Shopify Flow AI Assistant Prompts: A Practical Guide (2026)

Key takeaways

• Shopify Flow’s AI assistant is Sidekick used inside Flow - launched December 2025. You describe an automation in plain English and it builds the trigger, conditions, and actions for you.
• The biggest determinant of a good output is prompt specificity. “Tag VIP customers” gives a vague workflow. “Tag customers as VIP when they place an order over $200” gives a working one.
• It’s strongest at tagging, segments, notifications, inventory alerts, and scheduled reports. It struggles with deep multi-branch logic and Liquid-heavy actions.
• Workflows are drafted into the editor for your review - nothing runs until you click Activate.
• For changes outside Flow’s remit (theme edits, landing pages, quizzes), use Fudge - the AI assistant cannot edit your storefront.

The Shopify Flow AI assistant collapses the steepest part of Flow’s learning curve: knowing the names of triggers, conditions, and actions, and stitching them together. With it, you describe the outcome and the workflow is drafted for you.

This is a practical prompt reference - copy any of these into Flow’s Sidekick panel and adjust for your store. The prompts below are the ones we use ourselves, and patterns we see consistently work for the merchants we support.

Why you can trust us

We’ve been in the Shopify ecosystem for four years and built Fudge - an AI storefront editor used by hundreds of Shopify merchants. We work with merchants on Flow setups regularly and have tested these prompts across active stores.

What is Shopify Flow’s AI assistant?

Shopify Flow is Shopify’s native automation tool - if X happens, do Y. The AI assistant is Sidekick, accessed from inside Flow. It became generally available in December 2025¹ and was extended in early 2026 alongside Flow’s vertical-layout redesign and safe-preview testing².

Where to find it: Open Shopify admin → Apps → Flow → click the Sidekick icon in the workflow editor. You can also describe a workflow from the Sidekick panel anywhere in the admin and it’ll route the request to Flow.

What it does: Takes a plain-English description and drafts a complete workflow - trigger, conditions, actions - into Flow’s editor. You review, edit, and click Activate.

What it doesn’t do: Run anything automatically. Workflows always require manual activation. It also doesn’t access deep multi-branch logic well; expect to refine those by hand.

Anatomy of a good prompt

The pattern that works:

Trigger (what starts the workflow) + Condition (the rule that filters when it runs) + Action (what should happen).

Weak: “Tag VIP customers.”

Strong: “When a customer places an order over $200, tag them as VIP.”

The strong version names the trigger (order placed), the condition ($200), and the action (apply VIP tag). The weak version forces Sidekick to guess at all three.

If you have an exception or follow-up step, add it as a sentence: “Then send me a Slack notification with the customer name and order total.” Sidekick handles compound prompts well as long as each clause is unambiguous.

Customer tagging

Tagging is Sidekick’s strongest use case in Flow - low ambiguity, well-supported triggers and actions.

• “When a customer places their first order, tag them with first-time-buyer.”
• “When a customer’s lifetime spend crosses $1,000, tag them as VIP.”
• “When a customer places an order over $500, tag the customer as high-value and the order as vip-handling.”
• “Tag a customer with loyal after their fifth completed order.”
• “When a customer subscribes to email marketing, tag them with subscriber. When they unsubscribe, remove the tag.”
• “When a customer places an order from Canada, tag them with ca-customer.”
• “When a customer hasn’t placed an order in 90 days, tag them with at-risk.”
• “When a refund is issued for a customer’s order, tag them with refunded.”

Customer segments

Segments work the same way as tagging but with conditional filters Sidekick can compose for you.

• “Create a customer segment of US customers who have spent over $300 in the last 90 days and are subscribed to email marketing.”
• “Create a segment of customers who have purchased from the Outerwear collection in the last 6 months.”
• “Create a segment of customers who placed an order in the last 30 days but haven’t opened any of our last 5 emails.” (Requires Klaviyo or Shopify Email integration.)
• “Create a segment of B2B customers who haven’t reordered in 60 days.”
• “Create a segment of one-time buyers from the last year who spent over $100 - I want to retarget them.”

