Shopify Sidekick: A Game Changer for Shopify Merchants and Agencies

April 10, 2026
App Guides, Shopify Tips
12 min read

Shopify Sidekick is your AI Assistant for your Shopify store. It’s included with every Shopify plan and available right inside your admin for unlimited stores, all for FREE. With just a click of the sparkle icon in your Shopify top nav, you’ll open up the chat window where you can type out a question or request for assistance, data on your store, or even instruct Shopify to complete admin tasks for you. Most merchants don’t even know this feature exists, despite it being available on every single Shopify plan for free.

I was sitting at a coffee shop in Austin last month watching a merchant spend 40 minutes manually build a discount code. One by one she poured through each field making sure everything was correct. She was even double checking the demographics for the promotion, previewing the code, and then re-writing the expiraton date. Meanwhile, in eight seconds she could have been doing the same thing in Sidekick by typing: Create a 20% discount for returning customers called SPRING20 valid for 7 days. The disparity between what a merchant knows to do and what a merchant actually does when using discounts when one of the features of Sidekick.

But Sidekick is not magic. It has real limits and if you treat it like a generic chatbot you will get generic chatbot answers. In this post we will cover what Sidekick does, how it will save merchants (both solo and agency) time and some of the things that it can not do. And then we will go through ways to get better results from the tool.

In this post

What Shopify Sidekick actually is

Sidekick is a conversational interface into your Shopify store that lives right inside the Shopify admin. When launched in mid-2023, it existed only as a preview, but Shopify has been aggressively enhancing it since then with numerous updates that allowed Sidekick to get better recognition of store context, to perform multiple actions in a single command, and to access more data on Shopify store.

Thanks to Shopify Magic, Under the hood Sidekick runs on the same technology that powers AI generated product descriptions, automatic removal of background from images, and AI powered email subject line suggestions. Powered by Shopify’s proprietary and licensed foundation models that they won’t publicly disclose, and for good reason. What’s important is that Sidekick can ingest data about your store (orders, products, customers, analytics etc.) and then you can have it take actions on your store (discounts, product collections, emails etc.). Every write action requires a confirmation step where you explicitly confirm before the action is executed.

This is an administrative time-saver, it saves time by showing your core website statistics in plain english as opposed to having to review them through an analytics tool. It is NOT a business strategy consultant tool.

What Sidekick can do right now

Shortlist of prompts that actually work today. Test them on your store.

Reporting and data pulls:

  • “Show me my top 10 products this week by revenue.”
  • “Which products have less than 5 units in stock?”
  • “What was my conversion rate last month vs the month before?”
  • “Summarize abandoned checkouts from the last 7 days.”
  • “Which customers ordered 3 or more times in the last 90 days?”

Admin actions:

  • “Create a 15% discount for returning customers, valid 7 days, called WELCOMEBACK.”
  • “Build a collection called Summer Essentials with all products tagged beach.”
  • “Write a product description for the product I am viewing, highlighting durability.”
  • “Draft an email campaign announcing a 20% sitewide sale this weekend.”

Guidance:

  • “How do I set up a buy one get one discount?”
  • “How do I add a new staff account with limited permissions?”
  • “What apps do you recommend for email marketing?”

The pattern: anything that maps nicely to a Shopify admin API worked well. Anything that required external information or human judgment didn’t. Therefore, it’s a good idea to first make sure that your product information is clean before testing out Sidekick on your store. If you load up your store with messy tags and blank descriptions, you can expect to get some funky results. First run yourself through the Shopify SEO checker to see if there are any gaping holes in your store before testing out this product.

How agencies use Sidekick differently

Sidekick is really powerful for solo merchants (it takes the click out of many actions) and for merchants with agencies managing 10 client stores, 20 client stores, 50 client stores, etc.

Agency developers can switch between client accounts and within 7 days know what key activities have occurred without having to scroll through Agency timeline posts. Project managers need only ask “what are the top 5 products by margin” to get up-to-date information to discuss during client meetings. Agency customers are also able to quickly get information such as “what are the collections and how many products are in each” or “list all collections with zero products” within a 3 second search.

– Sidekick respects staff permissions. This can often bite agencies who have scoped out their staff account to only allow editing of products and orders. Agencies should have the proper staff role configured to allow READ access to the various data surfaces that Sidekick requires to process and return analytics.

I was told by one agency owner that they had cut Monday reporting down from 2 hours to 25 minutes per client by running five standard prompts per store. Not automated, not sophisticated, just faster.

Sidekick vs clicking through the admin manually

For your reference: rough approximation of comparison of time-to-answer for some common tasks that merchants do in the admin. Note that Shopify does not publish such stats, and these are based off of my observation of merchants, so take for granted.

Time to manually pull the top 10 products for the week (I’d have to manually go into Analytics report, select the correct date range, then sort the products by performance, page by page, scrolling down until I got to #10)? It would take me about 4 minutes, but with Sidekick, it’s just 15 seconds. Creating a percentage-based discount for one customer segment manually would take around 3 minutes (setting up a new custom discount, entering the correct customer segment, and previewing the result). Sidekick would take one line of code to accomplish the same task. Time to find all products with zero inventory manually? Filtering a large list of products in the product report, scrolling through the pages, and maybe exporting a CSV if I needed to reference the information later? It would take me about 10 seconds with Sidekick to generate a much cleaner and accurate report.

