Using Shopify Sidekick to Supercharge your Store’s Growth

If you’ve run a Shopify store in the past couple of years, you’ve probably started to feel like you’re always trying to catch up, not just with competitors, but with all the latest features that Shopify is constantly rolling out to merchants. Like Shopify Sidekick, for instance.

It’s just one of the exciting AI features Shopify is been infusing into its platform lately – but it’s not just any old upgrade. Not every Shopify update is worth the buzz it generates – but Shopify Sidekick actually might be. 

Shopify AI has quietly been getting a lot smarter. It started small: AI product descriptions, auto-generated email copy, predictive search – the basics. Shopify Sidekick takes things to the next level. It’s not just another set of AI writing tools baked into your admin panel.

It’s a conversational assistant that actually helps you run your business better. In this guide, I’m going to show you what Shopify Sidekick can actually do, how I’ve seen merchants use it in the wild, and, just as importantly, where you shouldn’t blindly trust it to make decisions for you.

What Is Shopify Sidekick?

In the simplest terms, Shopify Sidekick is your built-in AI co-pilot. It’s basically the culmination of everything Shopify has been hinting at for the past few years: using generative AI to not just create content, but to help you make decisions, edit your store, and solve problems faster.

But AI assistant” sounds vague. So here’s what it actually looks like in practice. When you open your Shopify admin, there’s a little icon in the bottom right corner. Click it, and Sidekick pops up. From there, you can type in natural language prompts, something as simple as:

“Draft me a product description for our new line of hand-poured soy candles.”

or

“Show me why my conversion rate dropped last month.”

Sidekick’s foundation is Shopify Magic, which handles the content generation side. What makes Sidekick special is the contextual layer: it knows which apps you have installed, which products you’re selling, and what theme you’re using. That context lets it do more than spit out text (more on that in a moment). 

How to Access Shopify Sidekick

Honestly, Shopify hasn’t always nailed the experience of rolling out new features. Remember the first version of Online Store 2.0? Half the merchants I knew didn’t realize it existed for a year. Thankfully, Shopify Sidekick is easier to find and activate.

If you’re wondering whether it’s available to you yet, here’s the good news: as of Q2 2025, Sidekick is enabled by default on all Shopify plans, including Basic. 

There are a few catches: some features, like voice prompts and live theme previews, are still rolling out to certain regions. But the core functionality (chat, content generation, analytics summaries) should be visible in your admin right now.

Here’s exactly how to get started:

• Log in to your Shopify admin: Sidekick only works on desktop browsers. If you’re in the Shopify mobile app, you’ll see limited functionality.
• Look for the Sidekick icon: Check the bottom right corner of your admin dashboard. It looks like a little starburst chat bubble. Click it.
• Walk through the onboarding prompts: The first time you open it, you’ll get a quick tour explaining how to type commands, review suggestions, and accept or reject changes. 
• Set your language and voice options: Shopify announced earlier this year that Sidekick supports over a dozen languages, including French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. If you serve a multilingual audience, it’s worth exploring this.
• Link permissions if needed. If you want Sidekick to edit your theme or manage orders, you’ll be prompted to grant those permissions. You can revoke them anytime under Settings > Apps and sales channels > Sidekick.
• Test a simple command: I usually recommend starting with something low-risk like: “Show me my top-selling products from last month.”

Quick Tips

If you’re going to use Shopify Sidekick to edit aspects of your store theme – back the theme up first. You can do this in Online Store > Themes > Actions > Duplicate. Also, remember that you can stop using Sidekick at any time. Just ignore it, or disable it by going to Settings > Apps and sales channels > Sidekick > Remove.

Exploring the Key Features of Shopify Sidekick

So, I mentioned above that Shopify Sidekick wasn’t just your average AI companion for website management. What do I mean by that? Well, you can do a lot more than just ask it to write text for your product pages. Here’s what you can actually do. 

1. Conversational Chat, Voice & Screen Share

This is one of the most interesting features of Shopify Sidekick for me, because it’s something I haven’t seen any other eCommerce platform offer. Say you’re trying to do something important, like set up a complex promotion, and you don’t know what to start. 

You can just chat to Sidekick, directly, asking it for advice and step-by-step instructions. But that’s not all. You can also start a call with the Sidekick and have it actually speak to you. During that call, you can share your screen with the bot, just like you might share it with a Shopify Expert you’re asking for help with theme edits. 

Pretty cool right? The main caution: Sidekick defaults to Shopify-native instructions. If you’re relying on apps for shipping, bundling, or checkout, double-check that you’re not overwriting something critical when you start following instructions. 

2. Content Generation with Shopify Sidekick

Of all the features in Shopify Sidekick, content generation is probably the most instantly gratifying. Most merchants struggle to keep up with the sheer volume of words eCommerce demands, product descriptions, collection intros, meta titles, emails, blog posts. It’s relentless.

