Shopify Copilot: A deep dive for store owners in 2025

It seems like AI is everywhere these days, and it’s definitely changing how we run our ecommerce businesses. Shopify is right in the thick of it, building AI tools directly into its platform with features like Shopify Magic and its AI assistant, Sidekick. You’ll often hear this whole suite of tools referred to as the Shopify Copilot.

While these tools promise to make your life a whole lot easier, it can be tough to figure out what they actually do, especially when you start thinking about customer support. This guide will cut through the noise and give you a straight-up look at what Shopify Copilot can do, where it shines, where it falls short for customer service, and how you can fill in the gaps to really automate your support.

What is Shopify Copilot?

First things first, let’s clear up the name. "Shopify Copilot" isn’t a single product you can install. It’s the popular term for Sidekick, the conversational AI assistant that lives right in your Shopify admin. Sidekick, in turn, is powered by Shopify Magic, which is the broader family of AI features scattered throughout the platform.

The easiest way to think about Sidekick is as an internal assistant for you, the merchant. Its main job is to help you run your store more efficiently. You can give it simple text or voice commands, and it gets to work inside your Shopify admin. It’s almost like having a Shopify expert on your team who can handle store setup, marketing tasks, and data analysis. What it isn’t, however, is an AI agent that chats directly with your customers.

Key features and use cases of Shopify Copilot

Sidekick’s real strength is in cutting down the daily grind of managing a store. It helps you knock out tedious tasks in seconds, so you can spend your time actually growing your business.

Streamlining store operations and marketing with Shopify Copilot

Managing promotions and writing content can eat up a ton of time, but Sidekick turns these complex jobs into simple conversations.

Discount and campaign creation. Instead of clicking through a dozen different screens, you can just tell Sidekick what you need. For example, you could say, "Create a 20% off discount for all items in the ‘Summer Sale’ collection, valid for the first week of July," and poof, it’s done.

Content generation. Stuck with writer’s block? Sidekick can help draft product descriptions, brainstorm SEO-friendly meta titles, or even write the copy for your next email campaign. It’s a great way to get a solid first draft on the page without staring at a blinking cursor.

This video shows how Shopify Copilot can create collections and discounts in seconds.

Image generation and editing. You don’t need to be a design pro anymore to get professional-looking product shots. The Shopfolio Magic media tools can generate new backgrounds for your photos, remove them entirely for a clean look, or even whip up a unique hero banner for your homepage from a simple text prompt.

Conversational analytics and insights

Trying to understand your store’s performance is key, but digging through endless reports can be a headache. Sidekick makes your data much easier to digest.

Data analysis on command. You can ask questions in plain English and get answers right away. Instead of hunting through dashboards, you can just ask something like, "Why did our sales dip last Tuesday?" or "What was our average order value last month?"

Proactive recommendations. Sidekick doesn’t just wait for you to ask questions. It can also act like a mini business consultant, analyzing your store data in the background and offering suggestions to help you spot opportunities or fix issues before they grow into bigger problems.

Technical assistance and theme editing

For a lot of store owners, the technical side of Shopify can be a bit intimidating. Sidekick really helps lower that barrier.

AI code helper. This is pretty cool. You can now ask Sidekick to make code changes for you without having to hire a developer. You could say something like, "Hide the price for products that are out of stock," and it will generate and explain the code you need to add to your theme.

Guided walkthroughs. If you’re not sure how to find a setting or finish a task, you can ask Sidekick for a tour. It will guide you step-by-step right on your screen, making it much easier to learn your way around the Shopify admin.

The limitations of Shopify Copilot for customer support

Shopify Copilot is a fantastic tool for merchants, but it’s crucial to know what it wasn’t built for. When you look at it as a way to automate direct customer conversations, its limits become pretty clear. It’s designed to help you, not talk to your customers.

Why Shopify Copilot is an assistant, not an autonomous agent

Here’s the main thing to remember: Sidekick is there to assist you, not to replace your support team.

It’s really just an agent-assist tool. When you use it with Shopify Inbox, Sidekick gives your human agents suggested replies. This can definitely speed up response times, but it doesn’t handle conversations on its own. It can’t independently answer a question, tag a ticket, and close it out without a person involved.

