Shopify is helping merchants take advantage of AI technology with the launch of Sidekick, an AI-powered virtual assistant designed specifically to help e-commerce store owners. Sidekick demonstrates how, when properly applied, AI can play a big role in improving business operations and empowering entrepreneurs.
Sidekick offers a variety of useful features that can help online store owners boost their sales and business efficiency. Sidekick can examine data on merchants’ sales, orders, inventory, and customer behaviors and patterns to provide insights into why sales are fluctuating, which products sell the best, and how to effectively target different types of customers.
This AI-powered tool from Shopify was officially launched on 12 July by no other than the CEO of the e-commerce giant, Tobi Lütke, who explained how the software worked in a video.
How Can Sidekick Be Used by Merchants to Increase Sales?
With this data-driven knowledge, merchants can make better business decisions regarding pricing, promotions, inventory levels, and product assortments, among others.
Sidekick can also review merchants’ online store designs and themes to recommend ways to optimize layouts, categorize products more effectively, write more compelling product listings, and create targeted product collections.
Also read: Shopify SEO: 8 Tips to Help Customers Find Your Store
These small tweaks and optimizations have the potential to produce bigger sales gains by improving store usability and the customer experience.
Sidekick can automate routine yet time-consuming tasks like setting up discounts, running sales reports, and compiling key business metrics. This frees up merchants’ time so they can focus on higher-value activities that actually grow their businesses.
Sidekick’s knowledge is personalized to each merchant’s store and data, so it can respond accurately to questions about anything from inventory management to email marketing campaigns. This serves as a self-service help resource that is always available on demand.
Merchants can access Sidekick directly within the Shopify dashboard and interact with it through natural language commands and conversational text. They simply type questions or instructions and Sidekick provides answers and completes tasks accordingly.
By leveraging generative AI models trained on Shopify’s extensive merchant data and feedback, Sidekick aims to become a virtual assistant that truly understands e-commerce and can become an invaluable resource for store owners.
Sidekick is Powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT
Sidekick is a Shopify product built by Shopify for Shopify merchants. The company’s head of product for AI Miqdad Jaffer told the tech-focused online magazine TechCrunch recently: “We believe it’s our responsibility to keep the businesses we power on the cutting edge of technology.”
Jaffer explained that Sidekick and other recent AI capabilities are powered by a combination of proprietary Shopify data paired with available large language models (LLMs), architected in a way that data and conversations aren’t shared with third parties.
The company’s website confirms that Shopify picked ChatGPT, the popular generative AI chatbot created by OpenAI, as the backend software that powers Sidekick. They opted to use the ChatGPT API to run the tool on their platform.
All of the software’s features are available in English while some of them are also available in other languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, French, German, and Italian, among others. There is no additional cost for using Sidekick for Shopify Merchants regardless of their subscription tier.
While there are risks with some AI assistants producing false, biased, or toxic content, Shopify merchants can review all copy from Sidekick before publishing it. Sidekick is also not allowed to directly write or make changes to any of Shopify’s systems.
Sidekick aims to be exactly the kind of AI-powered assistant that entrepreneurs have been waiting for – one with an in-depth understanding of their specific business needs, data, and goals. If you currently use Shopify for your online store, keep an eye out for Sidekick as it rolls out more widely.
Based on early indications, Sidekick has the potential to meaningfully improve key areas of your business like operations, customer experience, productivity, and, ultimately, sales. By harnessing the power of AI in a personalized and tailored way, Sidekick could become a valuable sidekick indeed for e-commerce merchants.