Shopify Sidekick is an AI assistant inside your Shopify admin that helps you understand store performance, create content, and complete everyday tasks using plain-language instructions. You can ask questions about your business, request help with technical settings, and review proposed changes before applying them.
To get started, sign in to your Shopify admin, open Sidekick, and describe what you need. Shopify includes Sidekick with its plans, although features and usage limits vary by plan.
This guide covers Shopify Sidekick, rather than unrelated products also called “Sidekick AI.” It explains practical ways to use the assistant while keeping control of your store.
Features and pricing checked against Shopify’s official documentation on November 10, 2026.
What Is Shopify Sidekick?
Sidekick is Shopify’s commerce assistant. It works with your store’s data and can help with questions and tasks that would otherwise require navigating several admin pages.
For example, you might ask it to summarize sales performance, help organize a collection, or prepare content for a new product launch. It can also handle multistep requests, with longer tasks continuing in the background until they are ready for review.
Its usefulness comes from connecting a conversation to your actual store. However, a helpful answer still depends on accurate records, clear instructions, and your review.
Is Sidekick a Customer-Facing Chatbot?
No. Sidekick helps merchants and staff inside Shopify. It does not conduct customer support conversations on your behalf.
A storefront chat tool serves shoppers asking about delivery, products, or orders. Sidekick serves the people running the business. Keep that distinction in mind when choosing tools for customer service.
Access, Languages, and Pricing
What Do You Need to Use Sidekick?
You need access to a Shopify store and an authorized admin account. Staff members use Sidekick within their existing permissions; the assistant does not unlock restricted information or features.
Shopify supports Sidekick on desktop, mobile browsers, and the Shopify app on phones and tablets. However, access to the assistant does not mean every task works on every device.
For your first session, use a desktop browser. It gives you more room to inspect suggestions and supports tasks such as generating workflows and custom admin apps.
Which Languages and Regions Are Supported?
Shopify describes Sidekick as multilingual and says it adapts to store language settings. You can ask questions in your preferred language. Its product-description generation documentation also supports languages available through Shopify.
The reviewed documentation does not provide a complete country-by-country Sidekick feature matrix. For an international store, verify the specific task in your account instead of assuming identical availability everywhere.
When requesting localized content, specify the language, audience, currency, and measurement units. A French product description for Canadian shoppers may need different wording and commercial details from one intended for France.
How Much Does Sidekick Cost?
There is no separate standard Sidekick subscription charge: Shopify includes it with your Shopify plan. Features and usage allowances can differ.
For context, Shopify’s US pricing page displayed these subscription rates when checked:
| Shopify plan | Advertised monthly equivalent with yearly billing |
|---|---|
| Basic | US$29 |
| Grow | US$79 |
| Advanced | US$299 |
These are Shopify platform subscription prices, not Sidekick fees. Check the official Shopify pricing page for your region, billing cycle, taxes, and current offers. Monthly billing can cost more.
Budget separately for paid apps, domains, payment processing, advertising, and outside services. An assistant’s recommendation does not make those services free.
For a practical way to monitor recurring app expenses, see best guide to SaaS spend management.
How to Use Sidekick AI: Step by Step
1. Open Your Store and Start a Conversation
Sign in to the correct Shopify store. Open the Sidekick field or select the Sidekick icon shown in your admin.
Navigate to the relevant page first when possible. Sidekick can use the page you are viewing as context, which helps when discussing a particular task.
Start with a small request, such as:
“Summarize yesterday’s orders and identify anything I should investigate. Give me information only.”
2. Define the Task Clearly
Include four details:
- Goal: What you want to accomplish.
- Scope: Which products, dates, or records matter.
- Constraints: What must stay unchanged.
- Output: Whether you want a table, explanation, or draft.
Shopify recommends specific instructions and direct references to relevant store resources. Where available, use @ mentions to select the exact product, order, or collection.
For example:
“Draft a description for this cotton tote using only its recorded specifications. Keep it under 100 words, use a friendly tone, and leave pricing and inventory unchanged.”
3. Refine the Response
Treat the first response as a working draft.
Useful follow-up instructions include:
- “Explain which records support that finding.”
- “Separate confirmed facts from possible explanations.”
- “Remove any benefits not supported by the product specifications.”
- “Show the proposed changes before I approve them.”
Check that Sidekick understood the scope before expanding the task.
4. Review and Approve Changes
The approval process depends on the task. Sidekick may fill a form for you to save or present draft changes in a Store changes card.
For supported batches, review the changes before publishing. Shopify currently says this review-and-publish feature works on desktop and mobile browsers, but not inside the Shopify app. Published changes also do not have an automatic undo.
Before approving, check product names, amounts, dates, affected records, and any warnings. Afterward, open the relevant admin page or storefront to verify the result.
Practical Sidekick Use Cases and Prompts
The following prompts are examples to adapt to your store, rather than guarantees that every request will work with every configuration.
Investigate Sales Changes
Sidekick can help create analytics queries, visualizations, and data explorations. Naming the metric and reporting period makes the request more useful.
Try:
“Show daily net sales and order counts for the last 28 complete days and the preceding 28 days. Break down results by sales channel and flag missing data.”
Then ask:
“Which changes deserve investigation? Label possible explanations as hypotheses.”
