What is Shopify Sidekick and what can it do for your online store?

Shopify Sidekick is the AI assistant built into your Shopify admin. It answers questions about your sales, edits products and orders, writes copy, builds small admin apps and suggests what to do next, and it shows you each change to approve before anything is saved.

A lot of store owners already use it. On Shopify's second-quarter 2026 earnings call on 5 August, the company said Sidekick handled nearly 34 million merchant conversations in the quarter, and daily active merchants using it were up 3.6 times on a year earlier. So the question has moved on from whether Sidekick works. The harder question is what to hand over and what to check, because a wrong discount or a wrong product claim still lands on your customers, not on the assistant.

How Shopify Sidekick works inside your admin

Sidekick lives in the Shopify admin on desktop, runs inside the Shopify app on phones and tablets, and works from your own store data. You type or speak a request in plain language. Sidekick works through the steps, fills in the forms or drafts the content, and then waits for you to approve the result.

To open it, click the purple glasses icon in the admin. There's nothing to install or configure. Voice mode works on desktop, mobile and Apple Watch, and it replies in the language you speak. Screen sharing, where Sidekick guides you step by step on your own screen, is in early access and only works in a desktop browser. Sidekick doesn't run when you open the admin in a mobile browser, so on a phone, use the Shopify app.

It also remembers. Shopify's Sidekick help page says it uses past conversations and recent activity in your admin to give more relevant answers. Shopify's memory help page puts numbers on that: conversations are kept for about three months and recent admin activity for about 12 hours. You can turn memory off for one conversation, but you can't turn it back on for that same conversation.

Longer jobs keep running in the background, even if you close the chat or move to another page. That changes how you use it. You can ask for sales, costs, profits and returns across your top 100 products, go and pack the day's orders, and come back to the answer.

What Sidekick can do for your store today

Across Shopify's help pages, Sidekick's work falls into eight groups: analysing store data, editing orders and draft orders, filling in product and discount forms, writing content, generating images, changing theme settings, setting up marketing tools, and working through your installed apps. The table uses Shopify's own example prompts and adds the part those prompts leave out: the check to make before saving.

Content goes well past product descriptions. Sidekick drafts blog posts, email copy for Shopify Messaging and online store pages, and it generates images for hero banners, marketing material and blog illustrations. Shopify warns that generated images can be unexpected or low quality. Image generation has two limits, a monthly one and a short-term one that frees up gradually over a few minutes, and both depend on your plan.

It sets up the tools around a sale as well: discounts, customer segments, custom reports, Shopify Flow workflows, metafields and metaobjects. If your installed apps support it, Sidekick can search their data and act through them, but it asks for your approval before it uses an installed app. Apps connect through Sidekick app extensions that their developers add, and Shopify's developer documentation caps this at 20 connected apps per user on a store.

Anything you ask week after week can become a skill. Skills are saved instructions you run by typing a forward slash and a shortcut, and a store can keep up to 50 of them, or 25 in some stores. Say you pull last week's sales every Monday, compare them with the week before and write three lines for your team. Saved as a skill, that whole routine becomes one shortcut, and your Monday starts with reading the answer instead of building it.

What Sidekick Pulse puts on your admin home

Sidekick Pulse is the part of Sidekick that works without being asked. It researches your store's data and shows up to five personalised recommendations as cards on your admin Home page. Selecting a card opens a Sidekick conversation with a to-do list, and nothing in your store changes until you approve each step.

Not every store has it yet. Shopify's Sidekick Pulse help page says the feature is in early access and available only to certain merchants. Your store needs recent sales activity, you need to be the owner or a staff member with admin access, and Shopify Network Intelligence has to be switched on. If a card doesn't fit your business, dismiss it with the X. Shopify says Pulse uses that feedback to personalise later suggestions, and giving a reason is optional.

Read a Pulse card the way you'd read advice from a new hire who has studied every report but never met a customer. It works from data. It can't know that a product is selling slowly because the supplier shipped late, or that a collection is about to be retired. Go through the to-do list it builds, delete the steps that don't fit, and approve the rest one at a time.

Building a custom app by describing it

Sidekick can write small custom apps for your Shopify admin from a plain description. Shopify's examples include an app that recommends which products to reorder based on sales velocity, one that creates discounted checkout links and QR codes, and a task tracker for your team. These apps run only inside the admin, and your customers never see them.

This is the part of Sidekick growing fastest. On the same earnings call, Shopify said merchants created more than 36,000 custom apps with Sidekick in the second quarter of 2026, up from 12,000 in the first. The feature comes with firm limits, and you should know them before you plan around it:

• It's only on the Grow, Advanced and Shopify Plus plans.
• Staff need the Develop permission under App development to create or edit apps.
• You can generate apps only from Sidekick in a desktop web browser.
• Usage has hourly and weekly rolling limits across the whole store, measured by how much work Sidekick does, not by how many apps you make.
• No generated app can reach your theme, checkout or customer accounts.

