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.
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.
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.
How inrelay meets each one.
Requirement by requirement - including what isn’t built yet.
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.
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.
- 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.
Ready before the next drop.
Connect your support@ in minutes - flat per account, teammates never priced, no card to start.