Carson’s 10 Golden Rules of Fast and Easy Shopify Support

Here are a few simple rules and tips we’ve put together to help you maximize your Carson subscription and become our favorite customers.

Posted 7 years ago by Jonathan Kennedy

1) Trust the process

Carson is a team of talented developers, but we want you to see us as a member of your team. Always expect great communication and quality work from us. Understand that your subscription with us will deliver more and more value over time, as we learn your store and your business, and you learn how to get maximum value from your monthly plan. If you haven’t done so, please read our FAQ to grasp some of the service benefits and limitations.

2) Be clear and concise with your job requests

When submitting small job requests, be as clear and concise as possible. To help our support team help you fast, try to have the end result of the job clear in your mind and specify things like the exact URL of the page you need to fix. If you’re unsure of the result you’re looking for, submit an inquiry with your situation and some context. Ask us for our best technical recommendation. You should have a clear idea of what you want the outcome of every job submission to be, whether it’s a technical result or a clear reply/recommendation – which in turn would help you submit a clear job as a follow up.

3) Create a fresh new task for every new job request

Start a new task by clicking the “Submit a new task” button within your dashboard and write a clear subject describing the job. 

ex: JOB 1: Remove social media icons from the footer.

If you are not on a plan, or have a task credit, you will be prompted with payment options.

4) Submit only 1 job request at a time

We know you have a list of things you want to accomplish. Team Carson wants to help! Our process and pricing are designed to allow for one task submission at a time. Submitting a task list will cause extra delays while we try to clarify which task is top priority. We’re working on a better solution for this. For now, it’s a process limitation but also allows us to keep our pricing relatively affordable.

5) Provide us with OS (operating system) and browser details (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc)

For us to fix styling issues, bugs or investigate error notifications, we need to be able to see what you’re seeing. To help your Carson support engineers quickly replicate the issue, let them know which browser and operating system you are using.

6) Limit the follow-ups before the promised turnaround time

Unless it’s a request for us to stop working on the current job because of a priority change, checking in on the progress of the job periodically will actually slow down the turnaround times. If something is urgent, by all means, contact one of our agents on live chat and we’ll see what we can do.

Otherwise please be mindful of our turnaround promise to you. If we need more time or there are delays, which may happen, we will notify you proactively.

If a job is submitted Friday, we try our best to handle it however, depending at what time of the day your request arrives on our queue, we may need to extend the delivery of the finished work on Monday. We do our best to be clear when this will happen by providing you with an estimated “First Deliverable” date.

7) Never work on your store’s theme files while Carson is working on your store

Nothing. Nada. When two developers edit the same theme files simultaneously, the result is always lost data, lost work, lost time and lost money. Let’s avoid this.

We will always use our double back-up process to protect your store data, but making changes simultaneously can null or delete the job being done. Lost work isn’t good for anyone. Please avoid this and help us help you maximize our time.

8) Be mindful of “preview mode” when checking our work

Carson will often send you a preview link in order to verify the changes before they are being pushed live by publishing them. This way, your customers won’t see the work in progress, until after it has been approved by you. When opening a preview link, you will notice a dark grey bar at the bottom of the page which will tell you that you are previewing a copy of the live theme (unpublished). The “Cancel theme preview” button in the lower-right corner of your screen, will cancel the theme preview, and the changes won’t be visible until the copy you were previewing is being published (subject to your approval).

9) Screenshots and video screenshares for the win

If you feel like you’re not able to properly explain your job request with a couple lines, try annotated screenshots or simple video screenshares. Screenshares and short videos are great way to explain the details of the request.

We suggest Lightshot for MAC/Windows for simple screenshots and Screenflow for MAC screenshares and JING for Windows screenshares.

10) Carson is all about you

We value you as our customer and we’re 110% dedicated to building our business around the idea of helping yours thrive. Your feedback on how we can improve is always appreciated. Whether it’s praise or ”tough” love – we want to hear it. We hope you continue to see value in what we do as an easy-to-use and complimentary support service to Shopify’s official support channels.