Smarter Shopify is our new series designed to provide practical, honest insights without the hype. We’ll be covering everything from search and SEO to content, imagery and creating sustainable brands built on trust. Before we fully dive in, let’s get started somewhere that’s already familiar; inside your Shopify admin.
If you’ve been using Shopify for a while, you’ll have noticed the little star icon appearing in more and more places. That’s Shopify’s AI quietly embedding itself across your store and if you haven’t explored it much yet, you’re in good company.
Most merchants we work with given it a try once or twice, found it a bit basic, and moved on. Used without much thought, these tools do feel a bit underwhelming, but used well and with a clear understanding of what they’re actually good for (and where they fall short) paired with how they fit into a broader strategy, they can provide real value.
Saving you time is one key area where tools like this shine, giving you space to focus on running your business rather than writing yet another lengthy product description.
The two main pillars of Shopify’s built-in AI are Shopify Magic – a suite of AI tools woven into your admin, and Sidekick – the conversational AI assistant that has grown considerably beyond its chatbot origins.
We’ll discuss what’s genuinely useful, what still needs a careful human input along with what’s new and worthy of your attention.
Shopify Magic – More Than Just Product Descriptions
When Shopify Magic launched, it was essentially a product description generator. We wrote about it in early 2024 and our verdict then was cautiously positive – useful as a starting point, but not a replacement for real copy. That’s still true, but Magic has grown considerably since then and its most useful features now extend well beyond the product page.
Product descriptions and copy
Still the most used feature and for good reason. The interface is straightforward, you’ll find the star icon in the product description editor, click it, enter your product name and a handful of keywords, choose a tone of voice and Magic generates a working draft.
When you’re staring down a catalogue of two hundred similar products, this matters. It breaks the back of the job and gets you moving, and occasionally the output is better than you’d expected.
That said, there are consistent limitations worth knowing about. AI writing still reaches for certain phrases that can fall flat and feel generic and overused regardless of what instructions you give it.
More practically for UK merchants it has a stubborn habit of defaulting to American spellings. “Color”, “aluminum”, “favorite” and of course the overuse of the much maligned em dash (—) all of whichwill creep in reliably and need checking before anything goes live. It’s the small things like this that are consistently annoying.
The bigger issue is brand voice. AI can approximate a tone, but it doesn’t know your products, your customers, or the particular way your brand speaks to people quite like you do.
For factual catalogue copy it’s fine. For anything that needs to actually sell, like a hero product, a new collection or anything with real commercial weight, it needs significant human input to land properly.
This is where working with people who understand both the tools and how copy actually converts makes a tangible difference. Getting AI to produce volume is easy; getting it to produce the right things, in the right voice, in a way that supports your SEO and wider business goals, takes more than clicking a button.
One feature that earns its place
The rephrase tool allows you to write your own copy, but when the words aren’t quite flowing, select the section that needs work, hit the star icon, and choose Rephrase. It doesn’t overwrite your voice, it fixes the clunky bit. Think of Shopify Magic as a tool that supports your writing rather than substituting it.
Image editing
This is the area where Magic has made its biggest strides, and for many merchants it’s now the feature with the most immediate practical value.
The built-in image editor lets you remove backgrounds, replace them with AI-generated alternatives, and extend or fill parts of a product image. For businesses that don’t have the budget for regular studio photography, this is a genuine game-changer. We’ve used it to standardise product backgrounds across catalogues that were photographed inconsistently over years – the kind of project that used to mean a costly reshoot or hours in Photoshop.
For straightforward product-on-background shots, it can work well, but less so for more complex or varied shots – and just when you glance and think everything looks great, AI can create some unexpected changesl that if not spotted, can erode trust in a brand.
Organic Whole Bean or Organic Whole Beee?
Complex products with intricate edges, transparent elements, or fine details like jewellery chains or flyaway fabric can still trip it up. Knowing when the tool is good enough and when you need something more considered is the kind of judgement that only comes from working with these tools daily rather than occasionally.
Sidekick Evolution From Chatbot to Operational Co-Pilot
Sidekick started life as a conversational assistant. Ask it a question about your store, get an answer in plain English. Helpful, but not especially remarkable. What it has become over the past year is a different proposition altogether.
