Shopify magic Sidekick Assistant

Stevia Putri

Stanley Nicholas
Last edited October 16, 2025
Expert Verified

If you run a Shopify store, you’ve probably heard the buzz around AI. Everyone’s looking for that magic button to save time, handle the boring stuff, and free them up to actually grow the business. Shopify's big answer to this is the Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant, an AI tool built right into your admin dashboard. It's pitched as a co-pilot that can help you run your store.
But what does it really do? And more importantly, what are the things it can't do?
This post is an honest look at where Sidekick is a genuinely helpful tool and where it hits a wall, especially when it comes to customer support. We'll explore what you can do with it today and help you figure out if and when you might need something with a bit more horsepower.
What exactly is the Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant?
Think of the Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant as a super-smart intern who already knows your business. It's a conversational AI, which is just a fancy way of saying you can type commands in plain English, and it gets things done for you. It’s a core piece of Shopify’s "Shopify Magic" suite of AI tools.
You can ask it to perform tasks, write some copy for a new product, or pull a quick report on how things are going. The key thing to remember is that Sidekick is an internal tool for you, the merchant. Its entire purpose is to make your life easier while you're working inside the Shopify admin. It’s not designed to chat with your customers or answer their support tickets.
The best part? It comes free with all Shopify subscription plans, so you can start playing around with it right now.
Where the Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant really helps out
When it comes to the day-to-day grind of running your store, Sidekick has some pretty impressive tricks up its sleeve. It shines in a few areas that can genuinely give you back hours in your week.
Running your store with simple commands
This is where Sidekick feels the most useful. It takes those annoying, multi-step tasks that have you clicking through five different menus and turns them into a single typed command.
Let’s say you’re gearing up for a weekend sale. Normally, you’d have to go to the discounts section, create a new code, define all the rules, apply it to a specific collection, and then double-check everything. With Sidekick, you can just type something like:
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"Set up a 20% discount on everything in the 'Summer Sale' collection, starting Friday."
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"Find all customers who bought something more than twice in the last three months and create a new segment for them."
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"Show me a report of my best-selling products from last month."
This is a huge time-saver. It turns those tedious little jobs that take five minutes here and ten minutes there into something that takes just a few seconds. This lets you stay focused on strategy instead of getting lost in the weeds of the admin panel.
Writing product descriptions and creating images
Ever find yourself staring at a blank screen trying to write a compelling product description? We've all been there. Sidekick can give you a solid starting point.
You can ask it to draft product descriptions, brainstorm ideas for a blog post, or even write some email copy for your next newsletter. You just give it a simple prompt, and it generates the text. For visuals, it can create images from a text description, which is handy for things like a hero banner for your homepage or a lifestyle shot for a product that’s hard to photograph.
For store owners who don't have a dedicated copywriter or designer on staff, this feature is a big deal. It helps you create professional-looking content without the hefty price tag.
Quick theme edits and easy data insights
Sidekick also makes it a bit easier to tweak the look of your store without needing to mess with any code. You can ask it to "make all my product page buttons rounded" or "change the main font to something more playful," and it will queue up the changes for you to approve. Just a heads-up, this tends to work best on newer Shopify themes (like Dawn version 11.0.0 and up).
On the analytics side, it acts like a quick-access data tool. Instead of building a custom report, you can just ask, "Compare the sales from my spring collection to my summer collection." It will pull up a simple chart to show you the comparison. It's a great way to make quick decisions based on real data without needing a degree in analytics.
The big catch: What the Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant can't do for customer support
Sidekick is a fantastic tool for managing your store from the inside. But once you start thinking about automating customer support, you’ll quickly find its limits. This is where you'll need to look at a tool that was actually built for the job.
It's a merchant assistant, not a customer support agent
This is the most important distinction to make. Sidekick is there to help you. It cannot, and is not designed to, talk to your customers. It doesn't connect to your help desk and can’t resolve support tickets for you.
A real AI support agent, like the ones from eesel AI, is built for that exact purpose. It plugs directly into your help desk, whether you're using Zendesk, Gorgias, or another platform. Its job is to provide immediate, autonomous answers to your customers' most common questions.
Its knowledge is stuck inside Shopify
