What Is Shopify Sidekick? Features, Access and the No-Selling Rule for Apps

Shopify Sidekick is the AI assistant built into the Shopify admin: merchants ask it questions, have it fill in forms, write content and build apps, then approve each change it proposes. Third-party apps can plug into it through Sidekick app extensions, and Shopify’s developer policy does not allow those apps to use Sidekick to sell.

That last rule sits in the content and safety policy on Shopify’s developer page for Sidekick app extensions. Under its Don’t heading, the page lists: “Use Sidekick to sell. Upsells, plan-upgrade nudges, competitor comparisons, false urgency, and fabricated endorsements are not allowed.” Shopify checks an extension’s descriptions when the app is deployed and checks the data it returns at runtime, and “App or content that fails a check is blocked”. This guide reads Shopify’s help center, its Sidekick page and its developer documentation as served on October 22, 2026. It is published by Relvino, which decides per shopper across email, SMS and pop-ups and so has a stake in how stores market to shoppers; read it as informed but interested.

What Shopify Sidekick is

Shopify’s help center describes Sidekick as “an AI-enabled commerce assistant in your Shopify admin” that works in plain language and “presents changes for your review before applying them.” It runs in two modes. In chat, a merchant asks a question or gives an instruction from any admin page, by typing, by voice, or by sharing a screen. In Sidekick Pulse, Sidekick researches the store’s data on its own and posts suggested actions as cards on the admin Home page, up to five at a time.

Sidekick uses the page the merchant is on as context, so a question asked from Analytics can draw on that page’s data. It also remembers: past conversations for about three months, and recent admin activity from about the last 12 hours, both of which can be switched off for a conversation. Repeated requests can be saved as skills and rerun with a slash shortcut, up to 50 skills (25 in some stores).

Sidekick is a tool for the people who run the store. Shopify’s own list of its limitations opens with this one: “Sidekick can't talk to your customers or handle customer support conversations on your behalf.” AI that sells to shoppers is a different part of Shopify, covered in the guide to agentic commerce on Shopify.

What Sidekick does in Shopify

Shopify groups the work into answers, tasks, content and apps.

Answers from the store’s own data

Sidekick answers questions about sales, products and customers with the store’s data. In Shopify Analytics it writes ShopifyQL queries, draws line, donut or bar charts, and links to a custom data exploration. It also guides setup work such as connecting a domain, SEO wording and, for stores in the European Union or the United Kingdom, VAT collection.

Forms and tasks in the admin

Sidekick fills in admin forms from chat instructions or reference images: products, discounts, collections, customers, B2B companies, order edits and draft orders. “Fields that Sidekick fills in or changes are highlighted in purple” so the merchant can review them before saving. For several separate tasks in one request, it builds a to-do list and works through it. In the theme editor it can change theme settings and add sections and blocks the theme already includes; it can also draft a workflow for Shopify Flow, covered in the ecommerce automation guide.

Content and marketing

Sidekick writes product descriptions, blog posts, online store pages and Shopify Messaging emails, and generates images from a text prompt. Inside Shopify Messaging it can draft or edit an email campaign’s text and design and recommend a customer segment to send it to. It can also help set up Campaign Autopilot, which Shopify describes as “the marketing agent in your Shopify admin that creates and runs marketing campaigns across your connected channels.” Sidekick explains and summarizes Autopilot; Autopilot is the one that runs campaigns.

Apps it builds

“Generating apps with Sidekick is available only to stores on the Grow plan, Advanced plan, and Shopify Plus plan.” A merchant describes a tool, such as one that recommends reorders from sales velocity, and Sidekick writes it; the merchant installs it by clicking Install. Generated apps reach only the store’s Admin API (orders, products, customers, discounts, content and analytics), work only inside the admin, and are built only from a desktop browser. Shopify adds a warning worth reading twice: “Generated apps can change customer-facing data in your store.”

What Sidekick asks before it acts

The headline rule is in Shopify’s considerations list: “Sidekick can't make changes to your store without your approval, and will only present options for you to review and approve.” In practice that approval is a save, apply or confirm step the merchant clicks, and the help center describes one for each kind of change:

• Forms. Sidekick highlights what it filled in; nothing is stored until the merchant saves. Generated text goes in with an Apply button.
• Orders. Sidekick opens the order edit page and proposes the edit; the order changes only when the merchant clicks Update order. Draft orders are saved only when the merchant clicks Save.
• Store policies. “If a policy already has content, then Sidekick asks you before it replaces that content.” It cannot edit a policy set to update automatically, and “Sidekick can't change your privacy policy.”
• Themes. Changes apply to the theme open in the editor, published or not, and take effect only when saved.
• Pulse. A suggestion becomes a conversation and a to-do list, and “Sidekick never makes changes to your store without your approval.”
• Third-party apps. “Before Sidekick uses an installed app, it asks for your approval.” The merchant can answer Yes for one request or Yes, and don’t ask again for that app; with memory turned off, Sidekick asks every time.

