Tickets Per Order: Why We Created Our Own Metric for Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Shopify entrepreneurs have never faced more competition. New brands launch every day, each one touting fresh products, tempting discounts, and sophisticated marketing campaigns. In such a crowded marketplace, truly understanding your customers’ satisfaction can mean the difference between thriving and merely surviving. The big question is: How do you measure something as nuanced as customer satisfaction?

Most ecommerce brands lean on traditional metrics like Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), ratings, and reviews. These metrics have their place; they’ve shaped our collective understanding of what "customer happiness" might look like. But if you’ve ever had a nagging suspicion that they’re not telling the whole story, you’re not alone.

At OpenDesk, we noticed that brands often face issues that never surface in a survey or a star rating, so we set out to develop a more proactive way to quantify customer satisfaction. That’s where Tickets Per Order (TPO) comes in.

The usual suspects — and why they aren't enough

When you ask an entrepreneur how they measure the health of their customer relationships, you’ll hear the same few buzzwords: CSAT, NPS, reviews, maybe star ratings.

• CSAT: Measures how satisfied customers are with a single interaction or purchase experience. It offers a quick pulse on a single touchpoint — whether that’s a conversation with support or product delivery.
• NPS®: Gauges how likely customers are to recommend your brand to others. This is a broad measure of loyalty, showing how likely customers are to become ambassadors for your brand.
• Reviews and star ratings: Public-facing endorsements or critiques, often found on your product pages or third-party sites. Public endorsements or criticisms can strongly influence other prospective buyers, leading to increased trust and conversions.

These metrics have been around for a while, and for good reason. Yet, for all their usefulness, these metrics have notable gaps.

NPS and CSAT scores, for instance, tend to be susceptible to what statisticians call response bias: The most extreme customers — either very happy or very unhappy — are often the ones who respond. Meanwhile, the quietly dissatisfied might slip through unnoticed. Reviews and star ratings, while powerful, also skew heavily toward people with strong opinions.

And in nearly every case, these metrics are reactive, showing you the damage only after a customer has decided to speak up. By the time a negative review lands, you’ve likely already lost both a customer and a portion of your brand’s goodwill.

The stakes are especially high in today’s Shopify ecosystem. Once a disgruntled customer posts a complaint on social media or fires off a scathing review, the news travels quickly. Potential buyers who discover your business may stumble on that single negative piece of feedback and decide to look elsewhere. Combine these risks with the fact that many dissatisfied customers never fill out a survey or leave a review — they simply disappear, taking future revenue with them — and it’s clear that we need a more forward-looking approach to measuring customer happiness.

The sneaking suspicion that sparked a new idea

At OpenDesk, we began to realize that brands needed an early warning system. We saw that by the time a business owner noticed a downturn in CSAT or a string of negative reviews, the damage was well underway — their customer retention was likely already suffering. If only there were a way to spot friction before it became a full-blown crisis.

That’s why we developed Tickets Per Order — we saw how many important signals go untracked in the typical Shopify workflow. Traditional feedback tools gather data from the minority of customers who fill out forms or post reviews, but what about the flood of emails, live chats, and DMs from customers seeking help?

Each piece of incoming communication is a touchpoint that reveals where confusion, disappointment, or friction is happening in real time. We realized that measuring these support tickets in proportion to your total number of orders would yield an entirely different perspective on your company’s overall customer experience.

Where traditional customer satisfaction metrics shine — and fall short

It’s helpful to understand the core strengths and weaknesses of the usual customer satisfaction indicators, so we can see exactly how Tickets Per Order fits into the bigger picture.

CSAT offers a quick, direct way to gauge how happy a customer is with a specific interaction. It’s especially valuable right after a support exchange, providing immediate insight into how well your team performed. However, its shortcoming is that customers choose whether to answer; you get limited data, and it’s often just a snapshot in time.

NPS is popular for estimating loyalty. The theory goes that if someone is willing to recommend your brand to their network, they’re highly satisfied. The downside is that NPS is easily influenced by mood, timing, and who decides to respond, all of which can mask underlying issues.

Reviews and star ratings remain vital for social proof. They’re also useful for prospective customers looking for trustworthy guidance. Yet reviews often appear too late in the customer journey. By the time someone leaves a negative review, they’ve typically exhausted their patience with your brand, meaning you have less opportunity to fix what went wrong and salvage the relationship.

Taken together, these metrics provide snapshots rather than a living, breathing overview of customer satisfaction. They tell you what customers believe after they’ve had time to form an opinion — positive or negative — and decide to share it. That’s still important, but it’s inherently reactive.

The bottom line: If an issue is brewing behind the scenes, you might never catch wind of it until a wave of complaints or bad reviews shows up.

