Open Sidekick from the Shopify admin, on desktop or in the Shopify app, and ask for the job in plain words: a sales chart, a discount, product edits, a draft order, a Flow automation, or "What should I reorder?". It shows changes for you to approve before anything is applied, so the speed comes from asking precisely and checking once.
The biggest change this year is inventory. Shopify's Stocky app stopped working on 31 August 2026; purchase orders now live in the Shopify admin, and Shopify points merchants to Sidekick for the reorder suggestions Stocky used to provide. What Sidekick won't do is talk to your customers. That's the job of Shopify Inbox, which now includes a free AI agent on the Basic plan or above.
What Sidekick can and can't do in your admin
Shopify describes Sidekick as an AI assistant in your admin that gives guidance, generates content, builds apps and completes tasks in everyday language. From Shopify's help pages, as of September 2026:
| It can | It can't |
|---|---|
| Build reports and charts from your data, and export them (export links expire after 10 minutes) | Talk to customers or handle support conversations |
| Create and edit products, discounts, collections, customers, draft orders and existing orders | Make changes to your store without your approval |
| Create customer segments, email campaigns and Shopify Flow workflows | Edit images within a store theme or your product list |
| Rewrite SEO titles and meta descriptions, and suggest theme setting changes in the theme editor | Work in the Shopify admin through a mobile browser (use the app or desktop) |
| Recommend and compare apps, and work with supported installed apps after asking you | Share other merchants' private information |
| Suggest what to reorder and draft purchase orders or transfers | Run while a dialog box is open over the main screen |
A few more details from Shopify's Sidekick pages: you can chat by text, voice or screen sharing; longer tasks can run in the background with a notification when they're ready for review; you can save a prompt as a skill for reuse; and Sidekick Pulse surfaces recommendations on the admin Home page. Features and usage limits vary by plan, and generating custom apps is limited to the Grow, Advanced and Plus plans.
Reordering stock now that Stocky has gone
Shopify's Stocky migration guide maps each old feature to its replacement: native purchase orders with supplier tracking, transfers between locations, inventory stock counts for stocktakes, Shopify Flow for low-stock alerts, and Sidekick in place of Stocky's demand forecasting. The guide's own example questions are "What should I reorder?" and a request to analyse current inventory across locations and suggest how to rebalance stock based on sales data, and it says Sidekick can draft purchase orders or transfers from its recommendations.
Know the gaps before you rely on it. Historical purchase orders and their statuses, received quantities and Stocky's supplier records can't be imported; suppliers are saved per purchase order rather than as defaults; and emailing purchase orders to suppliers isn't supported natively. Export anything you need from Stocky's history and keep it, and plan to send orders to suppliers yourself.
Here's how that looks for an illustrative barber shop with an online store selling beard oils ($18), beard balms ($16), pomades ($20), combs ($9) and gift sets ($45). Its supplier takes three weeks to deliver and has a minimum of 24 units per scent.
What should I reorder? Use the last 90 days of sales and flag anything
that will run out within 4 weeks, because my supplier takes 3 weeks
to deliver. Show units in stock, weekly sales and weeks of cover.Illustrative answer: "Three products need reordering. Cedar beard oil: 14 in stock, selling about 6 a week, roughly 2 weeks of cover. Classic pomade: 22 in stock, about 5 a week, just over 4 weeks. Gift set: 8 in stock, about 2 a week, 4 weeks of cover. Everything else has more than 6 weeks."
Two corrections came from the owner, not the data. Gift sets sell several times faster in the run-up to the holidays than the 90-day average suggests, so eight in stock in late October is far too few. And the supplier's 24-unit minimum means the cedar oil order rounds up. The follow-up request:
Draft a purchase order to [supplier] for 48 Cedar beard oil, 24 Classic
pomade and 36 Gift sets. Expected arrival three weeks from today.Sidekick drafted it for approval. The owner checked the lines and costs, approved it, then emailed the order to the supplier herself. For automating that last step, automating purchase orders and supplier emails with AI covers the options, and if you sell on several marketplaces, stock accuracy starts with syncing stock across Shopify, Amazon and eBay.
Stock kept in two places needs one more question. The barber shop keeps retail stock on the shop shelf, sold through Shopify POS, and a back-room location that fulfils online orders. An illustrative rebalancing exchange:
Look at inventory for beard oils and pomades at both locations and
suggest transfers so neither location runs out in the next 3 weeks,
based on each location's sales in the last 60 days.Illustrative answer: "Move 10 Classic pomade from Back room to Shop. The shop sells about 4 a week and has 6 left; the back room has 30 and sells about 2 a week. No other transfers needed."
Before approving the transfer draft, the owner looked at the shelf. The count said 6; the shelf held 2, because two testers had been opened and never adjusted out of stock. The suggestion was right for the data and wrong for the shelf. A quick physical count before any transfer or reorder of more than a few units saves a second trip, and a regular stock count keeps the data honest.
For alerts, ask Sidekick to build the Flow for you: "Create a Flow workflow that emails me when any product's inventory drops below 10 units." Check the threshold and the recipient before you approve it, then trigger it once with a test product to confirm the email arrives.
