Navigate choppy waters. Tide your customers over.

Reads each order’s real timeline and drafts the calm reply in your voice, ready for your approval.

Built by a $2M-ops operator. No invented numbers, ever.

Connects to where your backers already live.

  • Kickstarter · BackerKit — backer-list import, live
  • Webhook — any helpdesk that can POST JSON (beta)
  • Shopify — coming soon

Built by an operator who spent two years tiding customers over 60-plus-day waits.

The long wait

It isn’t one ticket. It’s a months-long emotional journey.

You collected the cash today and ship in 60 to 120 days. In that gap a confident buyer slowly turns into an anxious one — and an anxious one turns into a refund request. The same words mean something different depending on how long she’s waited.

  1. DAY 7

    Curious

    The order is fresh and she's still excited. She checks for a tracking page that doesn't exist yet and sends a friendly “just making sure my order went through?”

  2. DAY 30

    Restless

    A month in. The excitement's gone, the card statement showed up and the product didn't. She's quietly wondering whether she handed money to someone about to ghost her.

  3. DAY 60

    Frustrated

    Two months. Now it's “This is taking forever. I want a refund.” Founders read that as a decision. It usually isn't — it's “convince me to keep waiting.”

  4. DAY 89

    Dispute-risk

    The highest-stakes moment in the wait. “Where IS my order?? Last chance before I dispute.” You have maybe one reply and 24 hours.

Chargebacks hit more than revenue

A refund is a lost sale. A chargeback is a dispute on your record — and enough of them put your Stripe or PayPal standing at risk, in the exact category card networks watch most closely. Each chargeback runs $15–25 in fees before you lose the product and the customer (Source: card-network dispute fee range).

WISMO floods the inbox

“Where's my order?” arrives in waves for months, burying the tickets that actually need you. The longer the wait runs, the more of your inbox becomes the same question — asked again at day 7, day 30, and day 60, often by the same buyer.

“Scam” reviews stick

An anxious buyer left in the dark writes the review first and asks questions later. She doesn't conclude that production takes time — she concludes she's been had, and says so in the review the next hundred buyers read.

See it run

The tide coming in on a flooded inbox.

Watch a day-89 “where IS my order??” become a calm, approved reply in your voice. This is the live cockpit, on sample data.

Live cockpit on sample data
The presale-specialist layer

A calm layer on top of the stack you already run.

We don’t replace your helpdesk. We bolt on, take the presale tickets, and answer the long wait — while everything else stays exactly as it is.

Plugs into your existing stack

We bolt onto the Gorgias, Zendesk, Tidio, or Intercom you already run, reading the presale tickets you route to us. You approve and send from your own inbox. No migration, no infra change.

Knows each order's real timeline

Tideover reads order data and your production schedule, so every reply is grounded in where that specific order actually is — tooling, production, QC, packing, dispatch.

Timeline-aware, day-stage replies

A Day 7 nudge and a Day 89 worry need different words. Replies meet the buyer at the emotional stage they're in, in confidence bands — never an invented hard date.

Every novel reply is human-approved

Nothing auto-fires a promise. New situations get a real person's eyes before they ever reach your customer.

The pipeline
  1. 1

    Detect a presale WISMO ticket

  2. 2

    Pull the order’s real production stage

  3. 3

    Score refund risk

    the factors shown
  4. 4

    Draft an on-brand reply in a confidence band

  5. 5 · Route to a person for approval

    Every reply to a worried buyer waits for your yes.

See how it works →
Voice

Your words, not a template.

Replies are assembled from a playbook built on your own tickets, keyed to where each order sits. It reads like you on a good day, not a macro.

Control

Drafts for approval, never auto-sends.

Nothing reaches an anxious backer without a person’s eyes. A hard delivery date physically can’t leave the system — the check runs in code at send time.

Change

Update the timeline once, every reply follows.

When the factory slips, you move one production window. Every future reply and status page reflects it. No re-writing macros.

The operator behind it

In 2020 I started a gym-equipment business the week the gyms closed. I closed $200K in orders in my first seven days — and that was the start of the hardest two years of my working life.

Every one of those orders shipped into the worst freight delays in e-commerce history. Customers waited 60 days and more, and every morning the inbox refilled with the same question: where is my order? I couldn’t make a single container move faster. The only real job was convincing good people to wait a little longer, then doing it again the next day.

That’s where Tideover came from. The name is literal — I spent two years tiding customers over, learning order by order what keeps someone calm through a long wait and what turns a delay into a chargeback. Then I built that judgment into software, because instinct doesn’t scale. At 11pm, on your three-hundredth ‘where’s my order?’ email, instinct fails.

Those numbers — $200K in week one, 60-plus-day waits, two years of it — are my own account of my own business. They stay the only numbers on this page until real merchant results, shared with permission, replace them.

— Dylan

A plain-spoken proof pledge

No invented metric. No fake testimonial. No borrowed logo. No unearned star rating. Every number on this page is a target measured against your own baseline — and the full refund-reduction case study lands only after a real cohort completes.

[CASE STUDY PLACEHOLDER — refund-reduction delta, post first completed cohort]
Pricing

Priced by the presale orders you’re carrying.

Three plans, sized by seats and the orders in your wait window. Every one starts with a 14-day free trial — no card required, nothing auto-bills when it ends.

Starter
$299/mo
1 seat · One operator working one presale queue.
Recommended
Growth
$499/mo
3 seats · A small team splitting the queue.
Scale
$749/mo
10 seats · Multiple campaigns, one cockpit.

