How to handle subscription cancellations in Gorgias

Ecommerce subscriptions (coffee, supplements, pet food, skincare refills) are cancelled differently from SaaS. Customers often write “please stop my next box” in a chat or an email reply to their shipping notice, sometimes a day before the order ships. If your store runs support on Gorgias, those messages arrive next to order-status questions and returns, and speed matters: a cancellation handled after the charge turns into a refund, and sometimes into a chargeback.

This guide shows how to detect cancellation requests in Gorgias, act on them quickly from the ticket, record why customers leave, and read satisfaction surveys on those tickets. It sticks to Gorgias’s documentation: intents and sentiments, rules, macros and macro actions, ticket fields, the Recharge integration and CSAT surveys (all accessed November 2026).

Where the cancellation actually happens

Gorgias is a help desk; the subscription lives in a subscription app on your store. Gorgias documents a Recharge integration that shows Recharge subscriptions in the ticket sidebar and lets agents cancel or reactivate a subscription and refund a charge, partially or fully, without leaving the ticket. To cancel from the sidebar, the agent opens Subscriptions, clicks Cancel, then Confirm.

One caveat from that page: orders that went through Recharge must be cancelled with the Cancel button on the Recharge order, not on the Shopify order, or the cancellation will not work.

Gorgias also documents AI Agent actions for Recharge subscriptions and for Loop Subscriptions. If you use another subscription app, check its own Gorgias documentation; without an integration, agents cancel in the app’s admin and confirm in the ticket.

Step 1: detect cancellation requests

Intents

Gorgias detects intent and sentiment on incoming messages automatically (intents and sentiments). Its intent list includes subscription/cancel (requests to cancel a subscription, such as an auto-shipment or monthly order) and subscription/change for edits. If the system cannot assign an intent confidently, it leaves it blank, so intents are a strong hint, not a guarantee.

A rule to tag and route them

Gorgias rules follow a WHEN, IF, THEN structure. A rule for cancellations:

1. WHEN a ticket is created (Gorgias notes that “ticket updated” triggers do not fire on changes to message intents, so use ticket created or new message).
2. IF the message intents contain subscription/cancel, and the message is not from an agent.
3. THEN add the tag subscription-cancel, assign the ticket to the team that handles subscriptions, and set a high priority.

Tags in Gorgias are case-sensitive (Subscription-Cancel and subscription-cancel are two different tags), so agree on one spelling and stick to it. Gorgias’s rule templates also include an auto-tag template for subscription cancellations labelled as Recharge only.

Step 2: cancel fast, with one macro

Gorgias macros combine a reply with actions that run when the macro is sent. The macro actions page lists Recharge actions including Cancel last subscription, Activate last subscription, Refund last charge and Refund last order. Gorgias also notes that if a macro action fails, the ticket is reopened.

A “Cancel subscription” macro could:

1. Reply to the customer confirming the cancellation, with the date and whether an upcoming order is still shipping.
2. Run Cancel last subscription.
3. Add the tag cancel-done.
4. Set the Contact Reason and Resolution fields (step 3).

Two cautions before you let everyone use it:

• “Last subscription” means one subscription. If a customer has several (two products on different schedules), check which one they mean in the sidebar before sending the macro.
• Check the next order. If an order has already been generated, the customer needs to know whether it will ship and be charged, and you may need to cancel that order in Recharge too.

Step 3: record the reason and the outcome

Gorgias’s ticket fields include three managed, ecommerce-specific fields: Contact Reason, Resolution and Product. Contact Reason and Resolution come with suggested dropdown values you can edit. Gorgias’s advice for Contact Reason is to describe what the customer can see, not the internal cause. Only admins create fields; anyone who can reply can fill them in.

For cancellations, useful Resolution values are: Cancelled, Skipped next order, Changed frequency, Swapped product, Paused, Customer withdrew request. Useful reason values, captured from what the customer wrote: Too much product, Too expensive, Didn’t like product, Shipping problem, Moving, Other.

That gives you a monthly view of why subscribers leave and what share accepted an alternative, using your own data rather than an industry benchmark.

When to offer skip, frequency change or swap

Ecommerce subscriptions have alternatives that SaaS lacks. A customer who writes “I have too much coffee” usually needs a skip or a slower frequency, not a discount. A rough guide:

What the customer says	Reasonable alternative	Just cancel
“I have too much left”	Skip next order or change frequency	If they say they are done
“Too expensive”	Smaller size or less frequent delivery	If they already decided
“Didn’t like the flavour”	Swap product	If they want to stop
“Moving / travelling”	Pause or skip
“Shipping keeps arriving late”	Fix the shipping problem, apologise	Often

The rule that does not change: if the customer asks to cancel, cancel. Mention one alternative in the same reply if it fits the reason; do not hold the cancellation until they answer. See our click-to-cancel rules and pause vs discount guides.

Step 4: read CSAT on cancellation tickets separately

Gorgias CSAT surveys are configured from Workflows, then Tools, then CSAT for email, contact form and Help Center tickets, and from the chat preferences for chat. The docs list eligibility conditions: the ticket needs at least one customer message and one agent reply, the last agent reply must be less than a week old when the ticket closes, and the channel must be chat, email, contact form or Help Center. Scores go from 1 to 5, and Gorgias’s satisfaction report counts 4 and 5 as positive. You can exclude tickets from the survey with rules, for example by tag.

Whether to survey cancellation tickets is your call. If you do, filter them by your subscription-cancel tag and read them apart from other tickets: a 5 means the cancellation was quick and clear, which is what you want. A 1 with “I asked twice and was still charged” is a process problem, and a likely chargeback.

Doing this with NoChurn

NoChurn’s Gorgias connector is read-only: it reads tickets and never replies, tags or runs actions in Gorgias. Tickets are matched to your customers by email; doubtful matches are suggested for you to confirm and never merged automatically. They feed the churn score and churn drivers, and are kept as dated, verbatim evidence if a customer later disputes a charge processed on Stripe or Braintree. Subscription changes made from Gorgias, such as the Recharge cancel button and macros, stay in Gorgias and your subscription app. See NoChurn + Gorgias.