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AI email auto-reply for e-commerce: a 5-category workflow that never auto-sends

2026-09-26 · MailPilot team

If you run an e-commerce support inbox, you know the shape of the day: two hundred emails before lunch, and eighty percent of them are the same five things. Someone asks where their order is. Someone got a cracked screen and wants a refund now. Someone ordered the wrong size. Someone wants a wholesale price. And three emails are crypto spam.

We built MailPilot around that reality. Not as an auto-responder that talks to your customers unsupervised — as a drafting-and-routing layer that does the first pass so a human can do the last pass.

The five categories

Every incoming email is classified into exactly one of five types by a transparent signal-word rule engine — never a hidden model:

  1. Inquiry — shipping, price, availability, "does it come in blue".
  2. Complaint — broken, damaged, angry words, refund demands.
  3. Return / exchange — RMA, wrong size, wrong item, cancel my order.
  4. Partnership — wholesale, affiliate, collaboration, B2B.
  5. Spam — crypto, lottery, phishing signals. Quarantined, never replied to.

Score before you draft

Two numbers decide what happens next. Sentiment runs from −1 (furious) to +1 (delighted). Urgency runs 0–10: time words like "now" and "asap" add weight, refund and chargeback language adds more. When urgency hits 7, or sentiment drops below −0.4, or the category is a complaint, the email is escalated to a human with an internal note explaining why. Everything is auditable — you can see exactly which signal words fired.

The honesty rules

Auto-reply tooling fails publicly when it over-promises. MailPilot's drafting rules forbid guarantees: no promised refund timelines it cannot verify, no "100% satisfaction", no fabricated order statuses. Drafts use {{customer_name}}-style variables and stop where verification is needed.

The core design decision: MailPilot never sends. It drafts and routes; a human or your existing helpdesk presses send. Decision-support, not a black box.

What this replaces

Not your helpdesk — the first pass your team does manually today. Teams at 200+ emails/day typically spend 2–4 hours just triaging and re-typing the same answers. That is the layer MailPilot automates; judgment calls still route to people.

Try it

The free interactive demo runs the real classification and scoring engine on any email you paste — no signup. The free tier drafts 20 replies a day.


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