For Shopify brands, €5M to €20M GMV

See what's broken before you spend on AI.

A two-week, €2,500 audit of your support inbox. Founder-delivered, 200 to 500 tickets sampled, a written 90-day plan you keep whether you engage further or not. If we can't see a path to 30 percent deflection at acceptable CSAT, we tell you that too.

Ten business days from kickoff to deliverable. Credits against setup if you proceed within 30 days.

That chat bubble is a live Eltrus agent, the real product, not a contact form. Ask it anything about the audit.

The numbers we aim to move

Targets, drawn from published bands and our own modelling.

Targets, not promises. The cost-side numbers sit inside the published deflection band for native helpdesk AI; the revenue-side ones are modelled on a brand ready for Tier 2. The audit produces your real numbers, on your shop.

Cost side, Tier 1

Lower volume, faster replies, CSAT held.

Tier-one ticket volume handled by AI
30 to 50%
First response on AI-handled tickets
under 5 min
Typical baseline first response
12 to 36 h
CSAT target on AI conversations
4.5+ / 5

The realistic published deflection band for native Gorgias AI is 26 to 56 percent. We target the upper half of that range, not above it.

Revenue side, Tier 2

Recovered revenue, illustrative on a €5M apparel brand.

5% reduction in returns
~€50k / yr
10% of refunds converted to exchange
~€25 to 40k / yr
Subscription save at 30% save rate
~€60k / yr
Cart recovery, conversational
~€60 to 85k / yr

Conservative total: €100 to 150k per year on a brand that size. Real numbers come out of the audit on your shop, not a generic spreadsheet.

What an audit keeps finding

The support gaps that cost you orders are the ones you cannot see from the inside.

We tested the public support surface of 52 UK, Irish, and EU Shopify brands exactly the way we would test yours: a logged-out shopper, a real browser, the three questions your customers actually ask. The same few gaps came up again and again, and each one quietly loses orders and goodwill. This is what we keep finding, and roughly what it costs.

52 stores tested the way yours gets tested in the audit.
37 chats asked your customers' three questions. Most failed one.
24/37 left a shopper with no working chat at all.
15/37 pay for a helpdesk their customers never see.
29/52 where "where is my order" leads the bad reviews.
0/37 answered "where's my order" without making them wait.

What that costs you

A brand doing 4,000 orders a month is sitting on 150 to 250 "where is my order" messages a week, every one of them waiting. That is inbox hours, slower replies where a human is actually needed, and a quiet drag on repeat purchase. The audit puts your real number on it.

Every number above is counted from our own research, gathered May to June 2026 from public storefronts only, nothing accessed beyond what any shopper sees. The ticket data behind each storefront stays with the brand. The cost estimates here are industry norms and our modelling, not numbers from a client deployment. The audit replaces them with yours.

Tuned inside the helpdesk you already use

Why hire us

Three paths to the same inbox.

01 The DIY path

Do it yourself.

Six weekends of your ops lead's attention, then it drifts the moment they get busy. The retainer is someone whose only job is keeping it tuned.

02 The vendor path

The vendor's onboarding team.

Good at selling their own tool, gone once you are live. We tune what you already run, and stay long enough for it to compound.

03 The Eltrus path

Eltrus.

We report verified-resolution and seven-day re-contact, the numbers that tell you whether deflection is real or the tickets just came back through another door. In writing.

What the probes actually found

Five shapes we kept meeting.

Real findings, brand names withheld. These are not hypotheticals. Each was watched loading in a real browser and written down verbatim.

The ghost helpdesk

The full Gorgias chat scaffold sat in the theme. The widget never fired. The shopper met a contact form. We saw this exact shape in 15 of 37 brands: a paid subscription doing nothing the customer can see.

Offline at 10:30 on a Wednesday

A skincare widget, offline evening and mid-morning both. "Is this safe in pregnancy?" got a form, not an answer. The contact page calls chat "the quickest way to reach us."

"Live Chat" that means tomorrow

A gifting brand headed a section "Live Chat." Beneath it: "out of office hours we will get back to you the following working day." No widget ever loaded. On a deadline gift, that is a 24-hour wait.

The bot that read a question as a name

We typed "Where is my order? It hasn't arrived." It replied "Have you placed an order with us, Guest?", took the question as the name, and forced a dropdown. Zero understanding, on the most time-sensitive question there is.

Escalates on its own advertised feature

A capable AI agent listed "Do you ship worldwide?" as a quick reply. We asked about shipping. It said "I'll pass this to the right team" and escalated. Ten shipping articles in the help centre, all ignored.

A full worked example

The same method, run end to end on one real named brand.

We published a complete public-surface audit of OMNES, a UK womenswear brand (2.9 stars across 648 Trustpilot reviews at the time of the audit). Stack fingerprint, ticket-mix inference, deflection bands, a modelled cost of the gaps, every functional claim verified in a real browser. We have not been retained by OMNES and have never seen one of their tickets. It is the closest thing to "here is exactly what you get" that we can show before a first client.

Read the OMNES sample audit
For the technically inclined

How an engagement actually runs.

Three phases. You can stop after any of them.

  1. Audit, ten business days

    A pseudonymised sample of 200 to 500 recent tickets, categorised by flow. You get a written report and a walkthrough call. If the inbox isn't worth deflecting, we tell you.

