What is Shopify Sidekick and how to use it

Shopify Sidekick AI is the conversational assistant built directly into the Shopify admin. It is free on every plan, it lives behind the sparkle icon in the top bar, and it can answer store questions, run admin actions, and pull data that would normally take five clicks and a CSV export. If you have been ignoring it, this post is your reason to open it.

Sidekick launched in 2023 as a preview and has been upgraded hard across 2024 and 2025. It now understands your store context, can perform multi-step actions, and pulls from the same Shopify Magic infrastructure that powers product descriptions and image editing inside the admin. It is not a separate product you install. It is already there.

The catch is that most merchants use it like a search bar. Sidekick is better than that. Treated as a real assistant with specific prompts, it saves hours a week on reporting, list building, and routine admin tasks.

What Shopify Sidekick actually is

Sidekick is a chat interface that sits on top of the Shopify admin. You open it by clicking the sparkle icon in the top navigation of any admin page. It understands your store context (which store you are in, which product you are viewing, which report you have open) and it can read, summarize, and act on that context.

The key word is act. Sidekick is not just an answer engine. You can tell it to create a discount, adjust a product, build a collection, or schedule an email, and it will draft the action for you to review and confirm. Nothing is executed silently. Every write action goes through a confirmation step.

On the read side, Sidekick can pull from your orders, products, customers, and analytics. If you ask “what were my top five products last week” you get a ranked list without touching the reports section. If you ask “which customers have ordered three or more times in the last 90 days” you get a segment preview.

How it works under the hood

Sidekick runs on Shopify Magic, the same AI infrastructure that powers product description generation, image background removal, and the email subject line suggestions inside Shopify Email. Shopify uses a mix of its own models and licensed foundation models behind the scenes, and they do not publish the exact stack. What matters to merchants is that queries stay inside Shopify’s infrastructure and do not need an OpenAI or Anthropic API key.

When you ask a question, Sidekick translates it into a set of Shopify admin API calls, fetches the data, and writes a natural-language answer grounded in what it found. For write actions it builds a structured payload and shows it to you as a draft before execution. This grounding step is why it is far more reliable than a generic chatbot on the same question, and why it is less prone to hallucinating a product that does not exist.

Example commands that work today

Here is a non-exhaustive list of prompts that currently work in the Shopify admin. Try them on your own store and see what comes back.

“Show me my top ten products this week by revenue.”
“Which products have less than five units in stock?”
“Create a 15% discount for returning customers, valid for seven days, called WELCOMEBACK.”
“Write a product description for the product I am viewing, highlighting durability and sustainable materials.”
“Build a new collection called Summer Essentials with all products tagged beach.”
“How many orders did I get yesterday, and what was the average order value?”
“Summarize my abandoned checkouts from the last seven days.”
“Which customers have not ordered in the last 180 days?”
“Draft an email campaign announcing a 20% sitewide sale for this weekend.”
“What was my conversion rate last month compared to the month before?”

These work because each one maps cleanly to a Shopify admin API endpoint. If your prompt cannot be grounded in a Shopify data source, Sidekick will either ask you to clarify or fall back to a generic answer.

When to reach for Sidekick

Sidekick is at its best when the alternative would be clicking through several admin pages to pull a number. Reporting questions, quick segment builds, one-off discounts, and product description drafts are where it saves the most time. If you have a repeatable weekly task like “pull last week’s top ten products and send them to the marketing Slack”, Sidekick collapses that into one prompt.

It is also useful as an in-admin coach. Ask “how do I set up a buy one get one discount” and it will walk you through the exact steps with links to the right admin pages. For merchants who do not live in the admin every day, this is genuinely faster than reading a help doc.

Before you lean on Sidekick for strategy work, run your store through our AI readiness checker to see how well your product data is structured for AI tools in general. Sidekick gets much better answers on stores with clean titles, accurate tags, and filled-in metafields.