The approval covers Sidekick’s own proposals. A generated app, once installed, acts with the permissions it was granted, and Shopify tells merchants to test one thoroughly before installing it. Permissions also run the other way: Shopify’s Sidekick page says “Every staff member can use Sidekick based on their admin permissions.”

Why some merchants don’t have access to Sidekick

Shopify’s pages give several reasons a merchant may not see Sidekick, or may see less of it than a peer does.

• The browser. “Sidekick isn't currently available when you use the Shopify admin in a mobile browser.” On a phone or tablet it lives in the Shopify app instead.
• The plan. Shopify says features and usage limits vary by plan. App generation needs Grow, Advanced or Shopify Plus, and Sidekick can add a deposit to a draft order only on Shopify Plus.
• Staff permissions. Each staff member gets the Sidekick their admin permissions allow. Generating or editing apps needs the App development > Develop permission, and setting payment terms on a draft order needs a permission that allows it.
• Early access. “Sidekick Pulse is in early access and is available only to certain merchants.” Those merchants also need recent sales activity, owner or admin access, and Shopify Network Intelligence turned on. Screen sharing is in early access too, desktop browser only.
• The app. Sidekick works with a third-party app only if the app has added support, and the help center says so plainly: “This feature is available for apps that have added support for Sidekick.”

None of the Shopify pages read for this guide names language as a limit on Sidekick. Its Sidekick page says Sidekick adapts to the store’s language settings and can help in multiple languages, and voice mode answers in the language the merchant speaks.

How apps extend Sidekick

Shopify’s developer documentation describes two kinds of Sidekick app extension. A data extension lets Sidekick search an app’s data and answer with it. An action extension lets Sidekick take the merchant to the right page in the app, or open a purpose-built panel inline, where Sidekick suggests the change and the merchant stays in control of what gets updated. Shopify’s own example is an email app: a merchant asks for the best-performing subject lines, and Sidekick searches the Shopify Messaging app through its extension.

• What Sidekick does with it · Data extension: Searches the app’s data and answers with the app’s context · Action extension: Takes the merchant to the right page in the app, or renders the app’s panel inline
• Can it change anything? · Data extension: Shopify’s policy: “Keep data extensions read-only.” · Action extension: Yes, as a proposal: mutations belong here, “where the merchant confirms the change”
• Response time limit · Data extension: 1 second · Action extension: 3 seconds
• Tools per app · Data extension: Up to 20, shared with action extensions · Action extension: Up to 20, shared with data extensions

Quoted phrases in the table are from Shopify’s developer page; the rest is this guide’s summary of it.

Three details matter to a merchant more than to a developer. First, “Sidekick currently supports integrations with up to 20 apps for each user on a store.” The ceiling is per staff member, and it matters most to a store running many apps that support Sidekick. Second, Sidekick routes a question to an app by its written summary: every app with Sidekick extensions must ship one, and “Sidekick uses this summary to route merchant questions to the correct app.” If an app’s descriptions are vague, Shopify warns developers, “merchants will have to explicitly name your app to invoke it.” Naming the app in the question helps when Sidekick does not pick it up. Third, the app chooses its own scope. LoyaltyLion, a loyalty app, documents a data integration that answers questions about a program’s setup, members and metrics, and says “Access is read-only, so Sidekick can view your data but can't make changes to your program.”

The rule against selling through Sidekick

The content and safety policy is short. Shopify reviews an extension at two points: at deploy, it validates the extension and tool descriptions, instructions and input schemas; at runtime, it checks “the response data your tools return to Sidekick” before Sidekick uses it. A blocked extension does not appear in Sidekick, and Shopify emails the developer when a deployed version is blocked.

The list of things an app must not do is specific. Apps must not “Try to redefine who Sidekick is, steer its decision-making, or bypass the merchant's confirmation when Sidekick acts on their behalf.” They must not use Sidekick to sell, which rules out upsells, plan-upgrade nudges, competitor comparisons, false urgency and fabricated endorsements. And they must not include promotional content or filler unrelated to the tool’s purpose, embedded directives, credentials, or customer data nobody requested.