14-day free trial · no card required · annual is 2 months free · see seat counts, order caps, and the full feature table

The guarantee

We measure leading indicators — faster first response, fewer WISMO tickets, logged saves — against your own baseline. If your first cycle doesn’t move them, you don’t pay. The full refund-reduction picture takes a complete 60–120 day cycle; we report it after the first cohort finishes, and we’re telling you that up front.

Try it on your own queue

Import your backers, see the risk scores and drafted replies on your real tickets, and decide with the evidence in front of you.

Questions

Answered plainly.

Do you actually have proof it reduces refunds?
Not yet, and we won't pretend we do. A real refund number needs a full cycle, 60–120 days, longer than any trial can run. What we can show you on the trial and during your first cycle are leading indicators: faster first-response times, fewer repeat tickets, logged saves. The refund case study comes after your first cohort finishes its wait, built on your own data.
How is this different from my helpdesk's AI add-on?
Your helpdesk is an excellent generalist. Its AI treats “where's my order” as a shipping question and answers it the same whether you ship in 2 days or 120. It doesn't know which orders are presales, what stage they're in, or that the question means something different at day 7 versus day 89. Tideover is the specialist layer that fills that gap, and it plugs into your tools rather than replacing them.
Is this just ChatGPT?
No. The core doesn't require an LLM at all. Four deterministic engines do the work, and their math is on screen: the risk score shows the exact factors behind it, order value, how long the buyer has waited, sentiment, and production stage. Replies are assembled from an approved playbook keyed to where that order actually sits, so there's nothing to hallucinate. And it reads your real fulfillment window, which ChatGPT has no way to know. There is an optional AI-drafting layer — off by default, disclosed on the security page — and its drafts pass the same hard-date check in code, with a person approving every one before it sends.
We already have a VA who answers tickets.
Keep them. Tideover isn't a replacement, it's the cockpit that turns a general VA into a presale specialist. Each ticket arrives with a drafted reply in your voice, a risk score that shows its factors, and a gift suggestion when a save is worth it. Your VA reads the situation and approves in seconds, instead of clicking through Shopify and the preorder app to guess at a ship date. Same person, far better tools.
What if your AI invents a ship date and makes things worse?
It can't. Nothing goes out without your approval, and replies are constrained to confidence-band windows (“ships in weeks 9–11”), never invented hard dates. We lived the damage a bad timeline promise does to a brand. The check runs in code at send time, so a hard date physically cannot leave the system.
We're juggling Kickstarter backers, late-pledges, and Shopify preorders at once. Can you handle that?
That's the buyer we built this for. Three groups on three clocks in one inbox is the hardest version of the problem. We tag and separate the groups, map each to its real timeline, and make sure a backer never gets told a Shopify-preorder ship window.
Will you make promises you can't keep?
Never. We use confidence bands, “currently tracking for weeks 9–11,” not a hard date. Every novel reply is human-approved before it sends. A false delivery promise is the most damaging thing we could say, so we don't.
We barely get chargebacks.
Two things worth saying. First, rare doesn't mean cheap. A single dispute runs about $128 all-in once you count the fee, the product you re-ship, and the mark it leaves on a merchant account the card networks already watch closely for long delivery (Source: Mastercard 2025 State of Chargebacks). “Item not received” is the exact reason code a 90-day wait invites. Second, disputes were never the everyday cost. The everyday cost is WISMO volume: the same “where's my order?” asked hundreds of times across the wait. That's the bleed Tideover takes off your inbox, dispute or no dispute.
You'll see our customers. What about data security?
Less than you’d think, and that’s by design. The default setup is one rule in your helpdesk: tag presale tickets and route them to a private Tideover webhook, plus a CSV of backers you export yourself. No OAuth, no passwords, no Shopify admin. We see only the tickets you route to us, nothing else in your inbox. The public status page shows a buyer just their first name and a timeline, never their email or lifetime value. Revoking us is deleting that one webhook rule in your helpdesk. We don’t hold SOC 2 and we don’t claim certifications we haven’t earned. What we can and can’t see is laid out line by line on the security page.
What if you disappear mid-cycle? You're one person.
Fair question, and the answer is built into how this works, not a promise. You send every reply from your own helpdesk, under your own name, so the customer relationship was always yours. The status page is a separate hosted page, so switching it off never touches your store. And the whole integration is one routing rule you created in your own helpdesk, so ending it is deleting that rule. If Tideover vanished tomorrow you'd lose a tool, not your support.
Do I switch helpdesks or install anything?
No. Tideover bolts onto the Gorgias, Zendesk, Tidio, or Intercom you already run: it reads the presale tickets you route to it and drafts the replies, and you approve and send them from your own inbox. Nothing to rip out, no second inbox, no infra change.
What happens after the wait ends?
You pause. Tideover runs during the wait, so between cycles there's nothing to manage. When the next campaign or drop opens, you switch it back on for that cohort. Plans are month to month unless you choose annual.
What does it cost?
Plans start at $299/mo, sized by seats and the presale orders in your wait window, and every plan opens with a 14-day free trial — no card required, nothing auto-bills when it ends. Seat counts, order caps, and the full feature table are on the pricing page.

The tide always comes in. Their order is coming.

Start with a free 15-minute presale-support teardown — a real operator looking at your real support, no pitch. We’ll tell you straight whether we can help.

Get a free 15-min teardown
No new helpdesk to install14-day free trial, no card requiredTalk to the operator, not a queue