    • Sample categorised by flow, with confidence bands
    • Deflection opportunity per category
    • Refund leakage and exchange opportunity in euro
    • Five-flow implementation priority order
  2. Deploy, fourteen business days

    Knowledge base authored on your top five flows. The helpdesk's AI configured on those flows with confidence-based escalation. A small integration layer covers the Shopify-specific work the native AI doesn't handle (older order lookup, subscription mutations, 3PL reconciliation). The agent replies in your customer's language by default, auto-detected across EN, FR, DE, ES, IT, and others. First week monitored daily.

    • 30 to 40 KB articles authored in your voice
    • Confidence-based escalation rules
    • Integration layer for Shopify-specific edge cases
    • Multi-language by default, auto-detect across EN, FR, DE, ES, IT and others
    • Baseline KPI measurement on the prior 30 days
  3. Operate, ongoing

    Weekly tuning on every escalated ticket. KB maintenance as your catalogue and policies change. Monthly review call. Quarterly macro audit. Three-month rolling term, then 30 days notice.

    • Weekly report: deflection, response time, € recovered, hours saved
    • Tuning on every escalated ticket the prior week
    • Slack channel with one-business-day response
    • KB and macros exportable at any time, no platform lock-in
Engagements

Three ways to work together.

Every engagement starts with the audit. If you proceed within 30 days, the audit fee credits against setup.

A clear picture of what's broken.

Tier 0 · Audit
€2,500 one time, 10 business days

A PDF and a spreadsheet of what's wrong in your current support setup and what to fix, in priority order. No code, no platform access beyond read-only.

  • 200 to 500 ticket sample under DPA
  • Deflection opportunity quantified per flow
  • Refund leakage modelled in euro
  • Walkthrough call when you've read it
  • Credits against Tier 1 or Tier 2 within 30 days
Book the audit

The revenue your inbox is losing.

Tier 2 · Multi-channel + revenue recovery
€15k+ setup
+ €5 to 7.5k / month

Everything in Tier 1, plus refund-to-exchange, subscription save, abandoned cart conversational, and pre-purchase product Q&A. For brands above €15M GMV with active subscription or returns volume.

  • Helpdesk plus social DM and email coverage
  • Refund-to-exchange and subscription-save flows
  • Pre-purchase Q&A on product detail pages
  • Quarterly macro and policy audit
  • Six-month rolling, 45-day notice to exit
Talk about Tier 2

Fees in euro, exclusive of VAT. Helpdesk subscription and AI API spend stay on your account; we invoice our fees only.

What gets handled

Three flows do most of the work.

Most Shopify support inboxes resolve to three or four repeating shapes. We find yours, write the responses, configure the routing, and stay on it.

01

Where is my order

Order status, shipping delays, tracking lookups, address changes inside the cancellation window. Boring, repeatable, exactly what AI is for.

Typical share of volume
28 to 42%
Deflection target
75%+
02

Returns and refunds

Return windows, refund timing, exchange offers. A well-placed exchange option recovers revenue that would otherwise leave the brand.

Typical share of volume
18 to 28%
Recoverable revenue
€8 to €12k / month
03

Subscription and billing

Pause, swap product, change cadence, update card. Routine subscription work, resolved before it reaches a human agent.

Typical share of volume
10 to 22%
Save rate uplift
+15 to 30%

Typical ranges from published industry data and our 52-brand public-surface research. The audit produces your actual numbers.

Procurement

What buyers ask before signing.

Granting access to a support inbox is the highest-trust moment in this engagement, so we scope it tightly and say exactly what we do with what we read.

  • Read-only first. Access starts as a read-only helpdesk seat for baseline measurement. Write access is granted only after you have seen the plan and approved it in writing.
  • No training on your data. Customer content is never used to train any foundation model. API modes are set to opt out of training, with Zero Data Retention requested where your risk profile warrants it.
  • Encryption and scoped credentials. TLS in transit, encrypted operational storage, helpdesk credentials held in a per-client zero-knowledge vault and revoked within two business days of exit.
  • Human approval and a real off-switch. The agent runs draft-only or behind a confidence threshold until you trust it. Anything touching a refund, cancellation, or special-category data escalates to a human. You can pause it yourself, in your helpdesk, without raising a ticket with us.
  • You own the work and can leave. Payment data stays in your Stripe. KB articles and macros are yours, export to markdown on request, with a 30-day deletion timeline on exit. No Eltrus platform to get locked into.

All of it sits under a GDPR Article 28 DPA with a named sub-processor list and a written AI Governance Schedule covering refund authority and policy gating.

Full trust and security page

Eoghan Collins, founder of Eltrus, presenting at an Enterprise Ireland event
Who runs this

Eoghan Collins.

Eltrus is an Irish Ltd run by one engineer. The reason a one-person shop can credibly ship this: a surgical-practice CRM live in production in Galway, a digital twin of the Irish power grid that reached EirGrid's CleanerGrid final, photonics research at Tyndall, and StudySmith, a full study platform built and launched solo from backend to billing. The hard part here is not the model. It is someone who will sample the tickets, write the knowledge base in your voice, and own the result.

You talk to the person who configures your AI and writes your KB articles, not an account manager. If you are unavailable, what happens to my support? Answered plainly under single-operator continuity on the trust page.

About Eoghan

Start with the audit, or have a call first.

Book the €2,500 diagnostic, or take a 30-minute call to check the fit.