Shopify Sidekick is the AI assistant built into your Shopify admin — free with every plan, no install. This guide covers what it can do, how to prompt it well, and where it stops.
What Sidekick can do
Sidekick is a conversational AI in your admin that handles open-ended questions and multi-step tasks in plain language. The capabilities worth knowing in 2026:
- Content and image generation — blog posts, product descriptions, and on-demand images (it generates up to 5 AI images from a prompt).
- Shopify Flow building — describe an automation and Sidekick writes the Flow; nearly 50% of Q1 2026 Flows were built with it.
- Custom app building — describe an app and Sidekick builds it (plan-gated to Grow, Advanced, and Plus as of April 2026).
- Data analysis and store management — analyze data, manage orders, edit products by asking.
- Saved skills — save up to 25 reusable prompts, run them with
/, share by URL. - Sidekick Pulse — works proactively in the background, surfacing personalized recommendations from your store data.
How to write prompts that work
The single biggest lever is framing prompts as tasks, not questions (see step 2 above). Give Sidekick a concrete action, a time window, and a metric, and you get an executable result instead of generic advice. Specificity is the difference between “here’s some advice on discounts” and a discount that’s built and ready for you to confirm.
The honest limits
Two things Sidekick does not do. It operates on the merchant side only — it cannot answer customer questions, process returns, or provide live chat, so it is not a support tool (Gorgias or Tidio is). And it requires confirmation before executing changes, which is a safety feature, not a flaw — always verify before confirming.
Who this is for
Sidekick is the free, native AI baseline every Shopify merchant should use first, especially small-to-mid stores without dedicated copywriters or analysts. It is the starting point in our best AI tools roundup — use it first, then add a specialist tool for whichever job (email, support, analytics) is your real bottleneck.