A revenue decline does not explain its own cause. Stockouts, fewer visitors, refunds, or a previous promotion could each affect the result.
Check equivalent periods, store time zone, currency, and metric definitions. Avoid judging a full previous month against only part of the current month.
Draft Product Descriptions
Shopify’s product-description tools generate copy from supplied details, with language matching guided by your prompt. The documented automatic product-description generation workflow requires a desktop computer.
Example:
“Write a 90-word description for a 750 ml stainless-steel bottle. Include the screw-top lid and hand-wash instructions. Do not invent insulation performance, certifications, or warranty terms.”
Read the result as someone responsible for fulfilling the promise. If it claims the bottle keeps drinks cold for 24 hours, you need evidence before publishing.
The same review principle applies to sizing, materials, compatibility, delivery promises, and return terms.
Prepare Discounts and Customer Segments
Sidekick can help create discounts and customer segments from a description, with results reviewed before they take effect.
Example:
“Prepare a 10% discount for the Summer Accessories collection, valid from June 1 to June 7, 2027, in my store’s time zone. Require a minimum order value of US$50. Show the settings for review.”
Check eligibility, product exclusions, discount combinations, and expiry carefully.
A promotion can increase orders while reducing profit. Before approving it, consider product costs, payment fees, shipping subsidies, and expected returns.
Build a Shopify Flow Workflow
Sidekick can generate Shopify Flow workflows from plain-language descriptions. Workflow generation requires a desktop, and generated workflows remain inactive until you manually enable them. Shopify advises reviewing and testing them first. help.shopify.com
Start with a modest task:
“Create a workflow that tags newly created orders as ‘large-order-review’ when the order total exceeds US$300. Do not cancel orders or send customer messages.”
Then:
- Inspect the trigger.
- Check the condition and currency assumptions.
- Review the action.
- Test an order that should qualify and one that should not.
- Enable the workflow after confirming the results.
Once enabled, an automation can act on future events without another chat approval. That makes testing especially important.
For broader campaign planning and integration support, read marketing automation agency guide.
Create a Custom Admin App
For more specialized internal tasks, Sidekick can generate admin apps on Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Shopify Plus. This requires a desktop web browser and the appropriate app-development permission.
These apps operate inside the Shopify admin. They are not customer-facing storefront apps.
A sensible starting request might be:
“Build an internal product-review tracker that helps our team identify listings needing updated descriptions.”
Test it with a small set of records before relying on it across the store.
Permissions, Privacy, and Memory
Sidekick follows staff access controls. Give each team member the permissions their role requires, and avoid sharing the owner’s login simply to make a task easier.
Shopify’s subprocessor documentation lists AI service providers that may process personal data included in Sidekick inputs or responses. Do not assume conversations are processed entirely within your browser or never involve outside providers.
Use only the information necessary for the task. Avoid pasting passwords, API secrets, payment-card details, or unrelated customer information.
Can You Control What Sidekick Remembers?
Yes. Sidekick supports memory controls. Before sending the first message in a new conversation, you can turn memory off. You can also ask it to summarize or forget stored information.
Deleting a conversation removes it from chat history and conversation memory, but does not remove saved preferences. Treat memory settings as personalization controls, rather than assuming they describe every aspect of data retention.
Usage Limits and Common Problems
Sidekick should not be described as unlimited. For example, app generation has plan-dependent hourly and weekly limits shared across the store. Complex generation and repeated refinements consume more allowance; the usage display shows your current position.
If something does not work, narrow down the issue:
| Problem | What to check |
|---|---|
| Sidekick is missing | Confirm the store and account, refresh the admin, and check the current access documentation. |
| A task is unavailable | Check the required device, plan, permissions, and installed apps. |
| An answer seems wrong | Specify the records, date range, metric, and assumptions again. |
| A workflow does nothing | Inspect its trigger, conditions, test results, and activation status. |
| An app-generation request stops | Check the usage indicator and wait for allowance to become available. |
Even a technically successful response can be commercially unsuitable. Sidekick cannot decide your acceptable margin, validate an unsupported product promise, or guarantee sales growth.
FAQs
Is Shopify Sidekick free?
Sidekick is included with Shopify plans without a separate standard subscription fee. Your Shopify subscription and any paid apps or services still have their own costs. Shopify
Do I need to install a Sidekick app?
No separate Sidekick installation is needed. Access it from your Shopify admin. Be careful not to confuse similarly named third-party products with Shopify’s assistant.
Can Sidekick change my store without permission?
Shopify says live-store changes require approval. Review the actual changes before saving or publishing, and separately test any workflow you choose to activate.
Can Sidekick work with third-party apps?
It can work with installed apps that have added Sidekick support. Shopify documents an approval step before Sidekick uses a supported app in a conversation. Compatibility is not universal.
Can Sidekick help a new store with little sales data?
Yes. Content drafting and setup guidance can still be useful. However, a store with little transaction history has limited evidence for meaningful sales analysis. Begin with clear product information and operational tasks.
Final Words
Sidekick AI is most useful when you give it a specific task and inspect the result. Start with one sales question, one product-description draft, or one simple workflow.
Measure success by the time saved, the accuracy of the output, and the amount of correction required. Expand its role as you learn which tasks it handles reliably for your store.