Basics
"Where is my order?": what an AI assistant should do with the most common question
Order status questions are a large share of every store's chat. An assistant without access to orders can't answer them, and one that guesses makes things worse. Three ways to handle them, from a clean hand-over to a live order lookup, and what each needs.
· 3 min read · Supa Brain
Ask any online store what its customers write about most, and “where is my order?” is at or near the top. It’s also the question where an AI assistant is most likely to be useless or, worse, confidently wrong. The answer isn’t on any page of the website. It’s in the order system, the warehouse and the carrier’s tracking.
There are three sensible ways to handle it. Which one fits depends on your volume and your platform.
Option 1. A clean hand-over
The assistant doesn’t look anything up. It recognises the question, collects what a person needs, and passes it on.
“I can’t see orders myself, but our team can. Could you give me your order number and the email you ordered with? I’ll pass it on now. We reply within four working hours, Monday to Friday.”
Needs: a hand-over rule, a mailbox someone reads, an honest reply time.
Good for: small stores with a handful of order questions a day.
Watch for: the assistant inventing a status (“your order is on its way and should arrive tomorrow”). This happens when the instructions push it to always answer. Add an explicit line: never state an order’s status, location or delivery date. We wrote more on designing the hand-over.
Option 2. Self-service links
Before handing over, the assistant points to what the customer can do alone:
- the order tracking page, if your store has one;
- the shipping confirmation email, which usually contains the carrier’s tracking link;
- your published delivery times, so the customer can see whether the order is actually late.
“You can track your order with the link in your shipping confirmation email, or on our order tracking page. Standard delivery takes 2 to 4 working days after dispatch. If it’s been longer, send me your order number and I’ll pass it to our team.”
Needs: a tracking page or reliable tracking emails, and clear delivery times on your delivery page.
Good for: most stores. Many “where is my order?” questions are from customers whose order isn’t late yet.
Watch for: delivery times on the assistant’s sources that don’t match what you actually ship. If the page says 2 to 4 days and the warehouse takes 5, the assistant will tell customers their order is late when it isn’t, or on time when it isn’t.
Option 3. A live order lookup
The assistant is connected to your order data. After the customer verifies themselves, it reads the order’s status and tracking and answers directly.
Helpdesks built for online stores offer this. Gorgias, for example, integrates with Shopify and lets its AI agent see order information,1 and Intercom lets Fin carry out multi-step tasks, such as looking up data in connected systems, which it sets up as Fin Tasks.2
Needs: a platform with order integration, a verification step (order number plus email, or a logged-in account), and someone to set up and maintain the connection.
Good for: stores with many order questions a day and a support team that spends hours on them.
Watch for: what the assistant says when the data is ambiguous. “Label created” isn’t “shipped”. “Delivered” with the customer saying it wasn’t is a hand-over, not an argument. Write those cases into the instructions.
Choosing
| Hand-over | Self-service links | Live lookup | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup effort | Minutes | An hour | Days |
| Answers the customer immediately | No | Partly | Yes |
| Risk of a wrong status | Low, if forbidden | Low | Medium, in edge cases |
| Good from | Any size | Any size | Dozens of order questions a day |
Most stores do well with option 2 plus a clean hand-over. Option 3 pays off when order questions take a real share of someone’s day.
Test it
Whatever you choose, ask your assistant:
- “Where is my order?” (no details)
- “My order 12345 hasn’t arrived, I ordered last Monday.”
- “It says delivered but I don’t have it.”
- “Can I change the address on my order?”
None of the answers should invent a status. Each should either give a correct self-service route or collect details and hand over. For a broader test set, see the pre-season checklist.
If you’d like the assistant and its hand-over rules set up on your store, that’s Assistant Setup.
Footnotes
-
Gorgias, “Shopify integration”, gorgias.com. ↩
-
Intercom Help, “How to set up Fin Tasks”, intercom.com/help. ↩