Key takeaways
- Shopify Sidekick is built into your Shopify admin - no install required. Open it with the assistant icon in the top right.
- It can answer questions about your store data, create discounts, build automations, write content, and surface insights.
- Sidekick works best for admin tasks and operations. It cannot edit your storefront, theme, or visual design.
- Voice input is supported - you can speak your requests rather than type them.
- For storefront and design changes, you need a separate tool like Fudge.
Shopify Sidekick is Shopify’s built-in AI assistant. It lives in your admin and can help you run your store - answering questions, taking actions, and surfacing insights - all from a chat interface.
This guide covers how to access it, what it can do, the most useful prompts to try, and where it hits its limits.
Why you can trust us
Jacques has over 15 years of software development experience and has worked closely with Shopify merchants on their stores. We’ve been in the Shopify ecosystem for four years and built Fudge - an AI storefront editor with a 5.0 rating on the Shopify App Store. We use Sidekick ourselves and understand its strengths alongside the gaps it leaves.
How to open Shopify Sidekick
Sidekick is built into every Shopify admin. No setup, no install.
To open it:
- Log in to your Shopify admin
- Look for the assistant icon in the top-right corner of the screen (it looks like a small sparkle or star)
- Click it to open the Sidekick chat panel
- Type your question or request - or tap the microphone icon to use voice input
That’s it. Sidekick is ready to use immediately.
What Shopify Sidekick can do
Sidekick handles four broad categories of tasks.
Answer questions about your store
Ask Sidekick anything about your store’s data and it will pull the answer directly.
- “What were my top 5 products last month?”
- “How many orders are unfulfilled right now?”
- “What’s my average order value this week?”
- “Which customers haven’t ordered in 90 days?”
- “What’s my conversion rate this month compared to last month?”
This replaces manually navigating to reports and is faster for quick data checks.
Take actions in your admin
Sidekick can perform tasks for you - not just tell you things, but actually do them.
- Create a discount code
- Send an email campaign
- Build a Shopify Flow automation
- Tag a customer segment
- Create a new customer or company record
- Schedule a product to go live at a specific time
You describe what you want, and Sidekick handles the steps.
Write content
Sidekick can generate and edit text across your store.
- Product descriptions
- Email campaign copy
- SEO meta titles and descriptions
- Promotional text for sales and campaigns
- SMS marketing messages
Surface proactive insights (Pulse)
The Sidekick Pulse feature appears on your home dashboard. It proactively shows you things worth acting on - without you having to ask.
- Products that are trending in a region
- Checkout abandonment spikes
- Low stock warnings before you run out
- Bundle opportunities based on cart data
The most useful Sidekick prompts
These are the requests that deliver the most value day-to-day.
Related: Shopify Sidekick Prompts: The Complete Cheatsheet.
For store insights:
- “Show me sales by product for the last 30 days”
- “Which products have the highest return rate?”
- “What’s trending in my store right now?”
- “Write a ShopifyQL query for revenue by traffic source”
For operations:
- “Create a 15% discount code for VIP customers that expires in 7 days”
- “Build a Flow that sends a follow-up email 3 days after an order is delivered”
- “Tag all customers who have spent over $500 as ‘high-value’”
- “Show me all orders with open disputes”
For content:
- “Write a product description for [product name] that focuses on [benefit]”
- “Rewrite this product description to be more concise: [paste text]”
- “Write an email announcing our summer sale with a 20% discount”
- “Write an SMS message for our flash sale ending tonight”
For B2B:
- “Create a new company record for [company name] with net-30 payment terms”
- “Show me all B2B orders placed in the last 7 days”
How to get better results from Sidekick
Be specific. “Show me sales” gives a broad result. “Show me sales by product category for the last 14 days, sorted by revenue” gives exactly what you need.
Give context for content. When asking Sidekick to write copy, tell it the product’s key benefit, the audience, and the tone. “Write a product description for a bamboo water bottle, targeting eco-conscious shoppers, in a friendly but informative tone” will outperform “write a product description for my water bottle.”
Use it for automation setup. Building a Flow workflow manually requires understanding triggers, conditions, and actions. Describing it to Sidekick in plain language - “send a Slack notification to our ops channel when a high-value order is placed” - is much faster.
Ask follow-up questions. Sidekick remembers the context of your conversation. If you ask for last month’s top products and want to dig deeper, just ask: “Which of these have inventory below 50 units?”
What Sidekick cannot do
Sidekick is powerful for admin tasks, but it has clear limits.
It cannot edit your storefront or theme. Sidekick lives in the admin. It has no access to your theme files, the Theme Editor, or your storefront’s visual design. If you want to change a layout, update a section, add a landing page, or modify your product page design, Sidekick cannot help.
It cannot write Liquid code. Theme customizations require Shopify’s Liquid templating language. Sidekick doesn’t generate or edit Liquid.
It cannot make visual design decisions. Font choices, color schemes, section layouts, mobile responsiveness - these are outside Sidekick’s scope.
It cannot create pages. New landing pages, collection pages, or custom page layouts require the Theme Editor or a page builder - not Sidekick.
For all of these, Fudge fills the gap. You describe what you want in plain English - a new landing page, a product page layout change, a promotional section - and Fudge writes the code and shows you a preview before anything goes live.
Related: Shopify Sidekick Limitations: What It Can’t Do.
Related: Update Colors and Fonts in Shopify.
Sidekick vs the Shopify Theme Editor
It’s worth understanding what each tool covers:
| Task | Sidekick | Theme Editor |
|---|---|---|
| View store analytics | Yes | No |
| Create discounts | Yes | No |
| Build automations | Yes | No |
| Write product copy | Yes | No |
| Edit page layouts | No | Yes |
| Change fonts and colors | No | Yes |
| Add new sections | No | Yes |
| Create landing pages | No | Yes (limited) |
They’re complementary tools for different parts of running a store.
FAQ
Is Shopify Sidekick free or does it require a paid plan?
Sidekick is included on all Shopify plans (Basic, Shopify, Advanced, Plus) at no additional cost. Some advanced features may require higher-tier plans (e.g., B2B-specific Sidekick capabilities require a B2B-enabled plan). Core functionality — data queries, content drafting, basic automations — is available everywhere.
Can Shopify Sidekick edit my theme or storefront?
No. Sidekick operates only in the Shopify admin — it has no access to theme files, the Theme Editor, or anything visible to customers. For storefront and design changes, use the Theme Editor or Fudge. Sidekick handles ops; storefront tools handle the visible store.
Will Sidekick make changes I can’t undo?
Sidekick confirms before destructive actions (creating discounts, updating products, deleting customers). Once confirmed, the action executes immediately. There’s no built-in version history at the Sidekick level, though Shopify itself logs admin actions in the audit log (Settings → Users → activity log) for accountability.
Can multiple staff use Sidekick simultaneously?
Yes — each staff member has their own Sidekick session and conversation history. Conversations don’t share between staff. Be aware that destructive actions one team member runs are immediately visible to others (e.g., a discount created by one shows up in the Discounts list for all).
How is Sidekick different from ChatGPT’s Shopify connector?
Sidekick lives inside Shopify Admin and includes admin-specific capabilities (Pulse insights, ShopifyQL queries, B2B operations). ChatGPT’s connector lives outside Shopify and uses Shopify’s public APIs. Sidekick has deeper admin context; ChatGPT has broader chat capabilities. Both can take action on your store; pick based on where you prefer to work.