What it does well right now
Ask Sidekick something like “What were my top-selling products last month?” or “How many orders are still unfulfilled?” and it’ll pull the answer directly from your store data rather than pointing you towards a report. For merchants who find the Shopify analytics section a bit of a maze, this alone is worth getting familiar with.
One thing worth saying clearly before we go further. We strongly advise against clients making theme changes themselves. Despite Sidekick making many things feel straightforward, the risks are very real. Installing a new app can conflict with an existing one and cause unexpected problems across your store, and using Sidekick to modify your core theme is something we’d actively discourage.
The ease of the interface doesn’t remove the potential for damage – it can actually make it easier to cause problems without realising it.
Discount creation, shipping rules and basic automations – Sidekick can guide you through these conversationally, or in many cases just execute them, rather than leaving you hunting through menus. If you’ve ever spent twenty minutes trying to find where a particular setting lives in the admin, you’ll appreciate this more than you might expect.
Theme editing queries are another strong suit. The kind of question that used to mean a Google search, a forum post, and probably a message to your developer can often be answered by Sidekick directly, and it knows where to point you.
Sidekick Pulse – proactive rather than reactive
Shopify’s most recent platform update brought a meaningful change to how Sidekick operates. Previously it was entirely reactive, when you asked, it answered. Sidekick Pulse shifts toward something more useful, monitoring your store data and surfacing relevant insights without being asked.
Pulse watches your store performance, drawing on both your own store data and aggregated signals from across the Shopify platform and flags things worth your attention: products that may be underperforming, pricing patterns, drops in conversion that might indicate a problem on a specific page.
It’s not prediction, it’s pattern recognition across a significant amount of data. For a busy business owner who doesn’t have time to be in their analytics every day, having something surface the things that matter is genuinely valuable.
Getting the most from Pulse requires your store data to be clean, your product information properly structured, and your analytics set up correctly from the outset. It’s a feature that rewards having the right foundations in place and rewards even more when someone with the right knowledge is interpreting what it flags, rather than glancing at it and moving on.
Building mini-apps with Sidekick
The most recent and arguably most impressive addition is the ability to build simple custom apps directly within your store using plain-English instructions. Describe what you need for example, a reorder alert based on current stock levels, and Sidekick can build a working mini-app inside your admin.
At this stage, these apps are functional rather than polished, and there are limits to their complexity. But Shopify is clearly building towards a point where merchants can create bespoke store tools simply by describing what they want.
This is not an area where it pays to experiment without knowing exactly what you’re doing.
Sounds impressive right? But knowing what to ask for, how to structure an effective brief and how to sense-check whether what’s been built actually does what you need it to safely, without affecting existing functionality, still requires experience.
Even a seemingly small theme customisation, or a basic app that hasn’t been properly thought through, can cause serious problems. This is not an area where it pays to experiment without knowing exactly what you’re doing.
Three Things to Try
You don’t need to explore all of this at once, but if you’re time rich and keen to dig in yourself, here are 3 practical things you can try to start.
1. Use the rephrase tool on something that’s been bothering you
Find a product description or email that you know isn’t quite right, select the awkward paragraph, and hit the star icon and enter a prompt. Do ensure you sanity check the output and edit as needed to ensure it meets your requirements, both factually and tonally.
2. Ask Sidekick a question you’d normally search for
Next time you need to find something in your analytics, or you want to know how to change a particular setting, try Sidekick before going to Google, you might find the answer right there. You’ll find Sidekick at the top right of your admin screen, look for the little super hero icon.
3. Check whether Sidekick Pulse has flagged anything
Open Sidekick be proactive in asking for recommendations. Even if there’s nothing dramatic, it’s worth understanding what it is capable of monitoring, assessing and recommending.
Shopify AI Tools Are Only Part of the Story
Shopify’s built-in AI tools have come a long way, and there’s real value in understanding what’s available to you. But getting the most from them and using them in a way that genuinely saves time, protects your brand and contributes to your commercial goals , takes more than access to the features. It takes knowing how to direct them, when to trust them, and when to override them.
That’s what we do. If you’d like to understand how to make these tools work harder for your business, or if you’d rather hand that work to people who live in this space every day and get on with running your business, get in touch with us.
Over the coming months, we’ll be delving deeper into what AI has changed across search, content, marketing and branding – because the tools inside your admin are only one piece of a much bigger picture.