Dialog vs Shopify Sidekick (2026)

The agent acts in systems Dialog does not own, and a customer can add connections of its own. Dialog installs as a Shopify app and embeds through an SDK and CDN script that expose cart management and product fetching, so the agent adds to cart in the merchant's store instead of only advising.

Smart Reengagement captures a shopper's contact details in conversation and pushes them into the brand's connected email or CRM system. Developer mode adds external API calls, webhook triggers and custom rules, so the set of connections is not fixed. Reach extends onto external assistants including ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, where the brand's own agent answers.

Sourceapps.shopify.com/dialog-ai-sales-assistant, npm SDK and askdialog.com/agentic-commerceread 2026-09-01

The app ecosystem is the integration layer, instead of a list of connectors. Sidekick works natively across the whole Shopify surface, on every screen of the admin, in the mobile app and on Apple Watch. Sidekick App Extensions take it into third party apps in two forms. Data extensions surface a partner app's data when a merchant asks a relevant question, and action extensions route the merchant to the right place inside an app and stage the change.

Named launch partners include Klaviyo, Loop, Smile, Judge.me, Matrixify, Avia, Seguno, Checkout Links and Yotpo, spanning email, loyalty, reviews, data operations and conversion. Underneath sits the full Shopify Admin and Storefront API surface, and Sidekick can build Shopify Flow automations from a plain language description. The tool surface grows as partners build for it, not as Shopify writes integrations.

Sourceshopify.dev Sidekick documentation and Spring 26 Edition developer announcementread 2026-09-02

Dialog runs guided conversational sales flows that qualify a shopper's needs, recommend products with encoded recommendation logic and sequencing, and drive toward purchase. There is no complex multi step or multi agent orchestration.

Sourceaskdialog.com/agentic-commerceread 2026-10-01

Inside the admin, Sidekick carries out what a merchant asks for in natural language instead of describing how. It creates discount codes, modifies themes, generates product copy and images, creates customers, edits store policies, surfaces underperforming products and builds Shopify Flow automations from a description. It can also generate whole applications from a prompt and multitask in the background, and Sidekick Pulse monitors store data to surface anomalies unprompted.

Work starts with the merchant in conversation, not from a trigger. In third party apps the pattern is stage and confirm. Sidekick routes merchants to the right spot inside an app and stages changes for confirmation, and the merchant acts. A release announcement says AI agents now handle entire workflows end to end, but no path runs unattended from trigger to completion.

Sourceshopify.dev Sidekick documentation, Winter and Spring 26 Edition announcementsread 2026-09-02

The merchant's own customers start the agent's work, not the merchant's staff. A shopper's question on the homepage, a product page or search, or inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity, wakes the agent with no one at the merchant starting it, and a Smart reengagement module reaches back out to shoppers.

Sourceaskdialog.comread 2026-10-01

Sidekick Pulse monitors store data in the background and surfaces opportunities and anomalies, such as a conversion drop or an underperforming product, before the merchant asks. Inventory alerts and discount optimization prompts arrive the same way.

Merchants can also reach Sidekick on every screen of the Shopify admin, throughout the mobile app, which has voice chat, and from Apple Watch, and it can multitask in the background. It serves the merchant, not the shopper. The shopper facing surfaces in Shopify's stack (Agentic Storefronts, Store AI, the Universal Commerce Protocol) are separate products. Shopify does not say exactly what Pulse watches or how often it checks.

Sourceshopify.com/sidekick and Shopify Spring 26 Editionread 2026-10-01

The agent works from a structure built over the brand's own material, which Dialog calls encoding, not prompting. Dialog ingests the live catalog alongside the brand's documentation and content. The third encoding dimension, expertise, covers product knowledge, sales logic and recommendations, built on how the brand's best sellers advise.

That store persists, follows the catalog as it changes, and is read at conversation time to answer product questions and drive recommendations, with dynamic FAQs assembled from real shopper questions on top of it. Dialog says the agent is trained on the brand's catalog and tone, but what it describes is ingestion and retrieval, not fine tuning.

