By Katie Cianni, Founder of Dream Interiors
If you run an online store, you know the feeling. You wake up to 30 unread emails. Half of them are customers asking where their order is. A quarter are return requests. The rest are questions you've answered a hundred times before — delivery times, product dimensions, care instructions.
I've been running Dream Interiors for years now. We sell luxury furniture and home accessories through our Shopify store, and as the business has grown, so has the inbox. At our peak, I was spending 3-4 hours every single day just answering customer emails. That's 3-4 hours I wasn't spending on sourcing new products, working on marketing, or — honestly — just living my life.
I tried hiring help. A part-time virtual assistant cost me around £1,500 a month, and I still had to train them, check their work, and cover for them when they were off. The quality was inconsistent. Sometimes they'd give customers the wrong tracking information. Sometimes they'd take hours to respond. Sometimes they just wouldn't respond at all over the weekend, and I'd come back to Monday morning chaos.
I looked at the big customer service platforms — Zendesk, Gorgias, all of them. Most were expensive, complicated to set up, and still needed a human sitting behind them to actually do anything useful. I was paying for software AND still doing the work myself.
Finding something that actually works
A few months ago, I came across a tool called Fortuna. Honestly, I was sceptical. I've tried AI chatbots before and they were awful — the kind that trap your customers in a loop of useless FAQ links and make your brand look cheap.
Fortuna is completely different. It's not a chatbot. It's what they call an "autonomous support agent" — and once I installed it, I understood why.
It connected to my Shopify store and immediately read every product, every policy, every order, every tracking number. When a customer emails asking "where's my order?", Fortuna doesn't send them a generic reply. It pulls up their specific order, finds the exact tracking status, and sends them a personalised response with their tracking link — in about 3 seconds.
When I saw the first email go out, I genuinely thought a human had written it. It was polite, accurate, referenced the exact product and order number, and sounded like someone who knew our store inside out.
The part that sold me
What really convinced me was the refund system. When a customer asks for a refund, Fortuna doesn't just process it automatically — it prepares the refund and then sends ME an approval request. I tap "Approve" or "Reject" on my phone. That's it. I stay in complete control of every penny that leaves the business, but I don't have to do any of the research, the policy checking, or the drafting.
The first time a refund request came in at 11pm on a Sunday night, Fortuna had the response ready in seconds. The customer got a reply saying their refund was being processed before I even looked at my phone. When I checked the next morning, all I had to do was tap approve. Done.
What's changed since we started using it
I went from answering 30+ emails a day to checking maybe 2-3 that Fortuna has flagged for my attention. The rest are handled automatically. Our average response time went from around 12 hours (sometimes longer over weekends) to under 5 seconds. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Our customers have noticed. We've had replies saying things like "that was so fast, thank you!" and "wow, your support team is amazing." They think we've hired incredibly competent staff. We haven't — we've just got a very good AI agent that costs us £37 a month instead of £1,500.
And the thing I didn't expect: it gets better over time. Fortuna updates itself as the AI models behind it improve. I don't have to retrain anything or learn new software. The agent I installed three months ago is already noticeably better than it was on day one.
Would I recommend it?
If you're running an e-commerce store and you're still answering customer emails manually — or paying someone else to do it badly — I'd genuinely recommend trying it. They offer a 30-day free trial, which is how I tested it without any risk.
The website is hirefortuna.com. I have no financial relationship with them — I'm just a store owner who found something that actually works and wanted to share it.
It's saved me hours every week, thousands of pounds a year, and more stress than I can quantify. My weekends are mine again. My customers are happier. And I finally feel like the business is running smoothly instead of running me into the ground.
If you've got questions about how it works on Shopify specifically, feel free to drop me a message. Happy to share more about our experience.
Katie Cianni is the founder of Dream Interiors, a luxury furniture and home accessories store based in the UK.