Key takeaways
- Sidekick is strongest for data retrieval, operations, automations, and content generation - and it’s included with your Shopify plan at no extra cost.
- It’s built into your Shopify admin - no setup required.
- Since the Winter ‘26 Edition it can also restyle and rearrange what’s already in your theme from inside the theme editor. It still doesn’t write theme code, build new sections, or create landing pages.
- The best use cases involve tasks that previously required navigating multiple admin screens or knowing Shopify’s data structure.
Shopify Sidekick is Shopify’s AI assistant, built into the admin since 2024 and significantly expanded in 2025 and 2026. This guide covers Sidekick’s features and pricing, the use cases where it genuinely saves time - and the ones where it falls short.
Why you can trust us
We’ve built Fudge - an AI storefront editor used by hundreds of Shopify merchants - and have been in the Shopify ecosystem for four years. We use Sidekick alongside Fudge and have a clear view of where each tool is the right choice.
Shopify Sidekick features at a glance
Everything below is from Shopify’s official documentation, re-verified September 2026:
| Feature | What it does | Where it works |
|---|---|---|
| Store Q&A and reports | Answers questions about your data, writes ShopifyQL queries, builds reports | Admin |
| Product and order management | Edits products, manages orders, creates discounts and collections | Admin |
| Content generation | Blog posts, product descriptions, emails, images from text prompts | Admin |
| Theme customization | Adjusts existing theme settings (colors, fonts, spacing) and moves, removes, or hides existing sections | Theme editor |
| Flow automations | Builds Shopify Flow workflows from plain-English descriptions | Flow |
| Custom admin apps | Generates small admin apps by prompting (Winter ‘26) | Admin |
| Sidekick Pulse | Surfaces proactive recommendations without being asked | Admin home |
| Skills | Saves repeated prompts as reusable, shareable one-click actions | Admin |
| Background tasks | Keeps working on longer tasks and notifies you when done | Admin |
| Voice and screen share | Voice input (including the mobile app and Apple Watch) and screen sharing | Admin, mobile |
Changes Sidekick proposes are presented for your approval before they’re applied, and theme changes additionally require a manual save in the theme editor.
Shopify Sidekick pricing: is it free?
Yes - Sidekick is included with your Shopify plan at no extra cost. There’s no separate subscription or per-seat fee; Shopify’s own FAQ states that features and usage limits vary by plan. It’s available in the desktop admin and the Shopify mobile app (not the mobile-browser admin), and since the Summer ‘25 Edition it works in all supported Shopify admin languages.
Use case 1: Getting answers from your store data
This is where Sidekick is most immediately useful. Instead of navigating to Analytics, building a report, and filtering it manually, you ask a question and get the answer.
Examples:
- Finding your top-performing products last month without opening a report
- Checking how many orders are currently unfulfilled
- Seeing which customers haven’t ordered in 90 days
- Comparing this week’s revenue to last week at a glance
The time savings compound quickly. Data questions that would take 2-3 minutes of clicking become a 5-second conversation.
If you haven’t set this up yet, start with use shopify sidekick.
Use case 2: Creating discounts quickly
Building a discount in Shopify admin involves several steps: choosing the type, setting conditions, adding an expiry, setting usage limits. Sidekick collapses this into a single request.
Example: “Create a 20% off discount code called WELCOME20, valid for first-time customers, expires in 30 days, limited to one use per customer.”
Sidekick creates the discount and confirms the details. What previously took 4-5 screens takes one prompt.
This is particularly useful during campaign season (BFCM, summer sales) when you’re creating multiple discount codes quickly.
Related: Shopify Sidekick Prompts: The Complete Cheatsheet.
Use case 3: Building Shopify Flow automations
Flow is Shopify’s native automation tool. It’s powerful but has a learning curve - you need to understand triggers, conditions, and actions, and build the workflow visually.
Sidekick removes that barrier. You describe the automation in plain language and Sidekick builds the workflow for you.
Examples:
- “Send a follow-up email 3 days after every order is delivered”
- “Tag customers as ‘VIP’ when their total spend exceeds $1,000”
- “Alert our team in Slack when a payment dispute is opened”
- “Archive products automatically when inventory hits zero”
For merchants who’ve avoided Flow because it seemed technical, Sidekick makes it accessible.
Related: Shopify Flow AI Assistant Prompts - 50+ ready-to-use prompts grouped by category.
Use case 4: Writing store content
Sidekick can draft, rewrite, and improve text across your store.
Product descriptions. Give Sidekick the product name, key features, target customer, and tone, and it generates a description. Useful for stores with large catalogs where writing individual descriptions is time-consuming.
Email campaigns. Describe the promotion and Sidekick writes the email. Useful as a first draft you refine, rather than starting from a blank page.
SMS messages. Short, punchy SMS copy for flash sales, cart abandonment, and restock notifications.
SEO copy. Meta titles and descriptions for product and collection pages, written with the target keyword in mind.
The output usually needs editing rather than publishing as-is, but Sidekick dramatically reduces the time from brief to first draft.
Use case 5: B2B account management
For merchants on Shopify’s B2B features, Sidekick handles account administration that would otherwise involve multiple screens.