Sidekick cuts the friction. You can type a prompt like:

“Draft a 250-word product description for our unisex merino wool hoodie, emphasizing sustainability, comfort, and free returns.”

It’ll churn out a draft in seconds. That draft might not be perfect, but generally, it’s a good starting point.  In 2025, Shopify expanded Sidekick’s content models to pull in your product specs and top reviews automatically (if you have them stored as metafields). That means your drafts feel less generic and more anchored in your real products.

3. Customer Segmentation

Smart segmentation is what turns a Shopify store from a generic catalog into a business that feels personal. The problem is, it’s always been tedious to set up: lots of filters, exports, and manual tagging. With Sidekick, Shopify makes this almost conversational. You can prompt:

“Show me everyone who ordered more than twice in the past six months and spent over $300.”

or

“Create a segment of customers who purchased from our summer sale and haven’t ordered since.”

Within seconds, Sidekick generates the list and offers to save it as a segment you can target in campaigns. I’ve found this especially powerful when you want to set up retention flows or VIP rewards. For example, you can quickly identify your top 10% of customers by lifetime value without digging through reports.

The model is smart enough to recognize common eCommerce behaviors, like high-value cart abandoners or repeat purchasers in a specific product category. While Sidekick won’t send the emails itself (yet), it will recommend next steps, like creating a Shopify Email campaign or setting up automation in Flow.

One caveat: if your store uses a loyalty app, you’ll still need to cross-reference these segments with whatever tags that app creates.

4. Image Generation with Shopify Sidekick

This is a newer, still-evolving capability inside Shopify Sidekick, but it can save serious time if you’re strapped for creative assets. You can prompt:

“Generate a homepage hero image promoting our winter clearance sale, with bold text and snowflake background.”

Sidekick will create options in seconds. While the results don’t always look ready for prime time, they’re often good enough as starting points. I’d probably recommend downloading and tweaking 

In 2025, Shopify started giving users more controls: like specifying color palettes, aspect ratios, and styles (minimalist, playful, luxurious). This helps the output feel more on-brand.

I think of it as a rapid prototyping tool rather than a replacement for a designer. For example, if you’re launching a flash sale tonight, you can spin up a banner without waiting on a creative team.

5. Theme Editing with Sidekick 

For most merchants, theme customization is where it usually makes sense to call in the experts, and I still recommend doing that for the most part. Even seasoned store owners hesitate to touch code because a single misplaced bracket can nuke your layout.

But, if you’re just making basic tweaks, Shopify Sidekick is decent. You can type commands like: 

“Move the featured products section above the newsletter signup on my homepage.”

and Sidekick will rearrange the sections live.

You can also prompt it to:

• Change your primary font or color scheme.
• Add blocks like testimonials, featured collections, or announcement bars.
• Suggest simple Liquid snippets for dynamic content.

Sidekick does an impressive job avoiding catastrophic errors, but it does make mistakes. Always preview your edits on a duplicate theme, and back up your existing one. I’ve seen unexpected spacing issues on mobile after seemingly harmless rearrangements.

6. Analytics and Reporting

If you’ve ever spent an hour clicking around Shopify’s analytics, trying to spot what changed last month, and comparing results, you’ll appreciate this feature immediately.

With Shopify Sidekick, you can ask:

“Summarize why my sales declined in March.”

and Sidekick will surface trends you’d otherwise have to dig for—like declining conversion on mobile, lower average order value, or specific products that fell out of the top sellers.

It also understands relative comparisons:

“How did my repeat purchase rate in Q1 compare to Q4 last year?”

I’ve found this especially valuable when you need quick insights before a planning meeting. You get a plain-English explanation you can copy into your notes or presentations.

Note: Sidekick pulls from the same data you’d see in your dashboards. It doesn’t invent numbers. But the way it organizes and explains them can save hours of detective work.

7. Metafield and Metaobject Creation

Advanced product information has always been one of Shopify’s superpowers, but also one of the biggest headaches to maintain. If you’re dealing with technical specs, care instructions, or ingredient lists, metafields and metaobjects are essential.

Sidekick makes this less intimidating. You can say:

“Create a metafield for material composition on all products in the ‘Outdoor Gear’ collection.”

and it will generate the fields and apply them. You can then populate the values manually or with a CSV import.

Metaobjects go further, letting you define reusable content blocks—like product comparison tables or brand stories. Sidekick can create the framework for you so you don’t have to write JSON by hand.

8. Pricing Strategy Recommendations

This is one of the more experimental features, but it’s worth exploring. You can prompt:

“Analyze my accessory category and suggest pricing adjustments to improve margins.”

Sidekick can look at your product data and propose price ranges based on performance, historical conversion rates, and sometimes broader Shopify trends. But it doesn’t share competitor data for obvious reasons. 

It’s not a substitute for strategic pricing analysis, but it can surface patterns you might miss, like products consistently selling out too quickly or items languishing despite high traffic.

