What Shopify Sidekick Actually Does in Your Admin, and What It Can’t

On September 15, 2026, Shopify began rolling out a new look for the admin, and Sidekick moved from a side panel to a floating chat (opens in new tab) at the bottom of every page. The new look arrives gradually, and an admin that doesn’t have it yet shows the older layout, with the Sidekick icon and input window (opens in new tab) in a different spot.

Three months earlier, on June 17, 2026, Shopify’s Spring ’26 Edition introduced Sidekick App Extensions (opens in new tab), which link third-party apps into Sidekick so a single conversation can pull answers and take actions across your tools. The same Edition put Sidekick Pulse on a redesigned admin Home and extended Shopify Sidekick to Apple Watch.

On October 1, 2026, Shopify announced Canvas (opens in new tab), a design surface where Sidekick builds and edits a store’s theme, and began rolling it out in early access.

We build Shopify stores and the automations that run them, and Sidekick now sits inside that work. This is the breakdown we’d give a client deciding what to hand it.

Sidekick is an AI-enabled commerce assistant in your Shopify admin (opens in new tab) that gives guidance, generates content, builds apps and completes tasks from everyday language. It works in two modes: you chat with it to ask questions and complete tasks, or it surfaces recommendations through Sidekick Pulse on your admin Home. For longer tasks, Shopify Sidekick keeps working in the background after you close the chat or navigate away, then notifies you when the result is ready for review.

You can chat with Sidekick from Home or any other page in the Shopify admin (opens in new tab), on desktop, mobile and tablet, by text or by voice with screen sharing. Sidekick uses the page you’re on as context for your question: ask while you’re viewing Analytics, and it can use that page’s data. When a request is missing details, Sidekick asks a clarifying question, and it can offer multiple choice answers (opens in new tab) to speed that up.

Sidekick does less on smaller surfaces. On Apple Watch (opens in new tab), it can answer questions, but it can’t make changes to your store or navigate the admin. It also doesn’t currently run when you open the Shopify admin in a mobile browser. On a phone, Shopify Sidekick runs in the Shopify app, where it’s on every screen (opens in new tab) through typing or voice.

Sidekick presents changes for your review before it applies them. It can’t make changes to your store without your approval (opens in new tab), and it only presents options for you to review and approve. The same rule covers Sidekick Pulse’s proactive suggestions (opens in new tab): you review and approve each change before it’s applied.

When Sidekick edits an order, the order updates only after you review the changes and click Update order (opens in new tab). A draft order is saved only after you review it and click Save. When Sidekick generates content in a field, Shopify highlights that field in purple so you can see what was added.

In its Winter ’26 Edition (opens in new tab) on December 10, 2025, Shopify said Sidekick “can also build code and make changes directly, all with your oversight.” Outside Canvas, Shopify puts a review step in front of each change. Plan around the approval rule: Shopify Sidekick proposes, and the person who clicks accept owns the result.

In Canvas, Shopify puts the review in the publish dialog. When you ask for a change there, the Sidekick chat opens and Sidekick makes the change (opens in new tab). Canvas saves your changes automatically and has no save button. A change you ask Sidekick for in Canvas is saved with the rest of your changes, and your customers can’t view your changes until you publish them.

Sidekick can navigate to any Shopify admin page (opens in new tab) on your instructions, and it either handles a task directly or walks you through the steps. For analytics, it can generate custom ShopifyQL queries in the query editor, display line, donut or bar charts, and export reports to CSV, Parquet, JSONL or XML. Export links expire after 10 minutes if they aren’t downloaded.

Sidekick can also create and edit reports (opens in new tab) from prompts in plain language. That covers showing key metrics in the chat, creating a new data exploration, saving a modified report as a new exploration, and generating or refining a report’s ShopifyQL query. Staff who’ve never written ShopifyQL can get a custom report by describing it, though someone still has to read the query to confirm it measures what they asked for.

Sidekick fills in forms from your chat instructions (opens in new tab): fields on any admin page, products, discounts, collections, customers, B2B companies, order edits, and draft orders. For draft orders, some details depend on your plan, store setup and staff permissions. Sidekick can set payment terms only when your permissions allow it, and it can add a deposit only on the Shopify Plus plan and only when the draft order already has payment terms.

Sidekick can also tell you how much money is in your Shopify Balance accounts and help you move money between them or to an external account you’ve added as a payee, with a Preview step before you complete the transfer request. The September 15, 2025 release was limited to US stores using Balance (opens in new tab).

Sidekick creates discount codes and automatic discounts (opens in new tab): amount off product discounts, amount off order discounts and free shipping discounts. It also creates custom customer segments from natural language, updates metafield values and metaobject entries, and helps write emails, edit store content and generate blog posts. Always review generated text before you accept it.

