How to Use Shopify Sidekick (2026)

Key takeaways

• Shopify Sidekick is built into your Shopify admin - no install required. Open it with the assistant icon in the top right.
• It can answer questions about your store data, create discounts, build automations, write content, and surface insights.
• Sidekick works best for admin tasks and operations. Since the Winter ‘26 Edition it can also tweak existing theme settings and sections from the theme editor, but it doesn’t write theme code, build new sections or create landing pages.
• Voice input is supported - you can speak your requests rather than type them.
• For new sections, new pages and code-level storefront changes, you need a separate tool like Fudge.

To use Shopify Sidekick, open your Shopify admin, click the Sidekick icon in the top-right corner, and type or speak a request: a question about your store data, a task such as creating a discount, or a piece of content to draft. Sidekick is Shopify’s built-in AI assistant, included with your Shopify plan, and it answers questions, takes actions and surfaces insights from a chat panel.

This guide covers how to access it, what it can do, the most useful prompts to try, and where it hits its limits.

Why you can trust us

Jacques has over 15 years of software development experience and has worked closely with Shopify merchants on their stores. We’ve been in the Shopify ecosystem for four years and build Fudge, the AI operator for Shopify stores, with a 4.9 rating on the Shopify App Store. We use Sidekick ourselves and understand its strengths alongside the gaps it leaves.

How to open Shopify Sidekick

Sidekick is built into every Shopify admin. No setup, no install.

To open it:

1. Log in to your Shopify admin
2. Look for the assistant icon in the top-right corner of the screen (it looks like a small sparkle or star)
3. Click it to open the Sidekick chat panel
4. Type your question or request - or tap the microphone icon to use voice input

What Shopify Sidekick can do

Sidekick handles four broad categories of tasks.

Answer questions about your store

Ask Sidekick anything about your store’s data and it will pull the answer directly.

• “What were my top 5 products last month?”
• “How many orders are unfulfilled right now?”
• “What’s my average order value this week?”
• “Which customers haven’t ordered in 90 days?”
• “What’s my conversion rate this month compared to last month?”

This replaces manually navigating to reports and is faster for quick data checks.

Take actions in your admin

Sidekick can perform tasks for you - not just tell you things, but actually do them.

• Create a discount code
• Draft a Shopify Email campaign
• Build a Shopify Flow automation
• Tag a customer segment
• Create a new customer or company record
• Schedule a product to go live at a specific time

You describe what you want, and Sidekick handles the steps.

Write content

Sidekick can generate and edit text across your store.

• Product descriptions
• Email campaign copy
• SEO meta titles and descriptions
• Promotional text for sales and campaigns
• SMS marketing messages

Surface proactive insights (Pulse)

The Sidekick Pulse feature appears on your home dashboard. It proactively shows you things worth acting on - without you having to ask.

• Products that are trending in a region
• Checkout abandonment spikes
• Low stock warnings before you run out
• Bundle opportunities based on cart data

The most useful Sidekick prompts

For store insights:

• “Show me sales by product for the last 30 days”
• “Which products have the highest return rate?”
• “What’s trending in my store right now?”
• “Write a ShopifyQL query for revenue by traffic source”

For operations:

• “Create a 15% discount code for VIP customers that expires in 7 days”
• “Build a Flow that sends a follow-up email 3 days after an order is delivered”
• “Tag all customers who have spent over $500 as ‘high-value’”
• “Show me all orders with open disputes”

For content:

• “Write a product description for [product name] that focuses on [benefit]”
• “Rewrite this product description to be more concise: [paste text]”
• “Write an email announcing our summer sale with a 20% discount”
• “Write an SMS message for our flash sale ending tonight”

For B2B:

• “Create a new company record for [company name] with net-30 payment terms”
• “Show me all B2B orders placed in the last 7 days”

For a longer list grouped by task, see Shopify Sidekick Prompts: The Complete Cheatsheet.

How to get better results from Sidekick

Be specific. “Show me sales” gives a broad result. “Show me sales by product category for the last 14 days, sorted by revenue” gives exactly what you need.

Give context for content. When asking Sidekick to write copy, tell it the product’s key benefit, the audience, and the tone. “Write a product description for a bamboo water bottle, targeting eco-conscious shoppers, in a friendly but informative tone” will outperform “write a product description for my water bottle.”

Use it for automation setup. Building a Flow workflow manually requires understanding triggers, conditions, and actions. Describing it to Sidekick in plain language - “send a Slack notification to our ops channel when a high-value order is placed” - is much faster.

Ask follow-up questions. Sidekick remembers the context of your conversation. If you ask for last month’s top products and want to dig deeper, just ask: “Which of these have inventory below 50 units?”

What Sidekick cannot do

Sidekick is powerful for admin tasks, but it has clear limits.

It can only tweak what your theme already has. Since the Winter ‘26 Edition, Sidekick can change existing theme settings (colors, fonts, spacing) and move, remove or hide existing sections from inside the theme editor. You save those changes manually. It can’t go beyond the settings your theme already exposes.

It can’t edit your theme’s code. Sidekick can generate a single new theme block from a description, but changing the sections and templates your theme already has means editing Liquid, CSS and JavaScript, which it doesn’t do.

It cannot build new sections or layouts. If your theme has no section for what you want, or no setting for the layout you have in mind, Sidekick can’t add one.

It cannot create landing pages. New landing pages and custom page layouts need the theme editor’s manual tools or a page builder, not Sidekick.

For all of these, Fudge fills the gap. You describe what you want in plain English - a new landing page, a product page layout change, a promotional section - and Fudge writes the code and shows you a preview before anything goes live.

The bigger difference is the workflow around those changes. With Fudge, the AI operator for Shopify stores, you choose a goal, and it plans the work, prepares theme changes as drafts your team can see, and follows the results in your Shopify data, Google Analytics and Search Console. Keep using Sidekick in the admin; the two work side by side.

For the full list of limits, see Shopify Sidekick Limitations: What It Can’t Do.

Sidekick vs the Shopify Theme Editor

It’s worth understanding what each tool covers:

They’re complementary tools for different parts of running a store. To change fonts and colors by hand, see how to update colors and fonts in Shopify.

FAQ