The first Shopify subscription app you can run from chat

What Shopify Sidekick is

Sidekick is the conversational AI assistant Shopify launched in 2024 and now ships in the top-right corner of every Shopify admin page. Out of the box it understands the native Shopify domain — products, orders, customers, themes, discounts — and can take small admin actions on your behalf. It's free, included on every Shopify plan, and turns on automatically for stores in supported regions.

The piece that matters for subscriptions is the App Extensions API. In late 2025 Shopify opened Sidekick to third-party apps: an installed app can register data tools that Sidekick is allowed to call when a merchant's question matches the tool's domain. The merchant types or speaks a question, Sidekick decides which tool to call, the tool queries the app's database in milliseconds, the result comes back as structured data, and Sidekick reads it back in plain English. The merchant never sees a tool name or a JSON payload — they just see an answer (or a one-click link to the right admin screen).

SimpleSubscription ships a Shopify Sidekick extension that exposes the full subscription data layer to Sidekick: data-query tools that return numbers and lists, and navigation tools that deep-link to the right admin editor (one of which, open_subscriber_detail, handles per-subscriber 1-click confirmation-dialog actions via an action_intent parameter). At the time of writing, the major subscription apps we know of — Appstle, Bold, Loop, Recharge, Seal, Skio — do not ship a Sidekick extension. SimpleSubscription is the first subscription app powered by Shopify Sidekick AI. The extension is included on every SimpleSubscription plan, including Free. The rest of this guide is concrete: what merchants actually do with it, day to day.

The thesis — do everything subscription-related through Sidekick

Most subscription dashboards are built around one assumption: the merchant navigates a menu to reach the screen where the work happens. Pause a subscription? Open the app, navigate to subscriptions, search the customer, open the contract, click pause, pick a duration, confirm. Apply a discount? Open the app, navigate, search, open contract, find the discount tab, click apply, fill in the form, confirm. Ask whether MRR grew this month? Open the app, navigate to analytics, pick the date range, scroll to the MRR card, eyeball the trend.

Sidekick collapses the whole navigation layer. The merchant tells Sidekick what they want — "pause Lisa's subscription for two months", "apply 15% discount to [email protected]", "how is MRR doing this month?" — and Sidekick either reads the answer back from a live query OR opens the right admin screen with the right modal pre-opened, the right subscriber pre-resolved, the right metric pre-focused. The merchant confirms — like delegating to a subject-matter expert who already knows your stack.

That's the thesis. Not "Sidekick helps you do some subscription things" — but anything you do with subscriptions, you can do through Sidekick. The example list below covers the breadth, but it's not a closed list — every subscription tool, editor, and analytics view in the admin has a Sidekick path to it.

Example use cases — what merchants actually do with it

Below is a non-exhaustive list of the things merchants do with the Sidekick extension day to day. Group them however you like — by who initiates (customer ticket vs merchant-initiated), by horizon (immediate action vs strategic), by data scope (per-subscriber vs portfolio-wide). The point isn't the taxonomy; the point is the breadth.

Customer-support tickets — the most common loop. Subscription stores get a steady trickle of "can you do X on my subscription?" requests. Every one of these resolves through a brief conversation with Sidekick:

• "Pause Lisa's subscription for two months" → Sidekick resolves Lisa, opens her contract with the Pause modal pre-opened
• "Cancel [email protected]'s subscription" → cancel modal pre-opened
• "Skip Tom's next delivery" → skip confirmation pre-opened
• "Swap product A for product B on Anna's subscription" → product swap selector pre-opened
• "Update the shipping address on Pia's contract" → address editor pre-opened
• "Update the payment method on [email protected]" or "send him a payment-update link" → either the payment updater or the email-link modal
• "Change Mike's delivery frequency from monthly to bi-weekly" → frequency picker pre-opened
• "Move Liisa's next billing date to the 25th" → billing-date picker pre-opened
• "Apply a 20% discount to retain Sarah" → per-subscriber discount modal pre-opened
• "Refund the last order on contract gid://..." → refund modal pre-opened
• "Add this product to Anna's next order" → add-product flow pre-opened
• "Remove the bonus product from Mike's subscription" → remove-product flow
• "Change quantity of the coffee to 2 on Lisa's contract" → quantity editor
• "Reactivate Pia's cancelled subscription" → reactivation flow
• "Add an internal note to Sarah's contract saying she prefers afternoon delivery" → note editor

Every → arrow above means the same thing: Sidekick returns a deep-link to the SimpleSubscription admin with the right contract resolved and the right modal pre-opened. The merchant clicks the link, reviews the pre-filled action, and clicks Confirm to apply. The extension never directly mutates data — every change happens behind an explicit merchant click in the admin editor. The chat is the navigator; the admin is the executor.