Generated images stay out of your store until you save one. An unsaved image stays private between you and Sidekick in your chat history. Image generation limits depend on your Shopify plan and are shared by everyone who works in the store. Reference image uploads (opens in new tab) for Sidekick must be under 5MB, in JPEG, PNG or WebP, with a maximum of 3 files.

Inside Shopify Messaging email, Sidekick can generate or edit text, edit the design, generate images and recommend or create segments (opens in new tab), once you’ve already started the campaign. Sidekick can also recommend, help set up and summarize Campaign Autopilot, the marketing agent in your Shopify admin that creates and runs marketing campaigns across your connected channels. Shopify listed Campaign Autopilot as available in early access (opens in new tab) on August 4, 2026.

Sidekick writes product descriptions (opens in new tab) too, including from inside the pages you edit (opens in new tab). Our guide to writing Shopify product descriptions with AI covers that workflow and the QA it needs.

Sidekick can create or edit workflows in Shopify Flow (opens in new tab) from a description of the workflow you want, as long as the Flow app is open in your admin. Three constraints apply: you must be on a desktop device (opens in new tab) to generate workflows, workflows generated by Sidekick are Inactive by default until you turn them on manually, and Sidekick might omit business-specific logic in complex workflows, which you’ll need to refine before using the workflow. Building, testing and reviewing those workflows is covered in our guide to Shopify Flow automations.

Generating apps with Sidekick is available only to stores on the Grow plan, Advanced plan and Shopify Plus plan (opens in new tab). Staff need the App development > Develop permission to generate or edit apps, hourly and weekly limits apply, and app generation works only in Sidekick in the admin from a desktop web browser.

Generated apps work only within the Shopify admin, aren’t visible to customers, and can’t reach themes, checkout or customer account apps. They do get Admin API access (opens in new tab) to orders, products, customers, discounts, content and analytics, so a generated app can change customer-facing data in your store. An app your customers never see can still change the product and discount data they do see, so review a Sidekick-generated app the way you’d review any custom app before it runs against live data.

Sidekick can modify theme settings and make recommendations (opens in new tab) to help you achieve a particular style with your store, but it can make suggestions or changes to a theme only when you’re in the theme editor or in Canvas. In the theme editor, Sidekick can suggest and apply changes, including on themes that aren’t currently published, and you must save those changes for them to take effect.

In the theme editor, Sidekick can change global theme settings and the settings of sections and blocks, including text, number, range and color settings, color schemes, option selections and on/off settings. It can also add sections and blocks and set them up, move, remove or hide sections and blocks on the page you’re editing, turn installed app embeds on or off and change their settings, and add color schemes and palette colors on themes that support them.

Sidekick can add only the sections and blocks that your theme already includes (opens in new tab). For a block your theme doesn’t include, generate a theme block in the theme editor, or use Sidekick in Canvas if your store has access to it.

Canvas (opens in new tab), announced on October 1, 2026, is a design surface where merchants build with Sidekick. It lays out every page together in one interactive, infinite workspace (opens in new tab), so you can see the whole store and work on any part of it in context. You can ask Sidekick to build or change your theme (opens in new tab) from your description, or you can edit blocks, settings and text yourself.

Canvas is where Sidekick builds a store’s theme from a description on desktop. Sidekick builds the theme and opens it in Canvas (opens in new tab), and the new theme is added to your theme library as an unpublished theme. The other starting point is duplicating a supported theme, which opens a copy in Canvas and leaves the original in your theme library.

There are four ways to customize a theme in Canvas: ask Sidekick to make a change, change a block’s settings, edit text directly in the preview, or change the theme settings. Shopify says Sidekick now works directly on the theme’s files (opens in new tab), validates its code, and reviews screenshots of how its changes landed before handing the result back to the merchant.

On Sidekick’s use before Canvas, Shopify claims Sidekick made more than twenty-five million edits to themes (opens in new tab) in the first half of 2026. Ben Sehl (opens in new tab), Director of Product at Shopify and co-founder of Kotn, says “an entrepreneur on Shopify can build a fully custom store in twenty minutes that’s head and shoulders above what I built then.” That’s one executive’s comparison with the two weeks he says it took him to get a rough store working when he built Kotn 12 years ago, so don’t treat it as a build-time estimate for your store.

Canvas is in early access (opens in new tab) and is available only to certain stores, and on October 1, 2026, Shopify said it was rolling out to existing stores over the coming days. Canvas is available only on desktop devices and on plans that include theme customization. Your staff need the Online store > Themes > Edit code permission to open Canvas. You open it from the Themes page in your Shopify admin.

