How I Built an AI Customer Support Chatbot for Shopify That Resolved 80% of Tickets

#webdev #ai #shopify #javascript

My client was drowning in support tickets. Same questions, every single day.

Their team was spending 20+ hours a week just answering repetitive queries. That's when they came to me — and I built them an AI chatbot that changed everything.

The Problem
The store was getting ~150 support messages per week. 80% of them were the same 10 questions. This was slow, expensive, and burning out the team.

The Stack
OpenAI API (GPT-4)
Node.js + Express.js
Shopify REST API
n8n (workflow automation)
The Results
Metric Before After
Tickets resolved without human 20% 80%+
Avg response time 4 hours instant
Monthly support cost $1,200 ~$200
What I Learned
Context is everything. A chatbot that pulls live data is 10x more useful than one answering from static text.

Always build an escape hatch. The escalation flow made the client trust the system.

Prompt engineering matters more than model size.