It’s pretty obvious from these screenshots, anything that requires more than 3 clicks between admin pages is faster in Sidekick. Anything that requires manual judgment in sidekick (like selecting a good theme layout or product image arrangement) is still manual.

Nobody likes to admit mistakes with their catalog but Sidekick can return weird search results if your store has poor data. Clean up your product titles before trying to do SEO and read our post on product image SEO to learn how to properly name and organize products on your site for better returns from both Bing and AI-powered search engines like Microsoft Site Search.

Where Sidekick falls short

My problem with how Shopify is marketing this product is that it is being called your “AI business partner” but there are several things that it cannot do in five minutes that a real business partner can. See note at the bottom of this list for my reason for this caveat.

  1. No variant-level image management. Sidekick can upload images and write alt text. It can not assign a specific image to a specific variant combination. That is a real workflow gap for any store with color or material variants. You need a dedicated app for that (more on this below).
  2. No combined listings or product grouping. Sidekick can not link separate products together as a combined listing or render swatches on collection pages. If you sell the same shirt in 8 colors as separate products, Sidekick won’t help you group them.
  3. No deep SEO auditing. It can draft meta descriptions. It can not crawl your site, check for broken links, or audit structured data. Use our SEO checker for that.
  4. No Liquid editing. It will suggest theme code snippets if you ask, but it will not edit your theme files directly. And the code it suggests is… sometimes wrong. Don’t copy-paste Sidekick Liquid into a live theme without reading it first.
  5. No third-party app data. Sidekick only sees Shopify’s native data. If your revenue attribution lives in a third-party analytics tool, Sidekick has no idea it exists.
  6. No forecasting. It can show you what happened. It will not predict what will happen next quarter.

For the variant image gap use Sidekick with Rubik Variant Images on the product page, and for collection swatches and product grouping use it with Rubik Combined Listings. Sidekick is separate from the apps that power its workflows, enabling it to render in the admin separately from experiences on the site’s storefront.

Sidekick vs ChatGPT for store work

ChatGPT writes better. Sidekick operates better. That is the split.

ChatGPT does not know how many units of SKU-1234 you sold last week. It can not create a discount in your admin. It can not pull your real conversion rate. What it can do is write product descriptions with a specific brand voice, brainstorm campaign ideas, draft ad copy, and produce long-form content. Sidekick does none of those well.

The practical approach: use BOTH ChatGPT (or Claude, Gemini, etc) for generating content, brainstorming ideas and strategies and other tasks that don’t require live access to your Shopify store. And Sidekick for tasks that DO require live access to your Shopify store. For a deeper dive on how these new AI shopping assistants are revolutionizing product discovery on Shopify stores, check out our post on AI shopping assistants. For a step by step guide on how to structure your Shopify store’s data to make the most of this new trend, check out our AEO guide to optimizing your store for answer engine optimization.

Prompting tips that actually work

Sidekick rewards specificity. Vague input leads to vague output, but there are some established patterns that help.

  • Always give a time window. “Last 7 days” beats “recently.” Always.
  • Specify the metric. “By revenue” or “by units sold” beats “best.”
  • Chain actions. “Show me top 10 products this week, then create a collection called Best Sellers with those 10.” One prompt, two outputs.
  • Request a format. “Return as a table” or “as a bulleted list” makes copy-paste easier.
  • Review every write action. The draft step is there for a reason. Skim before confirming.
  • Clean your data first. Sidekick is only as smart as your product tags, descriptions, and metafields. Garbage in, garbage out. The Shopify SEO checklist covers data cleanup in detail.

The chat really lacks strategic insight. Don’t ask it something open like “How would you help my retail store grow?” It will spit out something vapid and trite, five bullets that read like some archived Shopify blog from 2019. Ask it questions about very specific operations and that’s where it’ll produce some value.

FAQ

Is Shopify Sidekick free?

Yes. Sidekick is included with every Shopify plan at no extra cost. No separate subscription, no per-query charges. Shopify includes it as part of every store.

Where is Sidekick in the Shopify admin?

Click the sparkle icon in the top navigation bar of your Shopify admin. This opens a chat window that floats over the admin pages.

Can Sidekick make changes without my approval?

No. All write actions (including discounts, product changes, and collection updates) are shown as a draft first and require your manual confirmation before execution. Nothing gets applied without you reviewing and approving it.

Does Sidekick train on my store data?

Shopify states that your store data is used to generate responses within your session but is not used to train the underlying foundation models. The data stays within Shopify’s infrastructure. For the most current details on data handling, check Shopify’s privacy policy and Sidekick documentation.

Can agencies use Sidekick across client stores?

Yes. Agency staff can use Sidekick in any store that they have access to. Sidekick will respect the permissions of the agency staff role you set up and only show them relevant information.

Can Sidekick assign images to product variants?

No. Sidekick can upload images and add alt text but cannot assign specific images to specific variants. Use a dedicated variant image app for that.

Does Sidekick work on mobile?

Yes. The Shopify mobile app also comes with a version of Sidekick. It functions similarly to the desktop version of Sidekick, with same prompts and actions.

Open Sidekick and ask it “what were my top 5 products last week by revenue”. If the answer is useful then you have clean data. If the answer is gibberish then start with the AI readiness checker and fix your catalog before you try anything else.

Co-Founder at Craftshift

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