Inside those limits, a generated app works through the Admin API, which covers orders, products, customers, discounts, content such as blog posts and menus, and analytics. An app that creates discounts or edits customer records has write access to live store data. Before you rely on one, check its permissions after you install it, run it on three or four records you can verify by hand, and write down what it changes. If it misbehaves, uninstall it the way you would any other app.

Jobs Sidekick can't do for you

Shopify names four things Sidekick can't do: talk to your customers or handle support conversations for you, share private data from other Shopify merchants, edit images inside a store theme or your product list, and run in the Shopify admin on a mobile browser. It also won't make tax decisions for you.

VAT shows how that last limit works. Sidekick can help with VAT registration, but Shopify's Help Center says it doesn't decide whether your store needs to register for VAT or owes VAT. That call stays with you and your accountant. Store policies work the same way: Sidekick can fill in a return policy template, and you're still the one who has to honour it.

Some guides still say Sidekick can't touch your theme or reach data in other apps. Shopify's current help pages say otherwise. They include theme prompts such as adding a slideshow section to the home page, and the Winter '26 Edition in December 2025 added theme edits from commands like "make this button rounded". Shopify keeps adding to Sidekick, so check the date on anything you read about it, this page included.

If you were hoping for a tool that answers shoppers' questions at night, Sidekick isn't it. It works for you and your staff in the admin, and a customer-facing chat tool is a separate decision.

Where a person still needs to check Sidekick's work

Every change Sidekick makes waits for your approval, so the review step is built in. The risk is approving on autopilot. The changes that need a careful read are the ones your customers feel: prices, discounts, order edits, product claims and policies.

Shopify's tips for using its AI tools put the responsibility plainly:

"You're responsible for the changes that you accept, so review the results before you approve them, especially for anything that affects what your customers experience or buy."

Put these checks in front of whoever approves Sidekick's changes:

• Discounts and prices: the percentage, the start and end dates, and exactly which products or collections are covered.
• Order edits, line by line, including quantities and the new total.
• Product copy, where any claim about materials, sizes, care or results needs someone who knows the product.
• Return and shipping policies. You have to keep the promises in them.
• Anything about VAT or sales tax, which belongs with your accountant.
• The date range and filters behind any report you'll base a decision on.
• Which installed app Sidekick wants to use, and what a generated app can write to.

Here is how a small slip turns into a big one. A store has two collections, Summer with 40 products and Summer Sale with 400. The owner asks for 15% off Summer, and the draft discount points at Summer Sale. Approve it without reading and ten times as many products go out at 15% off. The review step exists to catch exactly that, but only if someone reads it.

On a team, decide who approves price and order changes, and set staff permissions to match.

Shopify Sidekick pros and cons

Sidekick's biggest strength is that it already knows your store and costs nothing extra: Shopify says it's included with your plan, with features and usage limits that vary by plan. Its biggest weakness is that results vary. Shopify itself notes that the same request won't always produce the same result, so the output needs a human check each time.

What works in its favour:

• It sits inside the admin you already use, with no extra fee on top of your plan.
• Answers come from your real orders, products and reports, rather than generic advice.
• Jobs that take several screens, such as a custom report or a draft order, shrink to one request.
• It follows your store's language settings and can help in multiple languages.
• Skills turn your repeated requests into one shortcut.

What counts against it:

• App generation needs the Grow plan or higher, and Pulse is still limited to certain merchants.
• Image generation and app building run against usage limits.
• Screen sharing and app generation need a desktop browser.
• Generated images can come out unexpected or low quality.
• It only serves store staff, never your shoppers.

Our view: if your store has regular sales, use Sidekick weekly for reports and first drafts. Hand it changes to live prices and orders once you've watched it get the smaller jobs right a few times.

Who should use Shopify Sidekick, and where to start

New store owners get the most from Sidekick early on. Shopify's August figures show roughly half the conversations from merchants in their first 30 days are about store setup, design and theme configuration, and Sidekick's onboarding guidance led to an 8% increase in new merchants reaching five orders within 15 days.

Established stores use it differently. Among merchants five years in, setup falls to about 8% of conversations, while analytics and reporting pass 40%. That fits what the tool does best for an older store: answering a question about your own numbers faster than you could build the report.

Developers and agencies should pay attention too. Sidekick app extensions let an app's data and actions appear inside Sidekick, with the merchant staying in control of what gets updated. If you build or maintain a Shopify app, Sidekick is now one more place your users will look for your features.

Start in this order, so your trust in it builds on evidence:

1. Ask read-only questions first, such as last month's sales by product or this quarter's returns.
2. Use it for first drafts of product descriptions, a blog post or an email, and edit before you publish.
3. Save the requests you repeat as skills.
4. Let it make low-risk changes, such as drafting an order, and read each highlighted field first.
5. Try Pulse and app generation when your store and plan qualify.

Sidekick can now do most of the clicking in your admin. The judgement about what your customers see still belongs to a person, so keep the approvals with one. If you want a second pair of eyes on your product pages, SEO or email campaigns before AI starts editing them, email the Techno Mantraa team at info@technomantraa.com for a quote.