Free calculator
Support Ticket Cost Calculator for Ecommerce
Enter how many tickets you answer, how long one takes end to end, and what an hour of support time costs. The calculator prices your inbox — and the slice of it that's just order-status lookups.
Support cost per month
$1,500
$3.33 per ticket × 450 tickets — $18,000 a year, and roughly 60 hours of someone's month.
Cost of order-status tickets
$600
These are the most repetitive tickets you have — the same lookup and the same reply — which makes them the cheapest category to automate or prevent.
Runs in your browser. Nothing you enter is stored or sent.
Count the real minutes
A ticket isn't just the reply: it's finding the order, reading the tracking, checking the policy, writing, and the follow-up when the first answer didn't land. For a solo founder the hourly cost isn't a wage — it's what an hour of your time is worth against everything else the store needs.
Cut volume before speed
The cheapest ticket is the one never sent. Order-status tickets fall with honest shipping estimates and proactive delay emails; return questions fall with a findable, plain-language policy. What remains is mostly repetitive lookups — the part worth automating, with escalation rules for the judgment calls.
Full walkthrough: What is WISMO? Where-is-my-order tickets explained.
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Frequently asked questions
How much does a support ticket cost?
Minutes per ticket × your hourly support cost. At 8 minutes and $25/hour that's about $3.30 per ticket — before software. The spread matters more than the average: order-status lookups are cheap and automatable, while a complex complaint can eat an hour.
What percentage of ecommerce tickets are WISMO?
“Where is my order?” and other order-status questions are consistently the largest single category for merchants who ship physical goods — for many stores a third or more of all tickets, and higher in Q4. Your own helpdesk tags will tell you exactly; if you don't tag intents yet, start there.
How do I reduce support tickets without hurting customers?
Prevent the predictable ones: visible shipping timelines before checkout, a tracking link in every confirmation, proactive emails when an order is delayed, and a return policy people can find and understand. Then automate the lookups that remain — grounded in real order data, with humans on the exceptions.
When does it make sense to automate support?
When a meaningful share of tickets follows the same lookup-and-reply pattern. If the calculator shows order-status tickets alone costing hundreds a month, automation that resolves even half of them pays for itself — provided it drafts from real order and tracking data and escalates anything out of policy.