within 1 business day. For a reference point, 2026 cost guides put managed offshore support staff at $7 to $15 an hour, about $640 to $2,400 a month full time, and $350 to $1,300 a month for a 20-hour part-time desk (Wishup, Cherry Assistant, VantaStaff). AssistBPO prices per agent for a block of hours, so ticket spikes during a sale do not change the invoice.

Within the limits you set. Most stores give the agent a per-order refund ceiling, a list of situations that qualify automatically, such as lost-in-transit after a set number of days, and a rule for everything else to be approved by you. Actions are taken in your Shopify or WooCommerce admin under the agent's own staff account, so every refund shows who issued it and why, and the totals appear in the weekly review.

Yes. Buyer messages on Amazon, eBay and Etsy are answered within each platform's response window, return requests are handled under the marketplace policy rather than your own store policy where the two differ, and A-to-z or Item Not Received cases are answered with the tracking evidence attached. The agent works through Seller Central or the marketplace inbox with a permission-limited user you create.

We plan it in the weekly reviews from early autumn. You give us the promotion calendar and last year's volumes, we add surge agents trained on your policies under the same team lead, extend hours across the weekend where needed and keep the core agent as the point of continuity. January returns are treated as a second peak. Surge agents roll off once the backlog is back to normal.

Gorgias, Zendesk, Shopify Inbox, Help Scout, Freshdesk and Re:amaze on the help desk side; Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Magento for the store admin; Recharge and similar apps for subscriptions; Amazon Seller Central, eBay and Etsy for marketplaces. Carrier portals and ShipStation or similar are used for tracking and claims. All access is through seats you control, and nothing is exported from your admin.

The agent completes product training from your catalog, FAQs and past tickets before going live, and keeps a shared knowledge sheet of sizing, materials, compatibility and common questions that you can correct any time. Anything not covered is escalated rather than guessed. Product questions that keep coming back are reported weekly so you can fix the listing or the FAQ.

That is the point of the weekly review. The agent tags every ticket by driver, so you see how many contacts come from a specific carrier, a confusing size chart, a checkout bug or a product page that overpromises. Fixing the top two drivers usually removes a meaningful slice of the queue, and the report shows the before-and-after count for each fix.

Yes. A trained backup covers leave and sick days and already knows your policies, and the team lead can step in for short gaps. Because agents are employees of the group rather than freelancers, cover is planned and the same core person returns after leave, so customers do not notice a change in how their orders, returns and refunds are handled.

For part of it, and those rules are worth switching on either way. An auto-reply carrying the tracking link will close a slice of your where-is-my-order tickets before anyone reads them. What automation does not do is decide whether a parcel that has stopped moving is a carrier claim or a reshipment, answer an A-to-z case with the tracking evidence attached, or hear the tone of a customer on their second failed delivery. The agent takes the exceptions and keeps the macros current as policies change.

You can, though the stores that come through peak best start in early autumn, so the agent knows the catalog before the volume arrives. The plan is month to month with thirty days notice, surge agents are added against your promotion calendar and roll off when the backlog clears, and January returns are treated as a second peak rather than as the end of the season. If you do run it for one quarter, keep the weekly review: the ticket driver report is what makes next Q4 cheaper.

Read access to tracking, and enough of the store admin to act on what it says. In practice that is a staff account in Shopify or WooCommerce with a refund ceiling set on it, a seat in Gorgias, Zendesk or Shopify Inbox, the carrier portals or ShipStation for tracking and claims, and permission-limited users in Seller Central, eBay or Etsy. From your side we need cutoff times, which SKUs are slow moving, and who to ask when a parcel is sitting in the warehouse.