Add Starly to Gorgias

One button, one approval on your own helpdesk domain, nothing for you to create or paste afterwards, and a shadow mode that lets you read every answer for a week before a customer sees one.

Last updated 2026-08-14

Starly answers your customers inside Gorgias. A message arrives on a ticket, the assistant reads it, and when it can answer from what your business has told it, it posts the reply into the same ticket as an agent message. When it cannot, it leaves the ticket for a person and says so on the ticket. Nothing else about your helpdesk changes. Same tickets, same views, same team, same customers on the same channels.

Connecting is one approval on your own helpdesk domain, and the setup that used to sit behind it — telling Gorgias where to send new ticket messages — now happens by itself. What takes longer is the part that is a decision rather than a task: how long you read the assistant answers yourself before you let a customer see one.

Installing from the Gorgias app store

When you press Install in Gorgias, you land in Starly rather than in a Gorgias dialog. Sign in if you are not already. A helpdesk answers for exactly one business, so if you run several here you are asked which one this helpdesk belongs to; if you run one, you skip that and go straight into it. Either way you finish in that business Settings, Integrations tab, in the Gorgias card, with the helpdesk name already filled in.

That detour is deliberate. The install link carries no session and anyone can replay it, so the decision about which business a helpdesk joins is made inside Starly, by somebody signed in as an owner of that business, and it is checked again when Gorgias sends the browser back.

In the card, step 1 is "Connect your Gorgias account". Check the Gorgias domain is the one you mean, then press "Connect Gorgias". You go to your own helpdesk to approve, and come back to the same pane, which now names the helpdesk you connected, who connected it and when.

If the approval does not complete you are told which of the four things happened rather than left guessing: you cancelled it in Gorgias, it timed out after ten minutes, Gorgias sent you back without an approval, or Gorgias refused to complete it. In every case nothing was connected and nothing was changed, and you can press the button again.

There is no step 2. While you were approving, Starly added its own HTTP integration to your Gorgias account — the thing that tells Gorgias to send new ticket messages here — set to the right trigger, method and request body. You do not create it, you do not paste anything into it, and you do not have to find the form it used to live in. If you want to see it, it is in your Gorgias settings under Integrations, named Starly, and the pane shows the same values under "How Gorgias reaches Starly".

If your helpdesk already had one of those pointing at Starly, from before the app existed, it is taken over and brought up to date rather than duplicated. You end up with one, never two sending everything twice.

In the rare case Gorgias refuses that step, the pane says so plainly. Your helpdesk is still connected — only the delivery is missing — and you get a button to try again and the values to add it by hand if you would rather not wait.

What approving Starly gives it

The approval is between you and Gorgias: Starly never sees a password of yours, and there is no key for you to create, copy, store or rotate. What comes back is an access token that lasts a day and a refresh token that renews it, held on our server and never sent to a browser, including yours. That access is also what lets Starly set up the message delivery for you instead of walking you through a form.

Access is renewed five minutes before it would expire, because a token that runs out mid-conversation costs a customer their answer. You can withdraw the whole thing from inside Gorgias whenever you like, without asking us and without signing in here.

Shadow mode, which is how you should start

A new connection starts in shadow mode and stays there until you switch it off yourself. In shadow mode the assistant reads every ticket that reaches it and writes its answer into your Conversations tab, and that is all that happens. No reply is posted, no internal note is left, no label is added, and the ticket in Gorgias is untouched. The customer sees nothing, because nothing was sent. The card shows the word "shadow mode" so you can see at a glance which state you are in.

This is the safe way to watch it before customers see a word, and it is worth using properly rather than for an afternoon. Give it a week, or a hundred tickets, whichever comes first. Read its answers next to the real questions. Where an answer is wrong, the fix is almost always the knowledge behind it rather than anything in this pane. When you are happy, untick "Shadow mode, never reply to customers" and save, and the card status changes to live.

The card has its own switch as well. Turning that off pauses the whole integration: messages still arrive and are still logged, and nothing is answered. Turning it back on resumes.

Choosing the channels it answers on

Under "Where the bot replies" you tick the Gorgias channels the assistant is allowed to answer on: Email, Chat widget, SMS, Phone, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and API or other. Messages on unticked channels are left for your team and the reason is written in the log. At least one has to be ticked; if you want silence everywhere, pause the integration with the card switch instead.

One honest limitation. Email, chat, SMS and WhatsApp replies have been sent against the live Gorgias API and behave. Facebook and Instagram have not, and Gorgias validates outgoing messages per channel, so treat those two as unproven: switch them on if you want to, then read the log for the first day rather than assuming.

Choosing the questions it answers

Every incoming message is sorted into one question type before anything else happens. Under "What the bot answers" you can tick "Filter by question type" and then tick the types you would rather keep for your team. The filter is off unless you switch it on, so by default the assistant answers everything on the channels you allowed.

