AI Chatbot Glossary
What Is Shopify Sidekick?
Shopify Sidekick is the AI assistant built into the Shopify admin for merchants: it answers questions about the store, explains reports, and helps carry out admin tasks such as setting up discounts or editing settings through a chat interface.
Definition
Sidekick lives inside the Shopify admin and is aimed at the merchant, not the shopper. Shopify describes it as a commerce assistant that understands the merchant's own store data and can take actions in the admin on request, for example drafting a discount, pulling a sales breakdown, or navigating to the right settings page. It is part of Shopify's broader Shopify Magic set of AI features. Availability, supported languages, and capabilities have expanded over time and vary by plan and region; Shopify's help center is the source of truth for what it can do today.
Why Shopify Sidekick Matters for AI Chatbots
Sidekick lowers the skill barrier for running a Shopify store: a merchant can ask "why were sales down last week?" instead of building a report. It does not, however, talk to your customers on the storefront. That is a separate job, handled by a customer-facing assistant such as Chatonbo, which answers shopper questions, tracks orders, and captures leads on the store itself. A useful mental model: Sidekick helps you run the store; a shopping assistant helps your customers buy from it.
See it in practice:
Add a customer-facing assistant to ShopifyRelated Terms
Shopify Magic
Shopify Magic is the umbrella name for the AI features built into Shopify's platform, such as generating product descriptions, editing product images, drafting emails, and suggesting replies in Shopify Inbox.
AI Shopping Assistant
An AI shopping assistant is a chat-based helper embedded in an online store that guides shoppers to the right product, answers questions about sizing, shipping, and returns, tracks orders, and can add items to the cart, all inside one conversation.
Shopify Agentic Storefronts
Shopify Agentic Storefronts is Shopify's program for making merchants' products discoverable and purchasable inside AI agents and chat surfaces such as ChatGPT, using Shopify's catalog and checkout infrastructure rather than a separate store.
AI Agent
An AI agent is an autonomous software program that perceives its environment, makes decisions, and takes actions to achieve goals - going beyond simple chatbots by handling multi-step tasks.