Tracking Tickets Per Order means taking a proactive approach

We realized that to get ahead of dissatisfaction, you need to track the conversations that customers initiate from the moment they suspect an issue. That’s why we created TPO, a metric that quantifies how many support tickets you receive for every order you fulfill. This includes emails, live chats, social media DMs — any channel where a customer reaches out for help, clarification, or to express a concern.

Here's how it's calculated:

Number of support tickets related to orders ÷ Number of orders = Tickets Per Order

For example, if you shipped 100 orders in June and received seven support tickets about those orders, your TPO ratio is 7%. That may look small in isolation, but it’s a critical data point: 7% of your customers had to reach out for assistance.

This metric becomes even more insightful when you categorize those tickets. Are five out of seven complaints related to a glitchy discount code or product option? If so, you know exactly where to concentrate your resources. Did half your customers say the shipping took too long? Time to reevaluate your logistics partner or your stated delivery times.

Unlike CSAT or NPS, Tickets Per Order doesn’t rely on a customer’s willingness to fill out a survey. If they had a reason to contact support, it automatically gets counted. This provides a broader and more immediate view of potential issues, giving you a head start on fixing them before unhappy customers simply vanish — or worse, leave a scathing review for all to see.

How measuring Tickets Per Order works in practice

To grasp the power of Tickets Per Order, imagine you’ve just launched a new line of eco-friendly athleisure. In the first month, you sell 200 units and receive 10 support tickets. At first glance, a 5% TPO ratio doesn’t sound alarming. But dig deeper: Suppose seven of those tickets are about incorrect sizing or confusion over your sizing chart. That means more than a third of your support issues stem from this single problem.

In a traditional CSAT or NPS survey, you might see a dip in overall satisfaction without knowing exactly why. You’d have to guess or wait for customers to spell it out in an open-text question — assuming they even fill it out. With TPO, you see the pattern at a glance. Armed with this data, you can revise your sizing chart, add more fit information to the product page, or train support agents to anticipate common sizing questions. If you correct the issue promptly, your next month’s Tickets Per Order might drop to 2%, signaling your intervention worked.

Taking a proactive angle like this is particularly impactful for Shopify entrepreneurs on a tight budget. As a lean team, you don’t have the luxury of solving vague problems that show up in broad, infrequent surveys. Tickets Per Order pinpoints concrete friction points so you can direct your limited resources to the areas where they'll have the biggest impact on retention and customer happiness.

Setting TPO apart from traditional metrics

For many Shopify entrepreneurs, survival hinges on retaining every possible customer. It’s well known that acquiring a new customer is significantly more expensive than keeping an existing one. By identifying problems early through TPO, you can prevent churn, reduce returns, and foster stronger loyalty.

You can also pinpoint problems before they escalate, saving your brand from a downward spiral of negative reviews. If you’re a small operation, one nasty viral post about shipping delays could tarnish your reputation far more than a lower-than-expected NPS ever would. TPO acts as your early detection system, helping you address the root cause quickly.

Moreover, this metric lets you optimize your resources. With a standard NPS survey, you might learn that your overall loyalty is dropping, but you’d have to do a lot of digging (and guesswork) to find out why. Tickets Per Order shows you exactly which issues are hitting you hardest, so you can prioritize them and see the direct results in real time.

A forward-looking approach to customer satisfaction: Your ticket to action

We built Tickets Per Order directly into our OpenDesk Analytics dashboard to provide Shopify founders with an at-a-glance overview of their support volume in relation to sales. This platform goes beyond the raw ratio by categorizing tickets automatically, offering real-time updates, and presenting it all in user-friendly visuals. The goal is to translate incoming support data into actionable insights.

Take Regen Health, for example. With OpenDesk, they increased their automation rate from 35% to 70%, all while preserving a 92%+ customer satisfaction score.

Examples like Regen Health underscore the biggest advantage of Tickets Per Order: you’re not left guessing which operational tweaks or clarifications will have the greatest impact. You see the data, solve the problem, and measure the improvement — all in one continuous feedback loop.

Traditional metrics aren’t going anywhere; they still have value, and in many cases, they provide social proof and high-level indicators of brand health. However, they’re incomplete without a more proactive measurement that reveals friction points in real time. That’s why TPO has become such a pivotal tool for Shopify founders who want to stay ahead of the curve.

In a hyper-competitive market, every overlooked detail can chip away at your bottom line. Waiting for post-purchase surveys or negative reviews is too late to stem the tide of dissatisfaction. By measuring TPO, you’ll catch problems earlier, adapt faster, and deliver a smoother experience that turns first-time buyers into lifelong customers.

If you’re ready to see how this metric can transform your business, start your OpenDesk free trial today. You’ll gain access to real-time analytics, automated ticket categorization, and the unique ability to track Tickets Per Order — allowing you to tackle issues head-on. The result? Fewer disgruntled customers, higher retention rates, and a better path toward sustainable growth.

Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.