Ten Sidekick requests that save store time
Each request below comes with what to check before approving. Several use Shopify's own example wording from its help pages; the rest are adapted for the barber shop's store.
- Sales trend: "Chart my daily sales for the last 90 days as a line chart." Check the date range and whether refunds are included before you quote the figure.
- Product performance: "Show me the sales, costs, profits, returns, and discounts for my top 100 products." Profit is only right if each product has a cost entered; blanks show as full margin.
- A targeted discount: "Create a 15% discount code BEARD15 for beard oils only, valid 1 to 30 November, one use per customer." Check which products it applies to, the dates, the usage limit, and whether it combines with other discounts.
- SEO fields: "Rewrite the page title and meta description for @[product], and keep the title under 60 characters." Check the wording is true of the product and fits your voice.
- Order edits: "Add one more Cedar beard oil to this order and apply a 10% discount." Check the discount applies to the right line, and whether the customer needs to pay the difference.
- A trade order: "Create a draft order for [shop customer] with 24 Classic pomade at the wholesale price." Check the price, since wholesale terms may live outside Shopify.
- A customer segment: "Create a segment of customers who bought beard oil in the last 90 days but haven't bought beard balm." Open the segment's rules and read them; the logic is where segments go wrong.
- An email campaign: "Draft an email campaign promoting @[collection] in a supportive tone, and give me 3 subject line options." Check every claim, such as "bestselling" or "back in stock", against your data.
- A Flow automation: "Create a workflow that tags customers as VIP when their total spend passes $150." Check the trigger, the condition and whether it applies to past customers or only new orders.
- A theme tweak: in the theme editor, "Change the announcement bar to 'Free delivery over $50 until Sunday'". You must be in the theme editor for this, and you save the change yourself.
Use @ mentions to point Sidekick at the exact product, order, customer, collection, discount or segment you mean; it's the difference between "the oil" and the right oil. For product copy in bulk, compare approaches in Shopify Magic vs ChatGPT for product descriptions and writing Shopify product descriptions with AI that convert.
When a draft comes back wrong, resist fixing it by hand in the approval screen. Reject it and restate the request with the missing detail instead, such as "only products with product type Beard oil" or "dates in the store's time zone". The corrected wording is what you'll reuse next week, so the fix belongs in the request, and it's worth pasting into the skill if the job repeats.
A weekly report you write once and reuse
The single biggest time saver in the barber shop's week was turning the Monday report into a saved skill. The prompt it saved:
Weekly store check for last week (Monday to Sunday):
1. Total sales, orders and average order value, compared with the
week before.
2. Top 5 products by units sold, with stock left for each.
3. Any product with fewer than 3 weeks of stock at last week's rate.
4. Discount codes used last week and the total discounted.
Show it as a short table, then two sentences on anything unusual.Illustrative answer: "Sales $1,284 from 71 orders (average $18.08), up from $1,102 the week before. Top seller: Cedar beard oil, 19 units, 14 left. Under 3 weeks of stock: Cedar beard oil and Gift set. BEARD15 used 22 times, $61 discounted. Unusual: gift set sales doubled on Saturday."
What the owner checks each week: that "last week" means the Monday-to-Sunday she intended rather than the last seven days; that the discount total matches the discount's own report; and whether the unusual line is real or an artefact. The first week needed one fix. The average order value included a $300 trade order, so she added "exclude orders tagged trade" to the skill, and the numbers have been comparable week to week since.
A barber shop's store week, with and without Sidekick
The illustrative shop's online store takes about 300 orders a month across 40 products. Before Sidekick, the owner spent roughly five hours a week on store admin. After a month of using it for the repeat jobs, the same week looked like this:
| Job | Before | With Sidekick | What made the difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly sales and product report | 30 min | 5 min | A saved skill that runs the same two report requests |
| Setting up the week's discount | 15 min | 5 min | One precise request, one careful check |
| Reorder review and purchase order | 45 min | 15 min | Reorder question plus a drafted purchase order |
| SEO titles and descriptions (5 products) | 40 min | 15 min | Rewrites checked against the product, not accepted blind |
| Order edits and trade orders | 60 min | 35 min | Edits by request; still checked line by line |
| Everything else (customer emails, photos, packing notes) | 110 min | 110 min | Sidekick doesn't handle these |
That's about 300 minutes down to 185, roughly two hours saved a week, and the time comes from the repeatable jobs, not the one-offs. The month also had one near miss. A request for "15% off beard oils" was drafted against the "Beard care" collection, which also holds balms and combs. The owner spotted it on the approval screen and asked again, naming the product type. The approval step did its job because she read it.
Customer questions belong to Shopify Inbox, not Sidekick
Sidekick works for you in the admin; it can't answer customers. For that, Shopify Inbox now includes a free AI agent that answers customers on its own, on the Basic plan or above with new customer accounts. It can use web search as a secondary source when your store content doesn't cover a question, so test it on your own returns, delivery and product-care questions before switching it on. A sensible first test for the barber shop: "Can I return a beard oil I've opened?" If your returns policy doesn't say, write it down before the agent answers for you. The best AI chatbots for small Shopify stores compares Inbox with the alternatives, and what it costs to add AI to a Shopify store adds up the paid options.
