AI Receptionist for Shopify: What It Handles and What It Costs

An AI receptionist for Shopify is a voice agent that answers your store's line, looks up the caller's order and gives its status, answers product and policy questions from your own pages, and passes the rest to your team, live during your support hours or as a ticket. With Loop Voice it costs about $0.95 to $1.49 per answered conversation on monthly billing, against roughly $4 to $15 per three-minute call for a human answering service and about $26.59 an hour for a receptionist on payroll.

Loop Voice publishes this page and sells an AI receptionist, so treat its figures as one option; the comparison below is by category (hire, answering service, AI) at prices as of October 2026. For named AI vendors side by side, see the best AI phone agents for Shopify customer service.

Most store calls are about an order that exists or one the caller is about to place. Concentrix, a contact center operator, says where-is-my-order makes up roughly a quarter of contact volume in many retail operations during normal periods (Concentrix on retail contact volumes). The other shares below are an example for an apparel store; swap in a month of your own call notes.

In this example, 82% of calls need order data or a published policy, not judgment. Check how each plan bills the spam share: Smith.ai, for one, does not count spam or wrong numbers as long as the lines you forward pass Caller ID (Smith.ai pricing FAQ).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for receptionists (SOC 43-4171) at $18.27 an hour in May 2025 (BLS receptionists profile). For private-industry office and administrative support workers, wages are 68.7% of total compensation and benefits 31.3% (BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026). So $18.27 ÷ 0.687 = $26.59 per hour worked, and staffing the phone 40 hours a week (2,080 hours a year, about 173 a month) costs about $4,610 a month. One hire costs nearer $4,160, because their paid leave is already inside the $26.59, but then nobody answers while they are off.

That covers 40 of the week's 168 hours; covering all 168 costs 4.2 times as much, around $19,400 a month. In return, a hire packs orders between calls and can fix an order while the customer waits.

An answering service puts a trained person on your line 24/7, and many callers prefer a person. Prices as of October 2026:

At three minutes a call, AnswerConnect's 300-minute plan ($395, no setup fee) works out to $3.95 a call and Ruby's 50-minute plan to $15.00, while Smith.ai's human-first plans cost $7.00 to $10.00 per included call. Ruby also bills hold time and the receptionist's notes after the call (Ruby FAQ). None of the three needs a long contract, and Smith.ai also sells AI-first and hybrid plans.

Loop Voice bills in credits, about 1.5 per answered conversation on average: Starter is $119 a month for 120 credits (about 80 conversations), Growth $399 for 500 (about 330), Scale from $975 for 1,500 (about 1,000) and Enterprise $3,790 for 6,000 (about 4,000) (Loop Voice pricing). Every answered conversation uses credits, whether or not it leads to a sale, and extra conversations bill at the plan's per-extra-credit rate. For the same math against an outsourced call center, see AI voice agent vs call center costs.

Ask every vendor for these, and test them on a real call before the store line goes live:

1. Order lookup. It finds the caller's order and gives its status from store data. Loop Voice's inbound agent covers order status, returns and exchanges, sizing, shipping and subscription changes.
2. Answers from your own pages. A knowledge base built from your site pages, policies, FAQ and catalog, plus a list of real questions it couldn't answer; Loop Voice calls these answer gaps.
3. A handoff your team sees. A live transfer to your team's number during support hours, with the teammate briefed first, and otherwise a ticket with the AI summary, the order and the recording, in Loop Voice and in Gorgias, Zendesk, Redo or by SMS.
4. Rules for when to stop. Escalation on negative sentiment, complex refunds, and legal or medical questions, and a stop when the caller asks for a human.
5. No guessing. Ask something your pages don't cover; it should say it doesn't know rather than guess (Loop Voice's never-hallucinate guardrail), and your handoff rules should send the question to your team.
6. Honest about being an AI. With Loop Voice's clear-identity guardrail, the agent says it is an AI when asked.
7. Recordings you control. Loop Voice keeps recordings 7 days by default, extendable to 90, and recording can be switched off per number; the security page covers encryption and card data.

