Marketplace Briefing: Shopify leans deeper into AI with beefed-up merchant assistant and new store-simulation tools
This is the latest installment of the Marketplace Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the ever-changing e-commerce marketplace landscape. More from the series →
Shopify, the e-commerce platform used by smaller DTC brands to retail behemoths like Estée Lauder, is escalating its AI push.
On Wednesday, the company unveiled its latest Editions, the twice-yearly product showcase that this time features more than 150 updates centered on AI-driven tools for storefront design, workflow automation and A/B testing.
At the center of the announcement is Sidekick, the conversational AI assistant Shopify first introduced in 2023. Once positioned mainly as a reactive tool that answered merchant questions, Sidekick now goes beyond answering basic questions like “How do I set up a discount for a holiday sale?” and is capable of proactively suggesting business improvements and fixes to maximize merchants’ e-commerce sales.
“The goal of Sidekick is to be your e-commerce expert, your co-founder that’s there for you,” said Andrew McNamara, director of ML engineering at Shopify. “It’s really about amplifying what merchants and developers can do with AI, and helping them use those capabilities to run their business in a way that enhances their own creativity and business knowledge.”
Sidekick is receiving around 20 upgrades, including a new personalized task list that appears on the merchant home screen. Shopify said Sidekick now analyzes store signals, historical performance and feature usage to generate personalized recommendations to improve store operations. Those recommendations could include suggested improvements like “Set up abandoned cart emails to recover lost sales” or “A/B test a free shipping threshold to lift average order value.”
McNamara said these tasks can span everything from catching inconsistencies in shipping settings to diagnosing why certain customer segments convert at lower rates. The system also uses analytics citations to show merchants what data the suggestions are grounded in — and offers step-by-step guidance to carry out the fix.
“Sidekick will walk you through how to do it,” McNamara said. “Even if it’s something outside of Shopify admin, it’ll put that there, too.”
Sidekick’s new capabilities come as major retail platforms race to build more intelligent, and even autonomous, AI tools for merchants. Earlier this year, Amazon introduced an upgraded AI agent called Seller Assistant that can troubleshoot account issues, coordinate inventory tasks and take certain actions on a merchant’s behalf.
One of the other additions is Sidekick’s ability to generate admin apps — software tools that previously required a developer — using only a prompt. Merchants can describe what they need, and Sidekick produces a functioning app built with Shopify’s Polaris UI components and GraphQL API. This means that a merchant could, for example, ask Sidekick to “create a QR code for my farmers market booth that lets shoppers sign up or purchase a specific product with a discount code.” The assistant handles both the coding and the user interface, allowing store owners to create apps tailored to their unique workflows without any programming experience.
Developers say they’ve seen Shopify moving in this direction for over a year.
“They teased a lot of these kind of more developer-y things that Sidekick was going to be able to do,” said Mark William Lewis, founder of development agency Netalico Commerce, which works with about 30 active merchants. “This is the latest iteration of, ‘No, we’re still pushing in that direction of not having to email your developer,’ and really being able to manage your store the way we’re now used to interacting with ChatGPT.”
Since the Canadian company was founded in 2006, Shopify has established itself as the go-to provider for small businesses looking to sell their wares online. But in recent years, Shopify has set its sights on onboarding larger, household names. Some of its newest customers, announced in 2025, include big brands like Barnes & Noble, David’s Bridal and Estée Lauder. But Shopify’s McNamara said its newest Sidekick upgrades are designed for companies of all sizes.
“If you’re a small, single person starting a business, you don’t have another entrepreneur beside you,” he said. “For bigger merchants, it can do deep analytics on your store.”
Although Sidekick boasts a range of new capabilities, adoption remains a hurdle. Lewis said merchants may not trust AI-driven modifications for high-stakes changes.
“I can’t imagine that the store that’s doing millions is going to just trust asking an AI to do the changes,” Lewis said. However, smaller merchants could benefit, he added.
Sidekick now allows merchants to create Flow automations by description alone. Flow is a free, no-code automation for Shopify merchants that lets them build custom workflows to automotive repetitive tasks like inventory management, customer tagging, fraud alerts and more. With Sidekick’s new Flow automations, merchants can ask the assistant to do things like automatically tag customers if they place an order over $250, for example.
Shopify merchants can also make changes to to their storefront designs — for example, “Make this button rounded” or “Use more modern fonts” — by inputting conversational prompts into Sidekick.
Testing website changes with AI shoppers
Beyond Sidekick, Shopify is introducing SimGym, a research-preview app that uses AI shopper agents to simulate how real consumers would interact with a merchant’s storefront before a change goes live. For example, a merchant considering a new homepage layout could run the unpublished version through SimGym; the AI agents would browse the page the way different shopper personas typically do, highlighting where they stall, what they click and which promotions they overlook. That feedback can reveal issues, like a buried “Add to Cart” button or confusing product categorization.
Shopify built SimGym’s AI shoppers by analyzing patterns across billions of purchases on the platform. Those insights allowed the company to create behavioral personas and train agents that approximate how real customers browse and interact with a storefront.
“Merchants can then run simulations on their storefront to understand what would happen if they made a certain set of changes,” said Aaron Glazer, Shopify’s director of product.
Glazer said that simulated feedback can encourage “boldness and excitement” by letting merchants test ideas without risking customer confusion. But he also said that Shopify’s AI shoppers are still an approximation of human shoppers. As he put it, “There is no replacing humans or exactly mimicking what humans will do.”
Lastly, Glazer said Shopify is rolling out Rollouts, a native A/B testing tool for storefront changes, plus the ability to schedule site updates, such as launching and ending sales events.
Yet even as Shopify is eager to get more merchants to adopt these new tools, the company acknowledges their limitations. “As great as [simulations] are, they’re never going to be humans,” Glazer said. “The only way to really fully understand the impact is through an A/B test,” he said.
What I’m reading
- Instacart is integrating its app into ChatGPT, so users can shop and check out directly within the chatbot.
- Shopify is launching an “agentic storefront” tool for brands, per Vogue Business.
- Retail job cuts are up 140% year-to-date, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas.