Shopify Sidekick Features That Every Merchant Should Know

Have you ever heard of Shopify Sidekick? It’s Shopify’s step to welcome AI into its system and let merchants automate some of their common tasks.

It’s a much-needed move for a major ecommerce platform, as NVIDIA mentioned that 89% of retail leaders are already using AI in their operations or testing it in pilots.

But why should you use it, and how can you access it as a Shopify seller? We’ll answer these questions for you today.

In this guide, we’ll break down what Shopify Sidekick offers, how it can help your store, its main features and limitations, plus how other AI tools can push your automation even further.

The New AI Assistant for the Shopify Platform

What is Shopify Sidekick?

Shopify Sidekick is a new AI-powered assistant made for Shopify merchants. It’s pretty similar to Microsoft’s and Google Workspace’s AI copilots, and just like the two, it’s exclusive to its own platform.

This new feature helps you create, think, and decide faster, and makes the entrepreneurial journey more bearable.

But how can it do that? With just one chat (prompt or question), it can write your content, answer ecommerce-related questions, generate images, analyze reports, and even suggest actions to grow your store.

Sidekick is part of Shopify Magic, which is a collection of free AI tools built into Shopify. It makes the other AI features (text and theme generation, summaries, etc.) accessible for you, so you can act and get results in one window.

3 Benefits of Using Shopify Sidekick

Okay. Now you know what Shopify Sidekick is. It’s time to look at some of the benefits you can get. That includes handling repetitive tasks, getting better insights from your data, and being accessible whenever you need it.

Let’s talk about them in detail:

1. Gets Repetitive Tasks Off Your Plate

How long does it take for you to write product descriptions, segment your customers, and update collections? Of course, we know they’re important, but doing each step manually (every single time) is draining.

Sidekick can help you speed up this process by generating product descriptions in seconds, updating collections with new items, and creating customer segments based on purchase history or behavior.

2. Helps You Make Smarter Decisions with Data

Let’s say you have an apparel store. You want to improve your sales and see which products are the best to upsell. If you do that by yourself, you need to check sales reports and review customer orders. The process can be slow and intense. You know… like naming Miss Universe finalists.

But with Sidekick, you get the info you need in a snap. You only have to type a prompt like this: “Tell me my five best-selling items last year,” and it shows you a good list. Plus, it comes with a simple analysis to help you decide what to feature next or which items to bundle at checkout.

3. Always Ready to Support 

Sidekick is also accessible. You can ask questions anytime, and it works on your desktop and the Shopify mobile app. We still think human assistants are great, but this feature can be useful outside the usual 9-to-5 schedule.

Shopify also made a recent update, and now, the tool supports 20 languages. Besides the main ones like English and Spanish, it also works in Czech, Finnish, and Norwegian.

Core Capabilities of the Shopify AI Sidekick

Content generation, image creation, customer segmentation, and reporting and data exploration are some of Shopify Sidekick’s core capabilities. We’ll tell you how they work and some prompts that you can use to get started:

Content Generation

Digital Silk mentioned that 33% of marketing and media leaders say producing high-quality content is one of their biggest challenges. If these experts already find it hard, we can’t imagine how much more “troublesome” it is for you as a store owner.

Shopify Sidekick helps lessen that load by generating ready-to-use copy for your store. You can use it to draft marketing emails, blog posts, product pages, etc. It can also edit your existing content without needing to copy and paste it to your window.

Take this example. We asked Sidekick to provide us with a better product description. Here’s the prompt we used: “Could you provide me with a better product description for my Wedding Dresses & Gowns With Detachable Skirt product?” and here’s the result:

What you’ll notice from Sidekick’s content is that it is structured and usually follows certain formatting, such as headings, bullet points, SEO title, and meta tag suggestions.

Here are three more commands you can try today:

• “Write a 50-word description for a bamboo cutting board that highlights sustainability.”
• “Suggest three subject lines for a 15% off back-to-school email campaign.”
• “Create a new collection for eco-friendly kitchen products and write the intro text.”

Image Creation

Before Shopify introduced Sidekick, you needed to either hire a graphic designer or subscribe to ChatGPT, Photoshop, or Midjourney if you wanted to create product banners and marketing visuals.

Now, you don’t have to pay for extra tools or wait for a designer who understands what you want. You can simply type a prompt or request to your AI-assistant and get results in a few minutes (just a bit longer than text generation).

Imagine you sold anti-aging serums. You had a new product to launch this October, and you needed a hero banner for it. You opened Sidekick, typed your prompt, and got an image like this:

You could now use this high-quality image to promote your product launch across your Shopify store, feature it in email campaigns, or repurpose it for ads on social media. Here are some commands you can try:

• “Generate a hero banner with a minimalist background that features our summer sandal collection.”
• “Create a lifestyle image of a ceramic mug on a wooden breakfast table with natural light.”
• “Produce five variations of a winter coat with snowy scenery behind it.”

Pro Tips:

• Provide reference images (in JPEG, PNG, WebP) to guide your AI assistant in getting closer to the image you want.
• Be very specific with your prompts to get better results.
  • ✅: “Provide me an [image type] for my [product] named [name of the product] with [background and other important instructions]”
  • ❌: “Create an image for my anti-aging serum.”
• Be patient and learn as you go. You’ll rarely get the perfect result on the first try, so tweak your prompts and remember which ones work best (then use them as a template).