The Benefits of Shopify Sidekick

When you first start using Shopify Sidekick, it might feel like an AI gimmick - something nice to have, but not essential. But the more time you spend with it, the clearer it becomes why Shopify is betting so heavily on this.

For me, the biggest benefit is speed. You’d be amazed how much time you waste jumping between tabs, Googling help docs, or hunting for the one setting buried in Shopify’s admin. With Sidekick, you can type a sentence and skip straight to the solution.

Time Savings: I’ve seen stores cut their product launch workflows from days to hours just by leaning on content generation and theme editing. Even if you’re fast, drafting descriptions manually takes 20–30 minutes per SKU. Multiply that by 50 products, and you’re looking at a full week of work.

Reduced Errors: Sidekick guides you step by step, and shows you a preview before you confirm, there’s less chance you’ll accidentally delete something important. When you’re making live theme edits or tweaking shipping settings, that’s no small thing.

Better Use of Your Team: If you’re running a lean operation, you don’t have the luxury of a content manager, developer, and data analyst. Sidekick can fill in the gaps, so you can focus on what actually grows revenue instead of maintenance tasks.

Future Potential: Shopify has made it clear that predictive analytics and smarter recommendations are coming. Soon, Sidekick will likely be able to forecast inventory needs, recommend bundling strategies, and even flag fraudulent orders proactively.

That’s why I think every merchant should at least be testing AI sidekick Shopify. Even if you don’t delegate everything to it, it’s a force multiplier you can’t ignore.

The Limitations of Shopify Sidekick

For all the advantages, there are places where Shopify Sidekick can get you into trouble if you’re not paying attention. This isn’t a magic bullet, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with broken layouts or confusing customer experiences.

For instance, it’s not a strategist. It can execute demands and write product descriptions, but it doesn’t fully understand your brand vision or broader strategy. It doesn’t know exactly how to replicate your brand’s voice unless you carefully guide it either. That means you can end up with generic outputs. 

Other issues: 

Limited Context: Sidekick doesn’t always recognize how apps and custom code affect your storefront. For example, if you’re using a custom theme with unusual metafield configurations, it might recommend edits that break your layout. That’s why I always duplicate my theme before letting Sidekick make changes.

Risk of Over-Reliance: I’ve seen a lot of companies get into the habit of assuming they can just delegate everything to AI. But the moment you stop double-checking, you’ll end up with mistakes: mispriced products, outdated descriptions, or awkward design choices. The AI is improving fast, but it’s not foolproof.

Liquid Code Edits: I appreciate that Sidekick can suggest snippets, but I don’t trust it to touch production code unsupervised. A single misplaced bracket in Liquid can crash a store. Think of these suggestions as starting points, not final solutions.

Sidekick is an incredible tool, but it still requires a human in the loop. The best results come when you combine Sidekick’s speed with your judgment.

Best Practices to Get Started with Sidekick

I’ve watched enough merchants adopt Sidekick to know the difference between a smooth rollout and a train wreck. Here are the practices I recommend every store follow.

• Start Small: Don’t hand over critical workflows right away. Begin with low-impact tasks like generating draft descriptions, exploring reports, or building segments. You’ll get comfortable without risking anything mission-critical.
• Backup Your Theme: Before you let Sidekick touch layouts, duplicate your theme. You can do this in Online Store > Themes > Actions > Duplicate. That way, if something goes sideways, you can roll back instantly.
• Review Everything: Treat Sidekick’s output as a draft, not a final product. This applies to text, images, and theme edits. You are still the editor-in-chief.
• Train Your Team: If you have staff, make sure everyone understands how to use Sidekick and when to escalate issues to a human expert. Shopify has good official guides you can share: Sidekick Setup Guide.
• Monitor Performance: After you implement Sidekick’s recommendations, track what happens. Are conversions improving? Is bounce rate dropping? Use this data to decide how much you want to rely on AI.
• Experiment Consistently: The merchants who see the biggest gains are the ones who treat AI like a sandbox. Try new prompts. See what it can do. The more you explore, the more value you’ll get.

Why You Still Need Human Shopify Experts

This might sound funny coming from someone who spends hours a week exploring every new AI release, but I’ll say it plainly: Shopify Sidekick is not going to replace good human experts anytime soon. It can’t understand your business strategy (not completely). Plus, it lacks the creative vision, human knowledge, and experience that experts can give you. 

When you work with a vetted Shopify expert, you also have someone accountable. If something breaks, they fix it. If you have questions, they answer them. You can’t file a support ticket with AI when things go sideways.

That’s why I recommend any merchant serious about growth have a trusted expert in their corner. Whether you work with a freelancer or an agency, make sure they understand how to layer Sidekick into your workflows without letting it run the show.

If you don’t already have that support system, platforms like Storetasker make it painless. You’ll get matched with vetted pros who’ve built hundreds of stores and know exactly where AI should, and shouldn’t step in.

Want to combine AI with real human intelligence and supercharge your store’s growth?

Contact Storetasker today.