Answering only from your published guidance matters most on calls like this one to a health device brand, from a caller nine months out of knee surgery:

The agent quoted the store's safety guidance, said "I can't override that on a call," and sent the caller to their PT or surgeon. The caller said "I do know I'm talking to an AI assistant" and called the conversation "very informative." More recordings are in the call library.

Loop Voice's core setup takes under 10 minutes; give the knowledge base, rules and tests an afternoon.

1. Install the Shopify app from the Shopify App Store and connect your store.
2. Load your policies. The knowledge base crawls your site pages, policies and FAQ and syncs your products; upload size charts or warranty terms as PDF, DOC or text.
3. Pick a voice from ElevenLabs, xAI or Vapi, with the accent, gender and speaking speed that suit your store.
4. Write escalation rules for your exceptions (damaged items, wholesale) and send handoffs to Gorgias, Zendesk or Redo; the store support setup guide has a starter list.
5. Test. The simulator plays six personas, from an angry customer to one suspicious of AI, without dialing anyone or using credits; then call the agent's number with your hardest questions and use the retrieval test on anything it gets wrong.
6. Connect the number. Forward your store line, import a Twilio number, connect a SIP trunk from Twilio, Vonage or Telnyx, or buy a number in 90+ countries; see local vs toll-free numbers.

Then make the number easy to find. Shopify's automated contact information policy shows the phone number from Settings > General > Store contact details, policies are linked in the checkout footer by default, and Shopify suggests a dedicated business number so your personal one stays private (Shopify Help Center on store policies). The full walkthrough is in how to set up your first AI voice agent.

The agent answers 24/7; to cover only some hours, forward your store line to the agent's number in those hours. Gorgias found that at its median brand, 53% of pre-purchase questions and about 51% of support questions arrive outside weekdays 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., though across chat, email and contact forms, not phone (Gorgias research).

• You answer in the day: forward evenings and weekends, as the customer support use case suggests, and every call in peak weeks.
• You answer when you can: use conditional forwarding. On a Verizon mobile line, No Answer/Busy Transfer sends calls you don't pick up after three or four rings to another number, and per-minute charges may apply (Verizon call forwarding).
• Nobody owns the phone: forward every call.

Example: every call lasts three minutes once rounded up, 40 staffed hours a week cost $4,610 a month, and each Loop Voice conversation uses 1.5 credits. Each cell is the cheapest published plan for that volume at list prices, with the cost per call in parentheses.

• The payroll row covers weekdays only; the others answer 24/7.
• Ruby is left out because its overage rate isn't published; at three minutes a call, its $720 plan covers about 66 calls and its $1,725 plan about 166.
• The hire costs the same at 80 calls as at 1,000, so the gap is widest for a small store.

Some callers want a person at any price. In a Gartner survey of 5,728 customers in December 2023, 64% said they would prefer companies didn't use AI for customer service, and their top concern was that AI makes reaching a person harder (Gartner customer survey). So keep the path to a person short: turn on the guardrail that stops on "human", and during your support hours Loop Voice's agent transfers the caller to your team's number after briefing them; out of hours it hands off as a ticket with the AI summary, the order and the recording, so your team can follow up without asking the caller to start over.

A person is the better first answer when:

• Customers pay by phone with a card. Loop Voice doesn't take payments on the call (payment stays in your checkout, and it never stores card data), while Ruby includes payment collection and Smith.ai adds it for $1.00 a call.
• The sale is a consultation: made-to-measure, custom or high-ticket pieces.
• Most calls need judgment. A mix of damaged goods, disputes and exceptions becomes a stack of tickets a person could have closed on the call.
• You get a handful of calls. At 10 a month, Starter works out to $11.90 a call, and answering them yourself costs nothing extra.