Where Sidekick falls short

Sidekick is a generalist. It is good at many things and great at almost none. A few areas where it consistently misses:

Deep SEO work. It can draft meta descriptions but it does not audit a site the way a dedicated tool does. Run your store through our SEO checker for a proper scan.
Variant-level image management. Sidekick can upload images and write alt text, but it cannot assign a specific image to a specific variant. That is a job for a dedicated variant image app.
Combined listings and product grouping. Sidekick cannot create a combined listing across separate products. It also cannot render swatches on collection pages.
Complex Liquid or theme edits. It will suggest code but will not confidently edit your theme for you.
Third-party app data. Sidekick only sees Shopify’s own data. If a metric lives in a third-party analytics app, it cannot read it.
Historical forecasting. It can show you what happened. It will not forecast next quarter with any confidence.

For the variant image side specifically, pair Sidekick with Rubik Variant Images on the product page. For collection page swatches and combined listings, pair it with Rubik Combined Listings. Sidekick handles the admin workflow, the Rubik apps handle the front-end experience.

Sidekick vs ChatGPT for Shopify work

ChatGPT is a better writer. Sidekick is a better operator. The difference is grounding.

ChatGPT does not know how many units of SKU-1234 you have in stock right now. It does not know your top product last week. It can write a beautiful product description and brainstorm campaign ideas, but it cannot touch your store. Sidekick can do both, with the tradeoff that its writing is slightly more generic.

The practical move is to use both. Use ChatGPT for brand voice writing, big-picture brainstorms, and long-form content. Use Sidekick for anything that needs live store data or touches the admin. For AEO and answer engine optimization specifically, check our Shopify answer engine optimization guide.

Security and data privacy

Sidekick runs inside Shopify’s infrastructure. Your store data is not sent to a third-party model provider for general training, and Shopify’s privacy documentation confirms that merchant data in Sidekick queries is not used to train public foundation models. Write actions always require a human confirmation step before they execute.

Two practical rules. First, Sidekick logs are retained by Shopify for troubleshooting and quality, so do not paste customer PII that does not already live in the store. Second, because Sidekick respects staff permissions, a staff account with limited access only sees what it is allowed to see in the admin. That matters if you have contractors in the admin with scoped roles.

Tips for better results

Sidekick rewards specific prompts. Vague questions get vague answers. A few patterns that work:

Give a time window. “Last seven days” beats “recently”.
Give a metric. “By revenue” or “by units sold” beats “best”.
Chain actions. “Show me top ten products this week, then create a collection called Best Sellers with those ten products.”
Ask for formats. “Return as a bulleted list” or “return as a table” makes the answer easier to copy.
Review every write action. The draft step is there for a reason. Always skim the payload before hitting confirm.
Clean your data first. Sidekick is only as good as your product tags, descriptions, and metafields. A messy catalog gets messy answers.

For data cleanup, see the Shopify app stack audit and the Shopify SEO checklist for 2026. Both include a product data section that directly improves Sidekick output.

FAQ

Is Shopify Sidekick free?

Yes. Sidekick is included on every Shopify plan at no extra cost. There is no separate subscription.

Where do I find Sidekick in the Shopify admin?

Click the sparkle icon in the top navigation of the Shopify admin. It opens a chat panel on any admin page.

Can Sidekick make changes to my store without asking?

No. Every write action is shown as a draft for you to review and confirm. Nothing is executed silently.

Does Sidekick use my store data to train AI models?

Shopify’s documentation states that merchant data from Sidekick queries is not used to train public foundation models. Data stays inside Shopify’s infrastructure.

Can Sidekick assign images to product variants?

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

Is Sidekick better than ChatGPT for Shopify?

For anything that needs live store data or admin actions, yes. For long-form brand writing and brainstorming, ChatGPT is still stronger.

Does Sidekick work on the Shopify mobile app?

Yes. Sidekick is available in the Shopify mobile app admin, with the same prompts and action patterns as the desktop version.

Next step: open Sidekick in your admin, ask it for last week’s top ten products, and then run your store through the AI readiness checker to see how much cleaner you can make its answers.