It also has no multi-channel automation. Sidekick is stuck inside the Shopify ecosystem. If you’re like most growing businesses, you’re probably managing support in a dedicated help desk like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Gorgias. Shopify Copilot can’t plug into these platforms to automate emails or chats coming from other channels.

Limited knowledge sources and context

Good customer support runs on context, which is something Sidekick can’t really access beyond your store’s product info.

The AI doesn’t learn from your past support tickets. All that nuance, brand voice, and clever solutions your team has built up over thousands of conversations are completely lost on it. It can’t replicate the specific way you talk to your customers because it’s never seen it before.

Its knowledge is also stuck in a silo. It only knows what’s in your Shopify store. It can’t pull information from your wider knowledge base in tools like Confluence, Google Docs, or Notion. This means if a customer asks a question that isn’t answered on a product page, the AI is stumped, which just creates another ticket your team has to handle anyway.

Lack of control and customization for support workflows

Real support automation needs powerful, behind-the-scenes workflows that Sidekick just doesn’t have.

There’s no way to simulate or test it. You can’t safely see how the AI would perform before you let it loose with real customers. There’s no way to run it against thousands of your past tickets to see what percentage it would have solved correctly. This makes it pretty risky to rely on for anything more than simple, pre-written suggestions.

It also can’t perform custom actions. A modern support AI needs to do more than just talk; it needs to take action. Sidekick can’t do essential tasks like looking up a live order status in an external system, updating a ticket field in Zendesk, or escalating an urgent issue to a specific team based on rules you set up.

Pricing and availability of Shopify Copilot

This is one of the best parts. According to Shopify’s official documentation, the whole suite of Shopify Magic features, including Sidekick, is currently free for all merchants, no matter which plan you’re on.

It’s probably a good idea to keep in mind that access to certain features might change, and it’s always possible Shopify could introduce a new pricing strategy for its AI tools down the road.

You should also know that there are third-party apps on the Shopify App Store with similar names. For example, the AI Copilot app from La Machine à Idées has its own subscription costs, ranging from $12 to $300 a month. This guide is focused on Shopify’s built-in tool, Sidekick, which comes with your plan.

The better alternative: A dedicated AI support agent for Shopify

Once you see the limitations of Shopify Copilot for customer support, it becomes pretty obvious that you need a tool built for that specific job. This is where a platform like eesel AI comes into the picture. It’s designed from the ground up to solve the challenges that Sidekick doesn’t, plugging into your existing tools, including Shopify and your help desk, to provide actual end-to-end support automation.

eesel AI is built to fill the gaps left by internal assistants:

• Unified knowledge: eesel AI connects to your Shopify product catalog, your help center, thousands of your past support tickets from Zendesk or Gorgias, and your internal docs in Confluence or Google Docs. This creates a single source of truth, letting it give accurate, context-aware answers every time.

• True automation & custom actions: Forget just suggesting replies. eesel AI can act as a real agent that fully resolves tickets. It can look up live order statuses through API calls, automatically tag and sort incoming issues, and escalate to the right human team when needed.

• Risk-free simulation: One of the most powerful features of eesel AI is its simulation mode. Before you ever switch the AI on for live customers, you can test it on thousands of your historical tickets. You get a solid forecast of its resolution rate and can see exactly how it would have replied, giving you total confidence before going live.

• Radically self-serve: You don’t need to sit through a bunch of sales calls or mandatory demos to get started. With eesel AI, you can connect your help desk and other tools and be up and running in minutes, all on your own.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, a feature that the Shopify Copilot lacks, which allows testing the AI on historical data before going live.

Table: Shopify Copilot vs. eesel AI for customer support

Final thoughts on Shopify Copilot: Use the right AI for the right job

So, what’s the verdict? Shopify Copilot is an incredibly valuable tool for merchants. It streamlines store management, makes marketing easier, and puts data analysis within reach for everyone. It saves you time and gives you powerful tools, letting you focus on the big picture.

But for automating and scaling your customer support, its limits are clear. It just wasn’t designed to be a frontline support agent. To deliver the kind of fast, automated customer experiences that build loyalty and drive growth, ecommerce businesses should pair Shopify’s amazing backend with a dedicated AI support platform that’s actually built for the task.

Automate your Shopify support in minutes

Ready to see what a true AI support agent can do for your Shopify store? Connect your help desk and knowledge sources to eesel AI and start simulating your AI’s performance on past tickets today. You can be live in minutes, not months.