Examples:
- Creating a new company record with payment terms applied
- Looking up B2B order history for a specific account
- Identifying wholesale customers who haven’t reordered recently
- Checking revenue from B2B vs DTC in a given period
Useful for sales teams managing multiple wholesale accounts who need quick access to account data without navigating deep into the admin.
Use case 6: Proactive store monitoring (Pulse)
Sidekick Pulse surfaces insights on your home dashboard without you having to ask. Instead of only responding to queries, it flags things worth your attention:
- A product trending in a specific region
- A spike in checkout abandonment
- A product running low before you’d have noticed
- Bundle opportunities based on what customers are adding to cart together
This shifts Sidekick from a reactive tool to something closer to a business monitor. Useful for merchants who don’t have time to check analytics daily.
Use case 7: Writing ShopifyQL queries
ShopifyQL is Shopify’s query language for custom analytics. It’s powerful but requires knowing the syntax.
Sidekick can write ShopifyQL queries from a plain description: “Write a query showing revenue by traffic source for the last 30 days.” This opens up custom reporting for merchants who don’t want to learn query syntax.
Use case 8: Voice-driven store management
Sidekick supports voice input. Merchants can speak requests rather than type them - useful when reviewing inventory on a tablet, walking a warehouse, or multitasking.
The voice capability covers the same range of tasks as text. Less useful at a desk, more useful in a retail or warehouse environment.
Use case 9: Theme tweaks from the theme editor
Since the Winter ‘26 Edition, Sidekick works inside the theme editor. You can click an element and describe the change - “make this button rounded”, “hide the announcement bar on my home page”, “change my heading font and make the body text larger” - and Sidekick adjusts the matching theme settings.
The scope is settings-level: global theme settings, the settings of sections and blocks already on the page, and moving, removing, or hiding existing sections. You have to be in the theme editor for it to work, and nothing is applied until you save manually - it also works on unpublished themes, which is the safer way to experiment.
Useful for quick styling passes that used to mean hunting through settings panels. For changes your theme’s settings can’t express - new sections, new layouts, new code - see the limits below.
What Sidekick is not good for
New sections, custom layouts, and theme code. Sidekick’s theme editing works the settings your theme already exposes. It doesn’t write Liquid or CSS, doesn’t create new section types, and can’t build layouts your theme doesn’t support. It also can’t edit images inside themes.
Building new pages. Landing pages, campaign pages, and new page templates aren’t a documented Sidekick capability. Those still require the Theme Editor’s manual tools, a page builder, or an AI tool that writes theme code.
Complex customer service workflows. Sidekick can pull order data, but it isn’t a customer service tool. It doesn’t handle conversations with customers or integrate with support inboxes.
Sidekick and Fudge: how they fit together
Sidekick handles the operations and data side of running a store, plus settings-level theme tweaks. Fudge handles the storefront work beyond that.
Where Sidekick’s settings ceiling stops - creating landing pages, building new sections, updating product page layouts, writing the Liquid and CSS behind a campaign build - Fudge picks up. You describe what you want in plain English, Fudge generates the code, and nothing goes live until you’ve reviewed and approved it.
Together they cover most of what a merchant needs AI for, without a developer. (And if you are a developer connecting AI tools like Claude Code or Cursor to Shopify, that’s a third layer - see our Shopify AI Toolkit guide.)
FAQ
Yes. Sidekick is included with your Shopify plan at no extra cost - there's no separate subscription. Shopify notes that features and usage limits vary by plan. It works in the desktop admin and the Shopify mobile app, in all supported admin languages.
Within limits, yes. From inside the theme editor, Sidekick can change existing theme settings (colors, fonts, spacing, layout settings) and move, remove, or hide sections that are already there - you save the changes manually. It can't write theme code, create new sections, or build landing pages; for those, use a tool like Fudge that generates native theme code.
Pulling store data without navigating to reports. "What was my AOV yesterday vs last week?" answered in 5 seconds beats clicking through Analytics → Reports → Sales over time → adjusting filters. The compounding time savings on data queries alone justify the tool for most merchants.
For routine data pulls and content drafting, partially. For strategic analysis, judgment calls, or context-aware decisions, no. Sidekick answers "what" — a human is still needed for "why" and "what should we do about it." Best used as a force-multiplier for existing team members rather than a replacement.
Sidekick for one-off queries and quick checks; native reports for recurring scheduled views and dashboards. If you check the same numbers daily, set up a saved report. If you have ad-hoc questions, Sidekick. The two coexist — Sidekick can also help you find which native report has the data you need.
Sidekick is scoped to the store you're currently logged into — switching stores requires switching admin sessions. There's no cross-store unified view in Sidekick. For multi-store reporting, use Shopify Plus's central analytics or a third-party BI tool. Operate Sidekick per-store.
Not persistently between sessions. Within a session, you can give it brand voice context ("write in a casual, slightly cheeky tone aligned with our other product copy") and it'll match for that session. For consistent brand voice, save reference text in a brand guide and paste it into prompts as needed.
For a related approach, see edit your shopify theme.