Getting better answers from Sidekick
- Name the scope. Products, dates, customer groups and limits in the request itself. "15% off beard oils, 1 to 30 November, one use per customer" beats "set up a November discount".
- Save your repeat requests as skills. The weekly report and the reorder question are ideal: identical wording each week gives comparable answers.
- Check Sidekick Pulse on Home. Its recommendations are suggestions, not instructions; judge them against what you know about your season.
- Keep the data clean. Product costs, inventory counts and supplier details drive the answers. A stocktake that's months old makes every reorder suggestion wrong in the same direction.
- Download exports straight away. Report export links expire after 10 minutes.
- Start small with generated apps. On the Grow, Advanced and Plus plans you can ask Sidekick to generate a custom app for a store task. More complex apps use more of your hourly and weekly limits, so begin with something small and specific, and try it on a handful of records before trusting it with the whole catalogue.
- Watch plan limits. Image generation limits depend on your plan and are shared across the store, and app generation has hourly and weekly limits on the plans that include it.
Five checks before you approve any change
- Scope: which products, customers, collections or locations does it touch? Read the list, not the summary.
- Numbers: amounts, percentages, quantities and prices, recalculated yourself for anything involving money.
- Dates: start, end and time zone for discounts and campaigns.
- Audience: for segments and emails, who's in and who's out, and whether marketing consent is respected.
- Reversibility: can you undo it quickly? For bulk changes, try the request on one item first.
Sidekick's approval step turns every request into a review. Five checks take under a minute for most changes, and that minute is what makes the speed safe.
Shopify Sidekick: common questions
Which Shopify plans include Sidekick?
Shopify says Sidekick is included with your Shopify plan, with features and usage limits that vary by plan. Two limits are worth knowing: generating custom apps with Sidekick is only available on the Grow, Advanced and Plus plans, with hourly and weekly limits, and image generation limits depend on your plan and apply to the whole store. Check the Sidekick pages on Shopify's help site for your plan's current limits.
Can Sidekick change my store without asking me?
No. Shopify's help pages say Sidekick can't make changes to your store without your approval and will only present options for you to review and approve. It also asks before using an installed app, and changes it suggests in the theme editor have to be saved by you. The risk isn't that it acts alone; it's approving a change without reading it properly.
Does Sidekick fully replace Stocky?
Not entirely. Purchase orders, transfers and stock counts now live in the Shopify admin, low-stock alerts can run through Shopify Flow, and Sidekick handles reorder suggestions. But Shopify's migration guide says historical purchase orders, received quantities and Stocky supplier records can't be imported, and emailing purchase orders to suppliers isn't supported natively, so keep your old records and send orders to suppliers yourself.
Further reads
- Can an AI Chatbot Handle Order Tracking and Returns? — Whether an AI chatbot can handle order tracking and returns.
- How to Get a Weekly Business Summary Emailed to You by AI — Get a weekly summary of the numbers emailed to you.
- How to Test a Customer Chatbot Before It Goes Live — Test Shopify Inbox's AI agent before customers use it.
- How to Run a Stocktake Faster With AI and a Phone Scanner — Faster stock counts to keep Sidekick's data accurate.
- How to Create Product Photos With AI on a Small Budget — Product photos with AI when the image limits pinch.
- Best AI Inventory Tools for Small Retailers Compared — AI inventory tools for small shops compared: Prediko, Inventory Planner, Square Plus and Shopify Sidekick, plus what to do for weighed and perishable stock.
- What AI Costs a Small Retail Shop in Its First Year — An itemised first-year AI budget for a small shop, with three worked bills, the month each cost lands and the costs that never appear on an invoice.
- Taking a Local Shop Online With AI: Product Listings in a Weekend — A Friday-to-Sunday plan for getting a shop's first 30-80 products online, with the spreadsheet, prompt and checks that keep AI listings accurate.
- How to Set Up AI Abandoned Cart Emails for a Small Online Store — Turn on the free built-in checkout reminder, add two follow-ups, and let AI write the copy while plain rules decide who is emailed and when.
- How to Automate Returns and Refunds With Clear AI Rules — Twelve written return rules, what Shopify and returns apps automate, three AI jobs with sample outputs, and an online clothing shop's week of returns.
- Can AI Read Delivery Notes and Update Stock Automatically? — How AI reads delivery notes into goods-in records, when stock can update without a person, the mapping table that matters most, and the tests to run first.
- AI Features Already in Your Software: What to Switch On First — Thirteen built-in AI features in Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Xero, QuickBooks, Canva, HubSpot and Shopify, ranked by when to switch each one on.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Shopify help pages on Sidekick, getting started with Sidekick, getting help and guidance from Sidekick, generating content and generating apps with Sidekick, and migrating from Stocky to Shopify inventory management; Shopify Inbox AI agent details from the site's verified fact sheet. Checked September 2026.