How to Use Shopify Sidekick: A Practical Guide for Merchants

Shopify Sidekick is the AI assistant built into your admin. You talk to it in plain language and it answers questions about your store, drafts content, and stages changes for you to approve. It is powered by Shopify Magic, the same AI layer behind generated product descriptions, and unlike a generic chatbot it is wired into your real store data. That last part is what makes it worth learning properly.

This is the merchant-facing guide: what Sidekick is good at, the prompts that get useful answers, and where it stops. For the developer angle, see building for Shopify Sidekick.

Where to find it and how it works

Look for the assistant icon in the top-right of your Shopify admin. It looks like a small sparkle. Click it and you get a chat window. There is no setup step and nothing to install. It is on by default on every plan.

The thing to internalize is that Sidekick is not answering from the open web. It knows your products, your orders, and your trends, and it reads from that data to answer. Ask it "show me my top 10 products this month" and it returns your actual ten, not a generic explanation of how to find them. That grounding is the whole point, and it changes how you should phrase requests.

The prompts that actually earn their keep

Most merchants who try Sidekick once ask a vague question, get a vague answer, and leave. The fix is specificity. A few patterns that consistently return something useful:

Data questions, scoped tightly. "Show me sales, costs, profit, and returns for my top 100 products" returns a table you would otherwise have opened three reports to assemble. The more precise the scope (a date range, a sort order, a category), the better the answer.

Follow-ups instead of restarts. Sidekick remembers the conversation. Ask for last month's top sellers, then follow with "which of these have inventory below 50 units," and it carries the context forward. Treat it like a conversation, not a search box.

Content with the brief built in. "Write a product description for a bamboo water bottle, targeting eco-conscious shoppers, in a friendly but informative tone" outperforms "write a description for my water bottle" every time. Give it the benefit, the audience, and the voice.

Automations described in English. "When inventory drops below 10 units, tag the product and send a Slack alert" gets turned into a Shopify Flow workflow. You describe the outcome and it builds the plumbing.

Saving the prompts you reuse

Sidekick lets you save your best prompts as skills with a shortcut. Type / followed by a name to create one, or save a prompt you have already refined. After that, /your-shortcut runs it again without you having to remember how you phrased it. You can keep up to 25, and you can share a skill with another merchant who can add it to their own admin.

This matters more than it sounds. The hard part of using any assistant is consistency, and a saved skill turns a prompt you got right once into a button you press every week.

Where Sidekick stops, on purpose

Sidekick is never allowed to change your shop without approval. It will analyze, draft, and stage, then present the change for you to confirm. That is by design, and it is the same principle that governs every Sidekick-powered app extension: the assistant answers and proposes, the merchant decides. We unpack that boundary in Sidekick app extensions, explained.

It also can't see what isn't in your store. Sidekick reads your catalog and analytics, not the AI shopping channels outside Shopify. If you want to know whether ChatGPT or Perplexity surface your products, that is a different question, and one we cover in how AI shopping assistants find your store.

The question Sidekick can't answer alone

Here is the gap worth naming. Sidekick is excellent at reading your store. It is not, on its own, a window into how legible your store is to the agents doing the buying. Whether your products show up when a shopper asks an assistant "find me a waterproof hiking boot under 150 dollars" depends on your structured data, your catalog completeness, and your discovery files, none of which Sidekick audits by default.

That is the work AgentReady Signal does: it publishes and maintains the structured data and AI-discovery files your store needs to be readable by Sidekick and by the assistants outside Shopify, and keeps them in sync as your catalog changes. With our Sidekick extension installed, you can even ask the assistant directly where you rank in AI search, covered in asking Sidekick whether you show up.

If you would rather see where you stand before installing anything, our free Shopify AI readiness checker scans any storefront for the structured data, crawler access, and discovery files AI assistants rely on, in about a minute. Learn Sidekick for the daily work. Make sure the agents can read you for the growth.