Case Study
WISMO, reships, refunds, product care — a DTC home goods brand doing ~800 orders/month cut support tickets from 65/week to 22 and reclaimed 11 hours of ops time. No hiring, no stack changes, no theme edits.
Arcadia Home is a DTC home goods brand selling candles, ceramics, and textiles through Shopify. With ~800 orders per month and a 2-person team (founder + one ops hire), every hour counts.
Their support inbox told the same story every week: 47 of their ~65 weekly support tickets were shipping questions. "Where's my order?" "My tracking hasn't updated." "It says delivered but I don't have it." Each one took 3-5 minutes: look up the order, copy the tracking info, write a personalised response, close the ticket.
That's roughly 15 hours per week — nearly half of their ops hire's time — spent answering questions that Shopify already knew the answer to.
"I was paying someone $25/hour to copy and paste tracking numbers into emails. It was the most expensive data entry operation I'd ever run."
They installed Steadio — a 5-minute process, no theme editing, no developer needed. The widget went live on their storefront immediately, pulling data from their existing Shopify orders.
Day 1: Customers started getting instant answers to "where's my order?" The widget pulls live tracking data from Shopify and responds in seconds. No ticket created. No human involved.
Day 3: Steadio flagged a FedEx package that hadn't been scanned in 4 days — before the customer noticed. It scored it severity 87, auto-sent a proactive apology in the brand's voice, and queued a reship recommendation. The ops person approved it in one tap. Steadio created a draft order in Shopify with the same items and address, marked it paid, and it showed up in their Shopify Admin tagged "steadio-reship." Their fulfilment team picked it up like any other order. Total time: 15 seconds.
Day 5: A customer's package arrived damaged. The widget caught it when the customer messaged at 11 PM. The AI had the full conversation, assessed the damage, and recommended a refund under $25 — which executed automatically via Shopify's refund API. Customer notified. No ticket. No human involved. The whole interaction showed up in the audit trail the next morning.
Day 7: Their weekly ticket count dropped from 65 to 22. The 43 tickets that disappeared were a mix: WISMO answered by the widget, low-severity exceptions auto-resolved on autopilot, and product care questions ("how do I clean this?") handled by the AI using their product data.
| Metric | Before | After Steadio |
|---|---|---|
| Shipping tickets / week | 47 | 12 |
| Ops hours on shipping support / week | 15 hrs | 4 hrs |
| Avg response time (WISMO) | 4 hours | 8 seconds |
| Exceptions auto-resolved (no human) | 0 | ~40% |
| Reships processed | Manual in Shopify | One-tap draft order |
| Refunds processed | Manual in Shopify | Auto under $25, one-tap above |
| Chargebacks / month | 2-3 | 0-1 |
| Product care questions | Unanswered or manual | AI-handled via widget |
| Monthly support cost (post-purchase) | $1,500 + chargebacks | $400 + $159/mo |
Instead of copying tracking numbers into emails, they spend their reclaimed 11 hours per week on retention work: follow-up sequences, review requests, loyalty campaigns, and actually talking to customers who need real help — not just a tracking update.
The 12 tickets that still come through each week are the ones that genuinely need a human: complex returns, multi-item issues, custom requests. Everything else is handled before it reaches the inbox.
"The best part isn't the time savings — it's that my customers get a better experience now. They get answers in seconds instead of waiting hours. Some of them don't even know they're talking to AI."
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