Customer Segmentation

Here’s one great thing about Shopify Sidekick: it’s NOT ONLY for content generation. You can also use it for customer management, thanks to its advanced ability to analyze your stored data.

Customer segmentation is something you have to do as a merchant because it allows you to target the right shoppers and make your marketing efforts more effective. For example, you might want to give exclusive perks to repeat buyers or… send a discount code to inactive customers (and convince them to buy a new product).

The problem is, it isn’t easy to segment your customers manually, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of customers. Shopify Sidekick works in your favor by creating the segment for you with a simple prompt. 

In seconds, you’ll have a ready-to-use group to which you can send your campaign. Sidekick will also give you ideas (like re-engagement strategies), some analysis of the data, and what your next step is.

Here’s an example:

These are other prompts you can try:

• “Make a customer segment for my U.S. shoppers who subscribed to marketing emails.”
• “Show me customers who spent over $200 in the last month.”
• “Create a segment of customers who purchased at least two times in the last 90 days.”

Reporting & Data Exploration

Some of our clients aren’t a fan of analyzing reports. They end up downloading a couple of them only to stare at the numbers and wonder what they actually mean. A few even admitted they avoid reports altogether because the process feels too technical (it really is).

If you felt the same, Sidekick can definitely be useful for you. It gives you clear visualizations, simple breakdowns, and even a bulleted list of key insights so you don’t have to interpret raw data yourself.

We put it to the test to show you a real example. We asked about best-selling items, and Sidekick generated a table ranking products by revenue and orders. And here’s what it provided us:

Besides the visual (and simple) report, it also gave useful analysis, such as which dress brought in the most sales and how order values varied by segment.

Yes, it isn’t as advanced as other platforms, but as a merchant running your business alone… or with a small team, these reports are enough to help you focus on the products that make the most money and bring in more sales.

Done with the core capabilities. Next, let us show you how you can use it.

How to Get Started with Shopify Sidekick

The good news is that Shopify Sidekick is completely free for all Shopify plans. You can use it anytime you want, whether on a desktop or the Shopify mobile app.

Here’s how you can get started with Shopify Sidekick:

1. Log in to your Shopify admin and click the Sidekick icon (tiny masked superhero) in the upper right of your dashboard.
2. The chat window will open. Use any of the suggested prompts we provided, create your own, or start with the Sidekick’s ones to get started. Press “Enter” or select the arrow icon once you’re done.
3. Continue “chatting” with Sidekick to tweak the result or get more suggestions.
4. Use the thumbs-up or thumbs-down icons to give feedback and improve future responses.

Fin! That’s how simple this tool is.

Pro Tip: Expand Sidekick into full-screen mode when you’re working on bigger projects, like drafting email campaigns or analyzing reports. You can do that by typing https://admin.shopify.com/store/your-store-name/sidekick in the URL tab.

Limitations of Shopify Sidekick

While it can save you hours on content, reporting, and store management, there are still things it simply cannot do. Knowing these limits upfront helps you avoid awkward moments.

• No AI-assistant for customer-facing tasks: Sidekick won’t jump into your live chat and talk to customers directly. For example, you’ll still need to reply to that one shopper who insists their package is “lost.”
• No merchant gossip: Sidekick only works with your store’s data, not anyone else’s.
• No sneaky edits: Sidekick can suggest changes, but it won’t touch your store without your “go” signal.
• No advanced image surgery: It can generate new images, but won’t dive into your theme files or tweak product photos you’ve already uploaded. You’ll still need a proper editor for that.
• A memory cap: Sidekick saves your last 50 chats. After that, the older ones quietly disappear. If you had a groundbreaking idea in chat #51, we suggest you copy it somewhere safe.

Pro Tip: Use Sidekick as your assistant, not your replacement. It works best when you guide it with clear prompts and then add your human touch.

About Channelwill Apps’ AI Features

While Shopify Sidekick handles the basics well, we’ve been building AI tools that work way deeper into the specific challenges Shopify merchants face every day.

Here are some of our Channelwill apps that use AI and their functions:

• ParcelPanel uses AI to analyze your order history and suggest products that customers actually buy together. They’ll get a more personalized (and data-based) “you might also like” items and not some random ones.
• Trustoo takes all those customer reviews and creates clean summaries that show what buyers love most about your products. They won’t need to scroll through endless feedback and read 50 reviews just to check what customers think of a product.
• SEOAnt combines practical SEO tools with AI-powered content creation. It helps you research keywords, optimize product pages, and generate SEO-friendly descriptions easily, even without being an SEO expert.

We’re always updating and improving our apps because our goal is to make your store run smoothly with less manual work from you. So, you can focus on “growing” instead of trying to survive day to day.

Conclusion

Shopify Sidekick is a solid AI-powered assistant built for content creation, customer segmentation, image generation, and basic reporting for your store. It takes care of the time-consuming stuff so you don’t have to (or at least, do them less).

But if you want to reduce your manual work in other aspects of ecommerce, Channelwill has a series of apps that can help.

Ready to see how our AI features can work for your store? Book a demo with our team to learn how we can help you automate your post-purchase experience, boost customer satisfaction, and increase sales without adding more work to your plate.