Order tagging

Tag the order, not the customer, when the property is about that specific transaction.

• “Tag every order with the sales channel it came from (Online Store, Instagram, POS, Amazon).”
• “Tag orders containing more than 5 items as bulk.”
• “Tag orders with expedited shipping as rush.”
• “Tag orders shipping internationally with international and the destination country code.”
• “Tag orders containing a product from the Pre-order collection as preorder-hold and pause fulfilment.”
• “Tag orders over $1,000 as manual-review and skip auto-fulfilment.”

Inventory alerts and stock management

Sidekick handles low-stock and stockout patterns cleanly.

• “When inventory for any variant drops below 10 units, send an email to [email protected] with the SKU and current count.”
• “When a product hits zero inventory, automatically unpublish it from the online store. When stock is replenished above 5, republish it.”
• “When inventory for a SKU tagged bestseller drops below 25, send a Slack message to #merchandising.”
• “Every Monday at 9am, send me an email listing all products with fewer than 20 units in stock.”
• “When the inventory of a variant reaches zero, hide it from search and tag the product as out-of-stock.”
• “During November and December, treat any variant under 50 units as low stock instead of the usual 10.”

Fraud and risk

Use Shopify’s built-in risk score plus your own thresholds. Be explicit about what to do with flagged orders.

• “When an order has a high risk score, hold fulfilment, tag the order as risk-review, and email [email protected] with the order details.”
• “When an order’s billing and shipping addresses are in different countries and the order total is over $500, hold fulfilment for manual review.”
• “When the same customer places three orders within an hour, tag all of them as velocity-review and notify the team in Slack.”
• “When an order ships to a freight forwarding address, tag it as forwarder and skip the standard expedited shipping option.”

Notifications and alerts

Internal alerts to email, Slack, or task management tools. Keep the message format explicit so you don’t get cryptic notifications.

• “When an order over $1,000 is placed, send a Slack message to #high-value-orders with the customer name, total, and a link to the order.”
• “When a payment dispute is opened, email [email protected] with the order number, amount, and dispute reason.”
• “When a customer leaves a 1- or 2-star product review, post a Slack message to #cx with the review text and a link to the product.”
• “When a B2B customer places their first order, email the account manager assigned to that company.”
• “When an abandoned checkout has a cart value over $500, notify our outbound team in Slack.”

Scheduled and time-based workflows

Use the scheduled trigger for recurring summaries.

• “Every Monday at 8am, email me a summary of last week’s revenue, order count, and top 5 products by units sold.”
• “On the first of every month, email [email protected] a list of all customers who hit VIP status in the prior month.”
• “Every day at 9am, list any open orders that are more than 3 days old and unfulfilled.”
• “Every Friday afternoon, post a summary of the week’s refunds and disputes to #ops in Slack.”

Post-purchase and retention

Most of these depend on having an email tool integrated (Klaviyo, Shopify Email, Omnisend). Sidekick reads the integration’s available actions automatically.

• “Three days after an order is marked delivered, trigger the Review request flow in Klaviyo.”
• “When a customer hits 5 lifetime orders, send them the Loyalty unlock email in Klaviyo and tag them as loyalty-tier-1.”
• “When a customer hasn’t ordered in 60 days, add them to the Win-back Klaviyo list.”
• “When a customer’s order is delivered and they have not previously left a review, tag them with review-eligible 14 days after delivery.”
• “When a subscription order fails payment, send the customer a friendly retry email and notify the CX team.”

B2B and wholesale

Sidekick recognises Shopify’s B2B objects (companies, locations, payment terms) and can route on them.

