Why CaseKit exists

The gap

The options for a merchant answering support email are usually presented as two: keep struggling in Gmail, or migrate to a full helpdesk. The second is a real commitment — new inbox, new habits, ticket import, per-seat or per-ticket billing — and for a store doing a few dozen support emails a day it is a lot of machinery for a problem that is mostly one thing.

That one thing is this: the answer to most customer emails already exists in Shopify, and getting it means leaving the conversation.

What we built instead

CaseKit is a Chrome extension that resolves the Shopify order behind the Gmail conversation you have open, works out which support scenario the fulfillment state implies, and prepares the reply. You review it and send it. Gmail never leaves the screen and nothing migrates.

It does one job. It has no ticket queue, no routing, no SLAs and no omnichannel inbox, because adding those would make it the thing it was built as an alternative to.

The principle we care about most

Shopify determines what happened. CaseKit determines the support scenario. AI, on Pro, helps phrase the response. A person reviews and sends it.

That order matters. A support tool that lets a language model decide whether a parcel has shipped will eventually tell a customer something untrue, and the cost of that lands on the merchant rather than on the tool. Deriving order state from Shopify evidence removes that class of error entirely, which is why the deterministic layer came first and the AI layer came second.

What changed in 2.0

Earlier versions of CaseKit were a local-first extension that read Shopify and WooCommerce admin pages and formatted order summaries for your clipboard. CaseKit 2.0 is a rebuild: Gmail-first, Shopify-only, with a server-side resolver that can find the order from the conversation rather than needing you to already have the order page open.

Earlier WooCommerce guides are kept in the archive, because the support advice in them is still good even though the product no longer connects to WooCommerce.

One change deserves calling out rather than burying: CaseKit is no longer local-first. Version 1.x read the order page you had already opened, so nothing had to leave your browser. Version 2.0 works in Gmail, where the order is not on screen, so it has to ask Shopify — and we keep that credential encrypted on a server instead of inside a browser extension. That is a real trade and the security page explains it properly.

Independence

CaseKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Shopify or Google.