Canvas works only with themes developed by Shopify and with custom themes (opens in new tab). Third-party themes aren’t supported, which rules out third-party themes from the Shopify Theme Store.

Shopify’s Canvas sits next to the theme editor rather than in place of it. As Ben Sehl said at launch (opens in new tab), “We’re early here and Canvas is not replacing the existing editor yet.”

Canvas saves your changes automatically (opens in new tab), so there’s no save button. Publishing doesn’t save your work. It makes your changes visible to your customers.

On an unpublished theme, a saved change shows in Canvas and in the theme preview. On your published theme, customers can view your change only after you click Update, and then Publish changes.

The button reads Publish on an unpublished theme and Update on your published one. Either opens a dialog where you review the changes you’ve made since you last published (opens in new tab) before you click Publish changes. If the theme can’t be published, the dialog lists the errors and offers a Fix with Sidekick button.

Undo doesn’t cover Sidekick’s work. When Sidekick makes a change, your undo history is cleared (opens in new tab), so you can’t use Undo to reverse that change or any change that you made before it. To reverse a Sidekick change, you ask Sidekick to change it back or restore an earlier version from the theme history, and a restored version reaches customers only after you publish it.

At launch, Canvas doesn’t support (opens in new tab) third-party themes from the Shopify Theme Store, Markets, rollouts, translations, or app blocks and app embeds. On apps, you can’t add or configure app blocks or app embeds in Canvas (opens in new tab). On Markets, you can’t customize a theme for different markets in Canvas.

The translation limit is about translating inside Canvas. You can’t translate theme content directly in Canvas (opens in new tab), so use the Translate & Adapt app to translate theme content.

The rollout limit is about editing through a rollout. You can add a theme that you edited in Canvas to a rollout as a replacement for your main theme. You can’t use a rollout to edit a theme that you edited in Canvas, and you can’t open the theme from the rollout.

Two limits follow the theme after it’s been edited in Canvas. A theme that you edit in Canvas doesn’t receive theme updates (opens in new tab), and you can’t download the theme files for a theme that you edited in Canvas. You also can’t add a new block to a template manually in Canvas, so ask Sidekick to add it.

Duplicating a theme into Canvas creates a separate copy. You can edit the copy only in Canvas (opens in new tab), and you can continue to edit the original theme in the theme editor. Changes to one theme aren’t added to the other.

Sidekick App Extensions (opens in new tab) connect third-party apps directly to Sidekick. On June 17, 2026, Shopify said they were live for 15+ partners, naming Klaviyo, Loop and Smile. Apps that have added support for Sidekick (opens in new tab) include Klaviyo: Email Marketing & SMS, Judge.me Product Reviews App, and Seguno Email Marketing.

Approval runs per conversation. Before Sidekick uses an installed app, it asks for your approval. After you approve, the app is activated for the current conversation only, so approving an app in one chat doesn’t carry over to the next.

For app developers, Sidekick app extensions (opens in new tab) cover data extensions, which let Sidekick search your app’s data and which Shopify tells developers to keep read-only, and action extensions, which take the merchant to the right page in your app. Sidekick currently supports up to 20 app integrations per user on a store. Shopify’s content rules for extensions list “Use Sidekick to sell.” among the things not to do.

Sidekick skills (opens in new tab) are saved prompts that you can reuse with custom shortcuts, and you can save up to 25 of them. You can share skills with other merchants by URL.

Sidekick remembers your past conversations for about 3 months (opens in new tab) and can refer to your admin activity from about the last 12 hours. You can turn memory off for one conversation, but you can’t turn it back on for that same conversation, and deleting a conversation removes it from both your chat history and Sidekick’s memory. Conversations with Sidekick in the theme editor aren’t added to memory. Memory, which Shopify added on December 10, 2025 (opens in new tab), is kept at the user level.

Voice mode (opens in new tab) works on desktop, mobile devices and Apple Watch, and Sidekick automatically detects and responds in the language you’re speaking. Screen sharing in Sidekick is in early access and only available from the admin in a desktop browser.

Sidekick Pulse (opens in new tab) is in early access and is available only to certain merchants. Where it’s available, Pulse shows up to 5 suggested actions at a time, is limited to stores with recent sales activity, and requires the store owner or a staff member with admin access. It turns your store’s sales, traffic and inventory into next best actions (opens in new tab) on a redesigned admin Home.

Sidekick Pulse also requires Shopify Network Intelligence (opens in new tab) to be activated. When it’s enabled, Shopify says it “will securely use your customer data together with customer data from other merchants to generate insights that power advanced features, known as Enhanced Services, to make running your business easier.” Network Intelligence also comes with requirements for notifying your customers, so turning on Pulse is a data-sharing decision for whoever owns your privacy policy, as well as a feature choice.