• Order status, shipping problems, returns and exchanges, refunds and cancellations.
• Product questions, payments and billing, discounts and promotions.
• Account and login, complaints, general questions.

The two most owners switch off first are complaints and refunds. Both are conversations where being answered by software is itself the complaint, and both are cheap to hold back while you build confidence in the rest.

What it does with a ticket, and what it will not do

• It answers from your own knowledge: the cards you wrote and what was imported from your site. Where it does not know, it does not guess.
• It never answers its own replies. Gorgias fires the same trigger for agent messages, and those are skipped before anything else happens.
• If a teammate answers a ticket from inside Gorgias, the assistant goes quiet on that ticket and stays quiet until you press Resume bot in the Debug tab. It does not talk over the colleague who took the customer on.
• When it cannot answer, it hands the ticket over: it pauses itself on that ticket, tags it needs-human, and leaves an internal note saying what happened.
• Every ticket it answers is tagged starly-chat, plus a topic tag such as sa:returns, so you can build Gorgias views, rules and triage stats on its work.
• One ticket is one conversation. Follow-ups on the same ticket keep their context instead of starting again.
• It posts messages, adds tags and writes internal notes. It does not close, merge, assign, refund, or change anything else in your helpdesk.

Disconnecting and uninstalling

Disconnect in step 1 hands the tokens back to Gorgias, removes the integration Starly added to your account, and stops the assistant replying. Nothing is left behind posting at a connection that can no longer answer. An integration you built yourself before the app is left exactly where it is, because it was yours before it was ours. Uninstalling Starly from inside Gorgias withdraws the same access from the other side, and you do not have to do both. Conversations already recorded stay in your dashboard under whatever retention you set, and connecting again later starts from where you left off rather than from nothing.

When it does not work

• The assistant stopped answering one ticket: either somebody answered it in Gorgias, or it handed off. The log line says which. Press Resume bot in the Debug tab to put it back on that ticket.
• Answers appear in Conversations but never in Gorgias: you are still in shadow mode.
• Messages logged as skipped with a channel or a question type named: those are your own filters, working.
• Replies rejected by Gorgias: the error is in the log, and the business owner gets one email a day about it rather than one per failure. Transient failures are retried up to three times.
• Nothing in the log at all: Gorgias is not sending anything to Starly. Check in Gorgias that Starly is still installed, and that the Starly integration under Settings, Integrations is still there and switched on — an admin can delete it without meaning to.
• An answer is wrong rather than missing: the fix is the knowledge behind it. Open the conversation in the Debug tab, read the trace to see which cards it used, and correct the card rather than this pane.

The order that wastes least time: connect, send yourself a test message and watch it appear in the log, leave shadow mode on for a week, read what it wrote, fix the knowledge behind the bad answers, then go live on one channel before all of them.

Common questions

Is there anything for me to create, copy or store?

No. You approve Starly on your own Gorgias domain and that is the whole connection. There is no key to generate, no webhook to add, nothing to paste, and nothing of yours for us to lose. The integration that carries messages to Starly is created in your account as part of the approval, the access renews itself, and you can withdraw the whole thing from inside Gorgias whenever you like.

Can I try it without any customer seeing an answer?

Yes, and that is how a new connection starts. In shadow mode the assistant reads every ticket and writes its answer into your Conversations tab, but nothing is posted to Gorgias: no reply, no internal note, no tag, and the ticket is left exactly as it was. Read a week of answers next to the real questions before you switch it off.

Will it reply on top of an agent who is already handling the ticket?

No. When a person types a reply in Gorgias, the assistant marks that ticket as taken and goes quiet on it. It stays quiet until somebody presses Resume bot in the Debug tab. It also ignores its own replies, which come back through the same trigger, so it can never end up answering itself.

Which Gorgias channels does it actually work on?

You choose from email, chat widget, SMS, phone, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and API or other. Email, chat, SMS and WhatsApp have been sent against the live Gorgias API. Facebook and Instagram have not been tested there yet, and Gorgias validates outgoing messages per channel, so watch the log for a day after enabling either of those.

What does Starly hold after I approve it?

An access token that lasts a day and a refresh token that renews it, both on our server and never sent back to a browser, including yours. They are renewed five minutes early so a token cannot expire in the middle of a conversation, and pressing Disconnect hands them back to Gorgias.

What happens to my tickets if I uninstall?

The assistant stops replying, and that is all that changes. Tickets it already answered keep their starly-chat and topic tags, and the conversations it recorded stay in your dashboard under the retention you set. The only thing removed from Gorgias is the integration Starly added there itself; your tickets, views, rules and anything you built by hand are untouched, and connecting again later picks up where you left off.