Sidekick knows a lot about your products, orders, and Shopify data. But its knowledge stops at the Shopify border. It can’t see any of your external documents or help guides. If a customer asks a detailed question about your international shipping policy, and that policy lives in a Google Doc, Sidekick has no idea it even exists.
This is a huge difference compared to a tool like eesel AI, which is designed to connect to all of your company knowledge, no matter where it's stored. You can link eesel AI not just to your Shopify store data but also to your internal wikis in Confluence, your SOPs in Notion, your how-to guides in Google Docs, and even pull context from conversations in Slack. This allows it to answer tricky questions about company policies or return procedures that are way outside of what Sidekick can handle.
It needs your approval for every single action
Sidekick is built to be safe, which means it will suggest an action, but it won't actually do anything until you click the final "approve" button. This is great for preventing accidents, but it also means you can't have true, hands-off automation for your support. You’re still the one pulling all the levers.
With eesel AI, you get to choose what gets automated. You can set up rules that say "if a customer asks where their order is, the AI can handle it completely." But for more sensitive issues, like a complaint, you can set a rule to "always escalate to a human agent." With custom actions, the AI can do more than just talk; it can tag tickets, update customer fields in your CRM, and even ping your backend systems to get real-time order information.
You can’t test it before you use it
With Sidekick, you type a command and see what happens. There’s no practice environment or sandbox where you can test how it will perform at scale. You're basically testing it live on your store.
This is a major area where a dedicated support tool stands out. For example, eesel AI has a simulation mode that lets you test your AI setup on thousands of your own past support tickets. Before a single customer ever interacts with it, you can see exactly how the AI would have responded to real questions. It gives you an accurate forecast of your resolution rate and even points out gaps in your knowledge base (like, "The AI couldn't answer 20 questions about your warranty policy"). It’s a completely risk-free way to roll out automation and be confident that it’s going to work.
What about Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant pricing?
The Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant is included with all Shopify plans, so you don't have to pay anything extra for it. This is a great value, especially for merchants who are just getting started. To get all the features, you’ll want to be on a newer theme and using a desktop browser.
While "free" is hard to beat, it’s worth thinking about the hidden cost of a limited tool: your team's time. For businesses that are serious about improving their customer support, a dedicated platform with clear, flexible pricing like eesel AI often ends up being a much better investment. You get far more power and control, with predictable plans and no surprise fees based on how many tickets your AI resolves.
Final thoughts: A great tool for you, but not for your customers
So, what's the verdict? The Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant is a genuinely helpful AI tool for merchants. It’s fantastic at making store management faster, helping you create content, and giving you quick data insights. It can definitely save you time every single week.
But when it comes to scaling your customer support and automating resolutions, Sidekick just isn’t the right tool for the job. Its limitations in knowledge sources, autonomy, and customer-facing capabilities mean you'll need a dedicated platform to handle that side of the business.
If you’re at the point where you need to move beyond an internal assistant and want a fully autonomous AI agent that can resolve customer tickets, connect to all your knowledge, and let you test everything safely first, then it might be time to give eesel AI a try for free.
Frequently asked questions
The Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant is an internal conversational AI tool built into your Shopify admin. It's designed to help merchants manage their store tasks, create content, and analyze data more efficiently.
No, the Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant is not built to automate customer support interactions. It's an internal merchant assistant and cannot directly chat with customers or resolve support tickets.
Yes, the Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant is included free with all Shopify subscription plans. There are no additional costs to use its features for store management.
The Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant can help draft product descriptions, brainstorm blog post ideas, and write email copy. It can also generate images from text descriptions for various store assets.
The Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant primarily draws its knowledge from your Shopify store's data, products, and orders. It cannot access external documents, help guides, or knowledge bases outside of Shopify.
Yes, for safety and control, the Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant always requires your approval for any action it suggests. It will propose a change or task, but you must click "approve" for it to proceed.
The Shopify Magic Sidekick Assistant is an internal store management tool, whereas a dedicated AI agent like eesel AI is specifically designed for customer-facing support. A dedicated agent can connect to all your knowledge sources, automate ticket resolution, and operate autonomously.