Shopify Sidekick is a free, built-in AI assistant available to every Shopify merchant, but most don’t know how to use Shopify Sidekick. I will share a few ways on how to use Shopify SideKick, and you will be surprised by how much potential it holds. It can analyze your sales, write marketing emails, manage inventory, build customer segments, and even edit your store theme, all from a single chat window.
No extra apps, no monthly fee.
Here’s exactly how to use it across 10 high-impact tasks.
1. Diagnose a Sales Drop in Seconds
Your dashboard shows sales are down 20%. Before you spend an hour pulling data into spreadsheets, open Sidekick and type:
“Give me a full breakdown of this month’s sales performance and tell me what changed.”
Sidekick pulls your actual store data, compares it to the prior period, pinpoints where the drop happened, and gives you a plain-English explanation. Thirty seconds, no math. Then immediately follow up with “What should I do about it?” — and you go from diagnosis to action in the same conversation.
2. Increase Average Order Value (AOV) With Store-Specific Advice
Generic advice like “try upsells” or “add a bundle” doesn’t tell you which products, which price points, or which customers. Sidekick does.
Try this prompt: “What can I do this week to increase my average order value?”
It analyzes your catalog, your pricing, and your customers’ purchasing patterns, then tells you which specific products are natural bundle candidates and what price thresholds your buyers are actually comfortable with. To put a number on why this matters: a $5 increase in AOV across 200 monthly orders is $12,000 a year. One 30-second prompt.
3. Turn Phone Photos Into Professional Product Images
Upload your product photo, click the image, then hit “Generate” in the lower right corner. Try a prompt like:
“Take this product image and place it on a marble counter in natural lighting with a lifestyle setting.”
You can change the background, adjust colors, add or remove objects, and even edit text on the product itself. The key is specificity. “Overhead angle, soft natural light, linen fabric background, minimal styling” produces a completely different result than “product hero shot, dramatic side lighting, dark moody tones.”
Try a few variations before committing to a look or use this to skip the professional shoot entirely.
4. Set Up Discounts and Promotions Without Touching the Admin Menus
Most merchants think about running a sale, then don’t because opening the discount section, filling in every field, setting dates… it’s just enough friction that the idea dies. Sidekick removes that friction entirely.
Prompt: “Create a 15% off discount for my sale items collection this weekend, automatically applied at checkout.”
Sidekick navigates to the discount section itself and fills in the promo name, discount value, applicable products, customer eligibility, minimum purchase requirements, combination rules, and start/end dates. You just review and confirm. When it’s this easy, you actually run the campaign.
5. Rewrite Product Descriptions That Read Like Spec Sheets
It’s midnight, and you are writing product descriptions one after the other. While adding your 15th product of the day, you are repeating yourself and short on ideas. You know the ones where you have not done a satisfactory job. They’re technically accurate but completely unconvincing.
Prompt: “Write a detailed product description for [product name]. Describe what makes it unique, why a customer would want it, and optimize it for search.”
Sidekick writes the full description and takes follow-up edits to refine tone or focus. But here’s the more useful trick: save your brand voice as a reusable skill. Type / in the chat, click “New Skill,” name it something like “brand voice,” and write your instructions once, tone, vocabulary, words you never use, and who your customer is. From that point on, start any copy request with /brand voice and Sidekick applies those rules automatically. No re-explaining every session.
6. Write Marketing Emails That Are Actually Ready to Send
Email is still the highest-ROI channel in ecommerce, and most store owners know they should be sending more. The problem isn’t motivation, it’s energy — who’s writing a compelling email at 9 p.m. after running a business all day?
Prompt: “Write a promotional email for my new limited edition collection launch. Tone is calm but exciting with a bit of FOMO. At the end, include my top three best-selling products from the last 30 days with a 48-hour 15% discount promo code.”
You get a subject line, full body copy, and a clear CTA. Don’t paste and send without reading it, though — add one personal detail, something only you would know. The first draft is Sidekick’s. That last 10% is what makes it land.
7. Get a Full Inventory Health Report
Every store has three inventory problems running in parallel: things flying off shelves that need restocking, dead stock sitting unsold for months, and a murky middle section you’re not sure what to do with. Figuring all of that out usually means pulling data from multiple places and doing math you don’t have time for.
Prompt: “Tell me which products to restock, which are dead weight, and what my sell-through rate looks like across collections.”
What comes back: restock candidates ranked by sales velocity, dead stock flagged with specific action recommendations (discount, bundle, or remove), and sell-through rates by collection. Dead stock costs carrying money. Stock-outs cost revenue. One prompt tells you exactly where you stand.
8. Build Customer Segments Without Manual Filtering
Win-back campaigns, VIP offers, loyalty emails — they all perform better when they’re going to exactly the right people. Finding those people manually gets overwhelming fast as your list grows.
Here’s the five-step process:
- Open Sidekick from the sidebar
- Type what you’re looking for — e.g., “Show me customers who signed up but never purchased”
- Review what Sidekick finds (it’ll show you a summary and explain why the segment matters)
- Click “Create a segment” directly inside the Sidekick panel
- Review the logic it built, then save it
That’s it. Name it, save it, and it’s ready to use in your next campaign. No query builder, no manual filtering.
9. Update Your Store Design With a Prompt
Before Sidekick, changing how your store looked meant either knowing where every setting lived or paying a developer. Now you can start with a prompt.
“Make my store feel more premium — darker tones, more white space, update the hero section.”
Sidekick takes you to the online store editor and starts applying changes you can see as they happen. You can keep prompting to tweak from there, or approve what’s done. It can also generate entirely new custom blocks — content sections you can drop into your storefront, so you’re not just rearranging what’s already there. You’ll still want a developer for deep custom functionality, but the baseline of what you can do yourself has moved significantly.
10. Save Your Best Prompts as Reusable Shortcuts
Found a prompt that gives you exactly the analysis you need every week? Don’t save it in your notes app and copy-paste it forever.
Sidekick Skills let you save any prompt as a slash command. Two ways to create one: type / in the chat window and Sidekick walks you through creating a new skill, or write your full prompt, send it, then hover over the message and click the skills icon to save it directly. Name the shortcut, tweak the instructions if needed, and save.
Next time you need it, type /, select your skill, done. Build one for your weekly inventory check, your AOV analysis, your restock prompt — whatever you ask on repeat. Over time, you’re building a personal ops toolkit that runs on command.
All of this is already in your Shopify admin. Nothing to install, nothing to pay for separately. The merchants getting the most out of Sidekick aren’t doing anything complicated; they’re just actually using it.