Apps still reach merchants through Sidekick by another route: Sidekick recommends apps from the Shopify App Store on request, with each one’s rating, and Shopify tells developers that Sidekick and the admin “can suggest your app when its registered intents can help a merchant get things done.” That suggestion is Shopify’s, made from the intents an app registers. On Shopify’s rules, a pitch for an upgrade or for one vendor over another does not belong in an installed app’s answers inside Sidekick, and an app whose Sidekick answers carry one is outside a policy Shopify checks extensions against at deploy and at runtime.

Where Sidekick stops, and marketing starts

Sidekick sits on the merchant’s side of the store: it drafts campaigns and suggests segments, but it does not talk to customers, and its changes wait for a person’s approval. The guide to AI agents for ecommerce sorts tools like it by reach, and AI marketing for Shopify maps the rest of the store’s AI.

The question Sidekick leaves open is what each shopper should receive, and when. Relvino works on that question: it decides per shopper, in under 80ms, whether to send, which offer and on which channel across email, SMS and pop-ups, inside guardrails the brand sets. That is the model described in agentic marketing; Sidekick’s question is how a merchant gets admin work done faster.

What to read when an app announces Sidekick support

Each new Sidekick extension leaves a merchant with the same questions, answerable from the app’s own documentation.

• Data, actions or both? A data extension answers questions; an action extension proposes changes the merchant confirms. LoyaltyLion’s is read-only, and says so.
• On which plan? An app can tie its Sidekick support to its own plans, separate from Shopify’s. LoyaltyLion’s is on every plan, with customer lifetime value reserved for its Classic plan and above.
• What does it say about its summary? An app that describes its extension specifically gets routed to; one that does not has to be named in every question.

The approval prompt is the merchant’s last check either way. Sidekick asks before it uses an app, and once the merchant says yes, Shopify’s policy forbids the app from using its answer to sell.

Frequently asked questions

What does Sidekick do in Shopify?

It answers questions about the store and does admin work for the people who run it, from reports and product edits to content and custom apps. Shopify also lists mobile-specific tasks for Sidekick in the Shopify app: 3D scanning, barcode printing and tap-to-pay transactions. On an Apple Watch it gives quick voice answers, such as unfulfilled orders, today’s sales or low stock products, but cannot make changes from the watch. A merchant can also point Sidekick at one record by typing @ and the name of a product, order, customer, collection, discount, segment or marketing automation.

Why don’t I have access to Sidekick in Shopify?

Sometimes Sidekick is there and has moved, or the screen is the wrong one. Shopify is rolling out a refreshed admin design gradually, and in it a desktop chat starts from a Sidekick field on most pages instead of the icon in the top bar. In the Shopify app, Sidekick is unavailable while a dialog is open over the main screen, which can include the Discounts screen, and on a tablet it is not available in the Online Store Editor. If none of that applies, the plan, staff permissions and early-access rules described in this guide decide which parts of Sidekick a person sees.

Is Shopify Sidekick free?

Shopify’s answer is that it costs nothing extra: Sidekick is included with a Shopify plan, and features and usage limits vary by plan. Two limits are documented. Image generation has a monthly limit that resets at the start of each calendar month and a short-term limit that often frees up within a few minutes. App generation has an hourly and a weekly limit, both rolling, measured by the amount of work Sidekick does rather than the number of apps. Both sets of limits apply to the whole store, so everyone who works in it shares them.

Does Shopify have an AI feature?

Several. Besides Sidekick, Shopify’s help center lists AI built into specific admin workflows: suggested replies in Shopify Inbox, a theme generated from a description of the business, a suggested product category, sorting of storefront filter values in the Search & Discovery app, plain-language descriptions of customer segments, spend projections in the customer cohort report and summaries of merchant reviews for select apps in the App Store. Shopify notes that availability can vary by plan, device and language. There is also Tinker, a free mobile app for images and video, and stores can connect third-party AI tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini.

Can Sidekick send marketing emails to customers?

Not on its own. Sidekick helps with the content of a Shopify Messaging email campaign that a merchant has already started: the text, the design, images and a recommended segment. For creating and sending the campaign, Shopify’s help center points to Shopify Messaging’s own steps. Running campaigns is the job of Campaign Autopilot, a separate agent; Sidekick can summarize its status, list pending actions to review and give a weekly summary of its email tactics, Shop Campaigns and Meta ad campaigns.

How long does it take to migrate from Klaviyo to Relvino?

The technical cutover takes about 30 minutes: install the Shopify app, point the sending domain, connect the SMS number, and shopper data ingests automatically. Revenue is then measured in a 14-day pilot, so the cutover and the results run on two separate clocks. The brand sets guardrails such as margin floors, the channels Relvino may use and brand voice, and Relvino decides offer, timing, channel and creative for each shopper inside them.