Seventeen common action verbs map to a pre-opened modal. For requests that don't fit any single verb — multi-step custom arrangements, investigative questions, unusual special requests — Sidekick returns a link to a customer workspace view that aggregates every contract, order, payment attempt, communication, loyalty record, and churn-risk score for that customer, with every per-subscriber action one click away. There is no subscription operation Sidekick can't reach — known patterns route to a specific modal, anything else lands in the universal workspace where the same actions are available. Complete coverage by design.

Strategic consultation — when you want guidance instead of an action. Sidekick answers open-ended questions like a subscription analyst would, but grounded in your live database rather than generic playbook advice:

• "How do I grow MRR this quarter?" → ranked opportunities: top product contributions, single-item subscribers eligible for upsell, plan-tier moves the data supports — each with evidence (specific numbers) and an effort estimate
• "Who's about to churn this week?" (Premium) → top-ranked at-risk subscribers with the specific signals (opened cancel page, skipped two renewals, failed billing twice)
• "How much money is at risk from failed billing?" → unrecovered failed-payment volume, broken down by failure code (insufficient_funds vs card_declined vs authentication_required)
• "Why are customers cancelling lately?" → top cancel reasons from the in-portal flow, ranked by volume
• "How are my March cohort doing?" (Premium) → retention curve for any signup month
• "How is the win-back campaign performing?" → conversion rate, recovered MRR, contract IDs that came back
• "What product drives the most MRR?" → ranked product contribution to MRR
• "What's my MRR this month?" → instant figure with month-over-month change and per-currency breakdown for Shopify Markets stores

When the honest answer in your data is "nothing to flag this week", Sidekick says so — no generic talking-point fallback. The rankings come from deterministic scoring logic (the churn-risk model is feature-engineered and runs nightly), not from the language model's guess. The model picks the words; the data picks the ranking.

Per-subscriber tweaks (merchant-initiated). Same mechanism as customer-support tickets — the merchant just initiates instead of the customer. Apply a one-off discount to a high-value subscriber, change a frequency for a customer who asked verbally at an event, move someone's billing date to align with payday, add an internal note customer service should see next time. Every action listed in the customer-support loop above also works merchant-initiated.

App-level editor navigation. Beyond per-subscriber work, the entire admin is one Sidekick prompt away:

• "Open the win-back campaign editor" → win-back editor (or create-new if none exist)
• "Configure the Bronze loyalty tier" → loyalty tier editor pre-filtered
• "Open the coffee selling plan" → plan editor pre-filtered
• "Show the MRR chart" → analytics dashboard with MRR focused
• "Take me to notification settings" → settings deep-linked to the notifications tab
• "Draft a winback email to Lisa" → email composer pre-filled with the subscriber + template
• "Show me cohort retention for Q1" → cohort analytics with Q1 selected

How it actually works — one chat box, every subscription workflow

Under the hood the extension exposes the full subscription data layer to Sidekick. The tools split into two families. Data tools return numbers, lists, and structured data — Sidekick reads the result aloud as a plain-English answer. Navigation tools return an admin URL — Sidekick presents it as a one-click link to the right editor. The merchant never sees the tool names; Sidekick picks the right one based on whether the question wants a NUMBER or an ACTION.

Data: subscription metrics, active subscriptions list, customer lookup, contract detail, failed billing attempts, upcoming orders, churn-risk ranked list, cohort retention, product performance, win-back campaign performance, loyalty program summary, and the business-insights ranked action plan.

Navigation: open subscriber detail (carries an action_intent to pre-open the right 1-click confirmation dialog — pause, resume, skip, cancel, reactivate, apply discount, change frequency, change billing date, update address, add note, change quantity, remove product, add product, swap product, refund last order, send payment-update link, update payment method), open customer workspace (universal fallback for unusual multi-step requests), open plan editor, open subscription box editor, open bundle editor, open membership editor, open A/B test editor, open cross-sell config, open referral program, open win-back campaign editor, open loyalty tier config, open analytics view, open settings tab, open email composer, open migration tool, open support page.

Every per-subscriber action ends in an admin confirmation dialog where the merchant clicks Confirm. That's the safety boundary — the extension never directly mutates data. This is deliberate and matches Shopify's own roadmap (their action-tool framework doesn't yet support "subscription" as a direct-action category), and even when it does, the open-dialog pattern is the right boundary for actions that move money or cancel revenue.

Why answers are grounded — live data, not generic AI

There's a category of AI-product disappointment that goes "I asked the AI a question and it gave me a confident, plausible, and wrong answer." Sidekick avoids this for subscription questions because every answer is grounded in a live tool call against your actual database. No model is asked to estimate; the tool returns the structured number and Sidekick reads it back.

For strategic questions — "how do I grow MRR?", "who's at risk?" — the ranking comes from SimpleSubscription's own scoring logic, not from the model's judgement. The churn-risk model is feature-engineered (payment failure history, recent portal activity, time since last skip, contract age, cancellation flow interactions) and runs nightly to assign a numeric score per subscriber. The business-insights ranked plan uses concrete rules over your data. Sidekick reads the top of those ranked lists. The model picks the words; the data picks the ranking. When the answer is genuinely "nothing to flag this week," Sidekick says so — no fall-back to generic talking points.

