You know the email before you open it.
"Hi, I ordered 3 days ago and haven't received anything. Order #4821. When will it arrive?"
You check Shopify. Find the order. Copy the tracking number. Write a polite response. Hit send.
Five minutes gone. Forty-nine more to go.
The WISMO Problem
WISMO — "Where Is My Order" — accounts for 40-70% of all e-commerce support emails. If you're doing 50 support emails a day, that's 20-35 identical interactions:
- Customer asks where their order is
- You look it up
- You paste tracking info
- You send a friendly reply
- Repeat
At 5 minutes each, that's 2-3 hours daily on copy-paste work.
You didn't start a store to become a full-time tracking number lookup service.
The Usual "Solutions"
Hire a VA
$500-1500/month. Works, but now you're managing someone. And they still take 3-5 minutes per email.
Help desk software (Gorgias, Zendesk, etc.)
$60-300+/month. Organizes your emails. Doesn't answer them.
Self-service tracking page
Helps, but customers still email. They want reassurance, not a portal.
Canned responses
Faster, but still manual. You're copying tracking numbers into templates all day.
None of these solve the core problem: someone still has to do the lookup.
What Actually Works
The only real solution is automation that:
- Reads the incoming email
- Identifies it as an order status question
- Finds the order in Shopify automatically
- Pulls the real tracking data
- Drafts a personalized response
- Sends it (or lets you approve first)
No lookup. No copy-paste. No 5 minutes per email.
This is what we're building at Waveloom.