• “When a B2B order is placed, tag it with the company name, route it to the wholesale fulfilment location, and email the assigned account manager.”
• “When a new company is created in B2B, send a welcome email and add them to the New B2B segment.”
• “When a B2B customer’s outstanding balance crosses $5,000, alert finance and pause new orders for that company.”
• “When a B2B order is placed with net-30 terms, schedule a payment reminder email for 25 days after the invoice date.”

Fulfilment

• “When a customer places two or more orders within 24 hours, hold all of their open orders so they can be shipped together.”
• “When an order ships to California, route it to the LA fulfilment location. Otherwise route it to NJ.”
• “When an order contains a fragile product, add a 24-hour fulfilment hold and tag it handle-with-care.”
• “When a Shop Promise order is placed, prioritise it in the fulfilment queue and send a Slack alert if it isn’t picked within 2 hours.”

Tips for getting better results

1. Name the trigger as a verb event, not a state. “When a customer places an order over $200” works. “Customers who spend a lot” doesn’t - there’s no event for Sidekick to hook into.

2. Quote your tag values exactly. Use vip (lowercase, no spaces) or VIP-2026 (consistent across workflows). If you mix VIP and vip in different prompts, Flow treats them as different tags. Tell Sidekick the literal string: “tag the customer with vip (all lowercase)”.

3. Specify the email recipient or Slack channel. “Email me” without an address makes Sidekick guess. Give it [email protected] or #alerts directly.

4. Iterate inside Flow, not in chat. When the draft workflow opens in the editor, click into individual nodes and adjust. Asking Sidekick to “make it better” rarely improves output - editing the specific condition is faster.

5. Preview before activating. Flow’s preview mode runs the workflow against sample data without affecting your live store². Always preview a tagging or fulfilment workflow before activating - the cost of a wrong tag is small, the cost of pausing every order is not.

6. Save common patterns as Sidekick skills. If you find yourself running the same kind of prompt repeatedly (per-collection tagging, weekly reports, etc.), save it as a Sidekick skill so it’s a one-click rerun.

7. Build one workflow per concern. A single workflow that tags, emails, holds, and notifies tends to be brittle. Break it into three smaller workflows that each do one thing - they’re easier to debug and Sidekick drafts them more reliably.

What the Flow AI assistant can’t do

Complex multi-branch logic. If/else trees with three or more branches, or workflows that combine data from multiple objects (orders + draft orders + customer history) usually need manual refinement. Sidekick will draft a single-branch version that you’ll need to expand.

Liquid-heavy actions. When an action requires custom Liquid (formatting an email body with order line items, computing weighted scores), Sidekick gets the structure right but the Liquid often needs editing.

App-specific actions you haven’t installed. Sidekick only sees actions provided by apps already installed on your store. Asking it to “send to Klaviyo” without Klaviyo installed produces a workflow that won’t run.

Anything outside Flow. This is the big one. Sidekick (and therefore Flow’s AI assistant) cannot edit your storefront. It cannot:

• Create or modify a landing page
• Build a product recommendation quiz
• Add or remove a product page section
• Change theme colours, fonts, or layout
• Write or edit Liquid templates
• Build a popup, banner, or announcement bar

For these, you need a different tool.

Where Fudge fits

Flow’s AI assistant handles the operations side of running a store - data, tagging, notifications, fulfilment rules. Fudge handles the storefront side - the visual layer that customers actually see.

Where the Flow AI assistant ends, Fudge picks up. You describe a change in plain English:

• “Build a Black Friday landing page with a headline, countdown timer, three featured collections, and a sticky CTA.”
• “Add a product recommendation quiz to the homepage with three questions and route to the right collection.”
• “Replace the homepage hero with a video background and a 50% dark overlay so the headline is legible.”

Fudge generates the code, shows a preview against your live theme, and only writes to your store when you approve. Together with Flow’s AI assistant, the two cover most of what a merchant needs AI for - without needing a developer.

Related: Shopify Sidekick Prompts: The Complete Cheatsheet.

Related: Shopify Sidekick Use Cases: What It’s Actually Good At.

Related: Shopify Sidekick Limitations.