Shopify Sidekick: An AI Assistant To Help Merchants

It’s the answer to: can Shopify be automated, and the answer is now a resounding yes. Shopify Sidekick will be a sidebar chat with an AI assistant, where merchants can ask questions like “why have my sales dropped off from January to now?” and the AI will explain the dip in sales instantly, with automated reports and graphs to boot.

Another feature of Shopify Sidekick is the ability to do tasks for you. For example, you could ask it to put your summer collection of white t-shirts on sale, and Shopify Sidekick will swoop in and automatically add the sales information to those items – saving merchants plenty of time.

What’s more, it can handle bigger tasks related to the website’s aesthetic too, like asking the Shopify Assistant to add your new products to your homepage.

No, Shopify Magic is an AI tool for creating product descriptions, you click the three stars on your product description box and it generates the description instantly from a few keywords.

Whereas Shopify Sidekick is a whole other ball game, it’s a business-savvy algorithm that helps you build your website and run your business, offering advice and data. Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lutke said in the announcement that he viewed entrepreneurs as heroes and that all heroes need a sidekick. He explained that some entrepreneurs have someone they can call when they need help building up a business and wanted to provide a virtual assistant that anyone could turn to with their questions.

It’s hard to say as it’s not available yet, and we haven’t tested its capabilities. From what we’ve seen over the last year, AI is snowballing. If Shopify Sidekick works as the company intends, it could save merchants time on looking for answers, and even doing menial tasks like adding a sale sign to items.

There are a couple of questions about whether AI can generate good quality content, as when I spoke to Wix’s head of SEO, he stated about AI:

“We’re opening Pandora’s box. You can look forward to the web being temporarily ruined – and then it fixing itself.”

But that’s not to say that if AI is used as a base structure where you then go in and edit the content can’t be a time saver. It’s also hard to say without testing how proficient the Shopify Sidekick AI tool will be at answering questions, changing web pages, and relaying your website data. The jury is out on whether or not Shopify Sidekick will be a revolutionary new tool or won’t work as intended. Shopify Sidekick hasn’t been released yet, but Shopify has said it’s “Coming Soon” – so watch this space!