Get through BFCM with the team you have.
A ranked plan: what to prevent, what to automate, what to make faster to resolve. Built from how your orders, shipping, returns, and support questions actually get handled.
BFCM is the week your best-case forecast comes true.
Most operations are sized for an average week. When the forecast lands, every gap you already have lands with it.
- +51%
- more pre-purchase questions a day during BFCM than in the fall
- Gorgias Ecom Lab, BFCM 2025 window
- 1 in 5
- orders already becomes a ticket before the spike
- Gorgias Ecom Lab, March 2026 — apparel 22 and beauty 21 per 100 orders, at $10M GMV
- 8.8 hours
- median first response before peak, 10 hours after an AI handoff to a human
- Gorgias Ecom Lab, March 2026 and Oct 2025 to Apr 2026 — apparel at $10M GMV
- 53%
- of pre-purchase questions arrive outside business hours, where the median first response is 15 hours
- Gorgias Ecom Lab, July 2026
The rush shows up in your inbox.
Then in your DMs, in your approvals, and in your evenings. You can't hire your way out of it. You've probably already tried.
The queue is at a record high and keeps rising
More volume, slower replies. The people who waited message again. Now it's two tickets for one problem, and two of your team on the same case.
Everything needs your approval
A discount that didn't apply. A refund over the limit. You made the rules but never wrote them down. Your team can't sign off on exceptions, so they land with you.
The new hires aren't up to speed
Ramp takes weeks. Every question goes to your best person, whose own queue stops moving. You added headcount and got less capacity than you planned for.
You feel out of control and the team can tell
The dashboard shows symptoms you already know about, not what's causing them. When someone asks what's going wrong, you're guessing.
What waiting costs
Orders that don't come back
A fifth of shipping-and-returns questions during BFCM become orders when they're answered on the spot. Handled by a person, 61% wait over two hours. The carts don't.
Gorgias Ecom Lab, BFCM 2025 window
The complaints you never see
Only one in five unhappy customers posts it somewhere you can see. After a poor online retail experience, 40% cut their spending and 14% stop altogether.
Qualtrics XM Institute, 20,001 consumers across 14 countries, 2025. Industry figures from 28,400 consumers across 26 countries, 2023.
Three ways to get capacity back, in that order.
We start at the top for every recurring issue, and only move down when the step above can't hold.
Stop the question
The cheapest ticket is the one nobody sends.
- Help articles that answer the question before it's asked.
- Fix the missing size chart, material, or shipping cutoff on the product page.
- Proactive notifications when an order ships, slips, or arrives.
Resolve it without a person
Switch on what your help desk and Shopify already do, and build only where they stop. Everything you build, you maintain through peak.
- Native automations in your help desk, Shopify Flow, or Sidekick.
- Self-serve tracking and returns on Shopify's order status page and customer accounts.
- An AI agent fed the same facts, for the questions it can safely resolve.
Get to the solution faster
Put the facts in one place and the process on one path, so a case reaches its solution in minutes, not a day.
- Redesign the process and the SOP, so a case has one owner and one path.
- Bring the context the resolver needs into the ticket, not five tabs away.
- Find where a case sits on someone, and change who does what, in what order.
How the audit works
Three sessions with you, and the plan in your hands with weeks to act on it.
What we read
Customer conversations are the minimum, with the ticket data behind them. Your team's Slack channels add a lot. System logs and read access to your tools add more. We work with what you're comfortable sharing; the plan's depth scales with it.
What we work out
Which questions keep coming back, what actually has to happen to resolve each one, where the answer comes from, and how many hours a week it eats. Halfway through, you review the shortlist with us.
What you do with it
At the readout we walk you through the plan. What you take on, and with whom, is your call: your team, another provider, or us.
What you get
Know what to fix before the rush, and what to leave alone.
Everything is yours to keep. If the answer is “nothing yet”, you get the same write-up: why, what to watch, and what would change it.
The ranked plan
Every recurring issue with its route, its effort, the hours a week it gives back, and whether it's safe before peak or better left for January.
One thing to do first
The one change we'd make first, checked with the people who own that process, and up to two alternatives beside it.
The write-up
Recommendation, alternatives, trade-offs, risks, next step. Short enough to forward.
The evidence
The patterns, the resolution paths, and the assumptions behind them.
What's in scope, and what isn't
Scope, price, and data handling are agreed before you pay. Nothing changes halfway through.
- Who it's for
- Your store runs on Shopify, your team answers customers in a help desk, and orders, shipping, and returns live across several tools. Category matters less.
- Duration
- Two weeks from kickoff, once the data is accessible and the process owners are booked.
- Price
- $2,000 USD, fixed, paid upfront.
- Evidence
- Up to 5,000 conversations from up to 90 days of help desk history, plus whatever else you share.
- Your time
- Kickoff, shortlist review, readout. Two to three hours in total.
- Process owners
- Up to two, one short conversation each. Not employee research, not performance assessment.
- Data handling
- We agree the minimum data, how we access it, and when we delete working copies.
- Not included
- Implementation, full SOPs, build specs, ongoing reporting, and guaranteed results of any kind.
Before this was a service, it was my job.
I owned the customer-operations stack at Optimalprint and Gelato, a DTC print brand and the print-on-demand platform fulfilling for 27,000 merchants. My work carried a 50+ team through three BFCM peaks.
- +67%
- relative increase in automated resolution rate
- +12 p.p.
- of that gain from “where is my order?” questions
Most teams automate the inbox first. Most of the hours go into getting to the answer, not delivering it.
Founder @ Typenode
The WISMO flow that automated 80% of order-status questions, start to finish.
Get the case studyQuestions teams ask before sharing support data.
The fit call covers the challenge, the deadline, the data path, and whether we're the right people for it, before either side commits.
Bring the peak-season worry, the deadline, and the data you can share.
If it isn't a fit, you still leave with a clearer picture of where your operation loses time.