AI-Powered Returns: How Ecommerce Brands Are Automating Refunds and Exchanges

Article Summary:

Order tracking (“Where Is My Order?” or WISMO) inquiries can represent up to half of an ecommerce support team’s workload, especially during busy seasons.

Automating WISMO inquiries with AI Agents helps businesses deliver faster, more transparent post-purchase experiences while dramatically reducing repetitive support volume.

In this article, you’ll learn:

• Why WISMO consumes so much of ecommerce support
• How AI Agents retrieve real-time tracking data and resolve inquiries instantly
• What capabilities matter most in an automated order-tracking solution
• How Fin (as an example of a modern AI Agent) supports this automation
• A practical framework for implementing automated order tracking

Why WISMO Overwhelms Ecommerce Support

If you work in ecommerce support, you probably hear “Where is my order?” dozens of times a day. These WISMO (Where Is My Order) inquiries can account for 20–40% of support tickets and up to 50% of inbound calls. During busy seasons, that number climbs even higher.

Manually handling these requests wastes agent time and frustrates customers. Research from Shopify shows 69% of consumers expect real-time order tracking, and 96% actively track orders until delivery.

When they can’t get quick answers, satisfaction and loyalty suffer. Nearly half of U.S. shoppers say they’ve stopped buying from a brand after a single poor service experience.

The cost implications are huge. Answering the same WISMO question thousands of times is an enormous drain on support resources. For example, if you handle 10,000 tickets a month and ~30% are “Where’s my order?” queries, that’s about 3,000 tickets just on tracking.

How automating order tracking works (and why it’s a game-changer)

An AI-powered customer service agent can automate these requests end to end. Instead of waiting for a human to look up an order, the AI connects to ecommerce systems like Shopify or your internal fulfillment database.

When a customer asks “Where’s my order?” the AI retrieves live tracking details and delivery ETA when connected to your order systems through Data Connectors. It can understand natural phrasing (“When will my package arrive?” or “Has my order shipped yet?”) and respond in seconds.

This kind of proactive, personalized support eliminates delays and sets a new standard for post-purchase transparency.

How AI Agents Transform Order Tracking

Order tracking is one of the most predictable and repetitive workflows in ecommerce. When a customer asks “Where’s my order?”, the answer already lives inside your ecommerce platform or fulfillment system. AI Agents bridge these systems and deliver the information instantly.

A capable AI Agent can:

• Identify intent
• Access your commerce or fulfillment system securely
• Pull real-time tracking updates
• Understand natural phrasing such as “Has it shipped yet?”
• Deliver accurate, immediate responses across any channel

This gives customers the transparency they expect and reduces repetitive manual work for your team.

What Strong Order-Tracking Automation Requires

Order-tracking automation works best when an AI Agent can understand the customer’s request, pull accurate information from commerce systems, and respond consistently across channels. To achieve this, a modern solution typically needs several core capabilities.

1. Reliable, Real-Time System Connectivity

Accurate updates depend on the AI Agent’s ability to access order, shipping, and payment data directly from platforms such as Shopify, or your internal fulfillment tools. This includes retrieving tracking numbers, shipment status, delivery estimates, and order history.

2. The Ability to Take Action

WISMO rarely exists in isolation. Customers often need help updating an address, initiating a return, resending a tracking link, or confirming a payment. Strong automation allows the AI Agent to perform simple, policy-aligned actions instead of handing everything to a human.

3. Consistent, Multi-Channel Coverage

Customers ask about their orders in chat, email, SMS, social, and over the phone. Effective automation must meet them wherever they are and provide the same level of clarity and accuracy in each channel.

4. Built-In Safety, Brand Alignment, and Escalation Logic

Order-related inquiries often involve sensitive information. Automation should follow your brand guidelines, respect your refund and shipping policies, and know when to escalate a situation to a human agent.

5. Proven Reliability at Scale

Order tracking spikes during sales events and holiday peaks. An AI Agent should maintain fast, accurate responses even as conversation volume surges, ensuring customers get timely updates and support teams stay unburdened.

The Results:

• Instant, accurate updates that reduce wait times and improve transparency.
• Lower support volume across WISMO, delivery updates, returns, and address changes.
• Higher post-purchase satisfaction through faster, more reliable communication.
• Reduced operational costs as repetitive lookups shift to automated resolution.
• Consistent answers across channels, including chat, email, SMS, and voice.
• Stronger performance during peak periods, with stable response times at scale.

How to implement AI-powered order tracking

Fin’s four-step framework (Analyze, Train, Test, Deploy) makes automation fast to set up and easy to scale. Implementation typically takes days, not months, with no engineering required.

1. Analyze

Teams begin by reviewing support volume to identify how many conversations involve order status, delayed shipments, or tracking issues. These insights guide where automation can have the most impact.

2. Train

The AI Agent is configured to reflect the brand’s tone and policies. Order, payment, and fulfillment systems are connected so the AI can retrieve up-to-date information.

3. Test

Teams simulate real customer scenarios to validate the AI’s accuracy, escalation behavior, and handling of outlier situations before anything goes live.

4. Deploy

The AI is rolled out across channels such as chat, email, SMS, and voice. Performance insights help teams refine the automation and expand into additional post-purchase workflows.

FAQ: AI Order Tracking

What’s the difference between an AI Agent and a chatbot?

Traditional chatbots follow scripts or predefined flows. An AI Agent understands intent, retrieves real-time data, and can take action across your systems. Instead of simply responding with static messages, an AI Agent can look up orders, check shipment status, initiate returns, or escalate when needed. This makes it capable of resolving post-purchase inquiries end to end, not just chatting.

Can the AI Agent integrate with my commerce platform?

Yes. Modern AI Agents connect to platforms such as Shopify through secure, no-code data connectors. They can also integrate with internal order management or billing systems, allowing them to retrieve live order information and provide structured context to teammates when updates are required​​.

Is the system secure for order data?

AI Agents designed for customer service must follow strict security and compliance practices. Fin, for example, adheres to SOC 2 and ISO 42001 standards and uses industry-standard encryption for data in transit and at rest. Order data is only accessed when needed to resolve a customer request, and access is governed by your system permissions.

What happens if the AI Agent can’t find an order?

A well-configured AI Agent should ask clarifying questions, retry using available information, or offer alternative lookup paths such as email, phone number, or order ID. If the issue still can’t be resolved, it will hand the conversation off to a human agent with full context so customers don’t need to repeat themselves.

Can AI handle more than WISMO questions?

Yes. Order tracking is typically just the first workflow companies automate. AI Agents can also help with returns and exchanges, subscription updates, delivery exceptions, partial shipments, and missing or damaged item reports. As long as the required systems are connected, the AI can retrieve relevant data and follow your policies.

Does automating order tracking reduce overall ticket volume?

In most cases, yes. Because WISMO and related inquiries make up a large share of support interactions, automating them lowers overall ticket volume and frees human agents to focus on complex or high-value conversations. Over time, this also improves response times, consistency, and post-purchase satisfaction.

Turn order tracking into a strength

Order tracking should build trust, not drain resources. With Fin, ecommerce brands can offer real-time transparency, reduce ticket load, and scale support effortlessly.

See how Fin transforms order tracking into seamless self-service moments.
Book a personalized Fin demo and discover how effortless automated order tracking can be.