Shopify Sidekick
The AI assistant built into every Shopify store — it writes product descriptions, edits your theme, sets up discounts and answers questions about your own sales data.
What you'd use it for
Getting the day-to-day admin work of a Shopify store done in plain language, from product descriptions to discounts to questions about your own sales, without hiring extra help.
- Write product descriptions and page copy from a short prompt
- Generate AI product images, with a weekly quota that is small on Basic and Standard plans
- Create and schedule discounts and edit theme content directly in the admin
- Answer plain-language questions about your own orders, customers and sales trends
- Build a basic internal admin app from a description, on the Grow plan and above
The verdict
Sidekick is worth having, not worth choosing a platform for. Every live Shopify plan already includes it, so the real decision stays whether Shopify is the right place to run the store, not whether Sidekick is worth paying for on top. Where it actually earns its keep is the admin churn — descriptions, discounts, a straight answer about your own sales pulled from your own catalogue instead of generic advice. It is not a reason to move up a tier unless you specifically want it generating internal apps, and it is not a substitute for reviewing what it changed on a live storefront before a promotion goes out.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $25 USD/mo billed monthly, or $19 USD/mo billed yearly | A new or small store. | Sidekick and Shopify's AI features, 2% fee on third-party payment providers, 1% cashback on sales up to $3,500. |
| Grow | $65 USD/mo billed monthly, or $49 USD/mo billed yearly | A store with staff and growing order volume. | Up to 5 staff accounts, 1% third-party payment fee, cashback up to $5,000. |
| Advanced | $399 USD/mo billed monthly, or $299 USD/mo billed yearly | Higher volume, international shipping, more staff. | Up to 15 staff accounts, live shipping rates, 0.6% third-party payment fee, cashback up to $7,000. |
| Plus | From $2,300 USD/mo | Large merchants needing checkout customisation and many locations. | Unlimited staff accounts, fully customisable checkout, up to 200 POS locations, 0.2% third-party payment fee. |
Read from Shopify Sidekick's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
What you need to start
- A live Shopify store on at least the Basic plan, since Sidekick is not sold or signed into on its own
- The Grow plan or higher if you want it to generate custom internal apps
- Admin staff permissions matching whatever task you ask it to do, such as editing a theme or managing orders
Effectively none. Sidekick is already active on every live Shopify store, so the only setup is having a Shopify account in the first place.
Your first run Open the Shopify admin, click the purple Sidekick icon, and ask it something about your store — a working answer, drawn from your own catalogue and order data, comes back in seconds.
Where it breaks
There is no way to buy Sidekick without buying Shopify, so this is a platform decision wearing an AI label. Transaction fees sit on top of every plan and are where the real cost of a growing store lives — the subscription is the smaller number. Sidekick's answers are grounded in your store data, which means they are only as good as your product records and tagging. And a store assistant that can edit your theme and create discounts is acting on a live shopfront; check what it changed before a campaign, not after.
Sidekick is not sold separately — it is included on every Shopify plan, so the prices above are Shopify's plan prices. It runs inside the Shopify admin in the browser and in the Shopify mobile app. Payment processing fees apply on top of the subscription and vary by country and plan.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
When not to use it
Not a reason to move to Shopify if you are settled on another platform — that is buying a full store migration to get an admin assistant every major platform now ships some version of. Also not for anyone expecting it to build customer-facing features: even on Grow and above, the apps Sidekick generates only reach the Admin API and stay internal tools, never the storefront or checkout.
The useful framing here is that Sidekick is not a product you buy. It ships free with every Shopify plan, which means the question is never “is Sidekick worth it” — it is “is Shopify the right platform”, and Sidekick is a reason it might be.
What it does well is the admin work that quietly eats a merchant’s week. Write forty product descriptions. Set up a discount that expires on Sunday. Change the homepage banner. Tell me which products sold worst last month and why the returns went up. Because it sits inside the store, it is answering from your catalogue and your orders rather than from general advice about ecommerce.
What to actually budget
Not $25 a month. The plan fee is the small number; payment processing is the large one, and third-party gateway fees fall from 2% on Basic to 0.2% on Plus. A store doing real volume should model the fee before the subscription — that is where the tier difference pays for itself.
The caution worth stating
Sidekick can edit your live theme and create live discounts. That is convenient and it is also a change to a shopfront customers are looking at right now. Review its changes deliberately, particularly before a promotion.
If you are not on Shopify
For a simple site with a shop attached rather than a shop with a site attached, Wix is the lighter option. For writing the marketing that drives traffic to either, Canva and CapCut do more than any store assistant will.
Alternatives
Websites & appsAppsWix
A website builder that will assemble a whole site from a few answers about your business, then keep generating the copy, images and sections you ask for.
Marketing & socialAppsCanva
A design tool for people who are not designers — social posts, decks, flyers and print built from templates, with AI that writes copy, edits photos and resizes a finished design for every channel.
CapCut
A video editor built for short-form social, with automatic captions, background removal, templates and AI tools that cut a long recording down to postable clips.
Websites & appsAppsSquarespace
A design-led website builder where AI drafts your page layout, blog posts, and product copy alongside a human-built template.
Get Shopify Sidekick
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
The ebook is about what to hand over, in what order, and how you find out when it goes wrong. One payment, no subscription.