How plan data scope shapes Sidekick's answers

The Sidekick extension is the same on every plan — Free, Growth, and Premium. What changes per plan is the data Sidekick has access to. Customer-support routing, per-subscriber tweaks, and editor navigation work on every plan including Free, because they don't depend on advanced analytics — they depend on knowing which subscriber the merchant means and what action to open. Strategic consultation gets progressively richer at higher plans.

Free plan: the entire customer-support routing flow works — every action verb, every subscriber lookup, the workspace fallback. Sidekick answers everyday metrics (MRR & revenue analytics, churn rate, active counts, billing success, failed payment recovery health, upcoming orders, customer lookup, contract detail), and surfaces Free-tier configuration (portal branding, 14-language portal status, annual subscription billing setup, free migration progress). The extension earns its keep from day one.

Growth plan: adds Sidekick reasoning about the retention and growth stack — smart cancellation flow performance, frequency optimizer activity, bulk subscription actions, subscription bundles (build-a-box), mystery boxes with automated rotation, personalized gift subscriptions, free trial subscriptions, checkout & cart upsells, portal add-ons & cross-sell, custom discount & delivery rules, loyalty ladder & rewards points, refer-a-friend program, win-back campaigns, subscription & churn analytics, and email & SMS notifications.

Premium plan: adds the analytics, experimentation and enterprise-customization layer — tier-based membership program, white-labeled customer portal, custom domain on portal, custom email providers, customizable email templates, automatic SMS notifications, custom storefront translations, customer auto-tagging, Shopify Flow triggers, built-in A/B test results, smart churn predictions (per-subscriber AI-scored risk list), cohort retention curves, advanced forecasts & insights, product performance analytics, and per-currency MRR breakdown for multi-currency Shopify Markets stores.

Multi-currency and Shopify Markets

Multi-currency reporting is one of the places where Sidekick most clearly outperforms a generic dashboard. A merchant running on Shopify Markets often has active subscriptions in three or four currencies — say EUR, USD, GBP — and the wrong answer is to silently sum them in the store's primary currency at today's exchange rate. That number is meaningless and changes every day on FX moves alone.

SimpleSubscription reports MRR in two ways. The first is a single top-line figure in the shop's primary currency — available on every plan. The second is the per-currency breakdown for shops with active subscriptions in multiple currencies, available on Premium. Sidekick knows about both. Ask "what's my MRR?" on a single-currency shop and you get the simple number on any plan. Ask the same question on a multi-currency Markets store with Premium and Sidekick reads each currency separately: "You have €4,200 MRR in EUR, $5,800 in USD, and £1,100 in GBP." No silent FX conversion — currencies are reported as collected.

Privacy and data scope

Every Sidekick tool call is scoped to your shop only via a signed session token from Shopify. There's no cross-tenant access and no Sidekick-side persistence of your subscription data after the conversation ends. The data flow is: merchant question → Sidekick → tool API call → SimpleSubscription database (your shop's records only) → structured response → Sidekick reads it back.

What Sidekick reads is what your dashboard already shows. We don't expose payment method details (no card numbers, no CVV, no full tokens — only the last 4 digits and card brand that Shopify itself exposes). Sidekick's own data-handling (conversation history, model training) is controlled by Shopify and described in their privacy documentation; we don't have any independent data sharing with Sidekick or its providers beyond the tool-call response payload.

Limitations and known edge cases

Sidekick is good at fast answers and one-click navigation; it's not a substitute for the dashboard for everything. Here's the candid list of where it falls short, so you know to switch to the dashboard for these.

• No direct mutations — every change opens an editor where the merchant clicks Confirm. Deliberate safety boundary.
• No FX conversion — multi-currency MRR is reported per-currency, never converted.
• No scheduled reports — Sidekick is conversational, not a cron job. For scheduled exports, use the dashboard's CSV export or the public REST API.
• No deep historical drill-down — questions are answered against current state plus recent history. For "what was MRR on March 14, 2024?" use the dashboard's date-range filter.
• No cross-app correlation — Sidekick reads SimpleSubscription data and native Shopify data, but can't cross-reference data from another third-party app.
• No file uploads — lookup tools take one customer at a time. Bulk operations belong in the dashboard.
• Response budget — each tool has a 1-second budget. For very large stores (10,000+ active subscribers) some aggregation queries may degrade; the dashboard's longer-running export is the right fallback.

Getting started

There's no separate Sidekick setup. Install SimpleSubscription from the Shopify App Store and the Sidekick extension auto-registers during the standard OAuth flow. The next time you open Sidekick in the admin and ask a subscription question, Shopify routes the call to our tools automatically. No config file, no API key, no extra permissions popup.

If you're switching from Appstle, Seal, Recharge, Loop, Skio, or Bold, the migration is free and preserves your existing subscription contracts — including billing dates, payment methods, and discount history. Sidekick lights up the day the migration completes.