Shopify sets five limits on Sidekick (opens in new tab):

In Canvas, your changes are saved automatically (opens in new tab) and your customers view them only after you publish.

More limits apply by device and surface. In the Shopify app (opens in new tab), Sidekick isn’t available while a dialog is open over the main screen, and on a tablet it isn’t available in the Online Store Editor. Apple Watch answers questions without making changes, and app generation, Flow generation and Canvas all need a desktop. Theme changes happen only in the theme editor or in Canvas.

In Shopify, the AI that chats with customers is the Inbox agent (opens in new tab). It’s an opt-in feature of Shopify Inbox that you turn on to chat with customers automatically.

Sidekick’s part on that side is configuration. To have Sidekick refine your Inbox agent’s persona, click Refine with Sidekick (opens in new tab) beside it, then describe the tone, wording or service style that you want. Sidekick drafts the change for you to review and save. Choosing and setting up the customer-facing agent is covered in our guide to AI shopping assistants and conversational commerce.

Shopify’s AI tools split in two. Some are part of Shopify (opens in new tab), such as Sidekick and other AI features in your Shopify admin, and others connect your store to third-party AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. Alongside Sidekick, there’s Tinker, a free mobile app that Shopify says has more than 100 AI tools for creating images, videos and brand assets for your store, plus media generation in the file editor and a Shopify CLI connector.

Sidekick also works inside the pages that you edit, where it writes text for blog posts, online store pages, product descriptions, Shopify Messaging emails and content in the theme editor. Many of the other AI features in the admin are available at no additional cost (opens in new tab), but availability can vary by plan, device and language.

Where is Shopify Magic? Shopify’s marketing address for it, shopify.com/magic, redirects to shopify.com/sidekick (opens in new tab). Its Help Center address redirects to Shopify’s AI-powered tools overview (opens in new tab), where Sidekick does the text generation described above.

Does Shopify AI cover shoppers who use ChatGPT? Connecting a third-party AI tool (opens in new tab) is for AI tools you connect to a store you own. To make your products discoverable to shoppers who use AI assistants, Shopify points to agentic storefronts, Selling on ChatGPT and the Agentic plan instead.

Sidekick is included on every plan Shopify compares (opens in new tab), Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, with no add-on price. Shopify lists it under “Always included” as the “Built-in assistant” feature. Individual Shopify Sidekick features carry their own gates:

Sidekick’s staff requirements are set feature by feature: the App development > Develop permission for app generation, owner or admin access for Pulse, staff permissions for draft order payment terms, and the Online store > Themes > Edit code permission to open Canvas. Generating theme blocks (opens in new tab) needs the Edit code permission too, or the store owner or an administrator. Edit code (opens in new tab) lets users modify the theme code directly through the code editor, so anyone you let into Canvas holds the permission that opens the code editor too.

Sort Sidekick tasks by what a mistake would touch. Reports, ShopifyQL queries, navigation and questions about your own data don’t change the store, so they’re the lowest-risk place to start. A wrong answer there costs a re-check rather than a customer-facing error.

Form fills, discounts, segments, order edits and theme editor changes all stop at a review screen, a Save button or an Update order button. Hand them to Sidekick when the person approving can tell a correct result from a plausible one. A discount with the wrong eligibility or a segment with the wrong filter looks finished on the review screen.

Three kinds of Sidekick output need a named owner before they go live: Flow workflows, which start inactive and can omit business logic; generated apps, which can change customer-facing data; and Shopify Messaging emails, which reach customers once you send them. On client stores, those three get a second reviewer before anything is activated or sent.

A theme Sidekick builds or edits in Canvas needs the same owner, and its checkpoint is the publish dialog. Before you publish one, check it against Canvas’s limits (opens in new tab): whether your storefront relies on app blocks or app embeds, which you can’t add or configure in Canvas, whether you customize the theme per market, and whether you’ll want future theme updates or a downloaded copy of the theme files. Then review your changes at each preview width (opens in new tab) before you publish the theme.

If you duplicated a theme into Canvas, confirm you’re publishing the copy that has your latest changes, since the copy and the original don’t sync. Undo won’t reverse a Sidekick change in Canvas, so treat the theme history’s saved versions as your way back.

Keep two decisions with a person outright. Enabling Shopify Network Intelligence for Pulse is a data-sharing choice, and customer conversations belong to the Inbox agent or your support team, because Sidekick can’t handle them.

If you want Sidekick drafting more of your admin work without errors reaching your customers, our Shopify automation services team builds and reviews the Flow workflows and automations around it. Start with a free Growth Audit: a no-obligation look at why you aren’t getting found or converting, with a roadmap for fixing it.

You built something worth finding. We make sure it gets found.