Sourceaskdialog.com/agentic-commerceread 2026-09-01

Sidekick grounds its answers in the merchant's whole commerce system of record, natively, with no integration step and no sync lag. Catalog, inventory, orders, customers, policies and historical performance are queried live instead of indexed, and Sidekick can run ShopifyQL against real orders and analytics. Data extensions add retrieval across apps.

One merchant question makes Sidekick query several installed third party apps at once, rank the results, combine them with store context and return one answer with branded cards, so email, loyalty, review and analytics data from separate vendors arrive as a single grounded response. Retrieval respects each staff member's permissions, so the answer covers only what that person may see.

Sourceshopify.dev Sidekick documentation and Winter 26 Edition developer announcementread 2026-09-02

Per-shopper state outlives the conversation. Smart Reengagement identifies hesitant shoppers on what they asked but did not buy and carries that into a follow-up, so the exchange is retained and read back instead of discarded at session end. No memory feature is named, scoped or given a lifetime. The persistent brand encoding of identity, guardrails and expertise is configuration, not memory.

Sourceaskdialog.com/solutions/smart-reengagement and askdialog.com/agentic-commerceread 2026-09-01

Store data that Shopify holds permanently backs Sidekick, and Shopify calls it extensive knowledge of the merchant and their store. Conversation history is kept and can be opened again, and background multitasking keeps task state within a session. Nothing carries between conversations that a merchant can rely on. Sidekick learns no merchant preferences, keeps no state per agent and gives the merchant no control over retention or forgetting. Merchants cannot fine tune a model on their catalog or customer data.

Sourceshopify.com/sidekick and shopify.dev documentationread 2026-10-01

Dialog encodes a brand across three dimensions, identity, responsibility and expertise. Responsibility covers guardrails, policies and escalation, the rules the brand sets for its customers. The agent hands off under conditions the brand defines, and the same interface lets a team tune how it answers, recommends and escalates. Dialog names the guardrails as a pillar but gives no detail on them. There is no per action gate, permission model or escalation configuration.

Sourceaskdialog.com/agentic-commerce, brand encoding sectionread 2026-09-01

Merchants approve changes as Sidekick works, and Shopify checks extensions before any merchant sees them. Changes are shown to the merchant for approval before they are applied, and action extensions stage changes for confirmation, so when Sidekick acts inside a third party app the merchant confirms the change instead of finding it later.

Sidekick respects each staff member's admin permissions, so a person can act only on what they were already authorized to touch. Before publication, Shopify enforces a content and safety policy over every Sidekick extension and scans against it automatically, blocking tools that fail from appearing to merchants. Partners are selected into the preview. Both checks are part of the extension contract, so they apply to every third party extension.

Sourceshopify.dev Sidekick documentation and shopify.com/sidekickread 2026-09-02

An AICPA SOC 2 badge and a GDPR badge appear on Dialog's site. Shopify's data governance belongs to Shopify, not Dialog. There is no named control for customers, such as single sign on, role based access control, audit logging or retention configuration, and no public SOC 2 report or trust portal.

Sourceaskdialog.com homepage badge rowread 2026-09-15

Shopify is certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant and has been issued SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 reports for the service it provides to customers. It publishes a subprocessor list and a data processing addendum, and data from EEA, UK and Swiss customers is initially processed by Shopify International Limited in Ireland. Sidekick respects each staff member's existing admin permissions, so people act only on data they are already authorized to see.

Every Sidekick app extension runs inside Shopify's sandbox under Shopify auth, with exactly the API scopes of its parent app, so a third party tool cannot exceed the permissions the merchant granted. Shopify runs an automated security scan on every preview and deploy, records the outcome as a Sidekick event and blocks failing extensions from reaching merchants.

Sourceshopify.com/security, shopify.dev Sidekick app extensions documentation and help.shopify.com privacy pagesread 2026-10-01

Teams can review past conversations, and Conversation Insights logs and analyzes every question a shopper asks to surface recurring objections and gaps, with the SDK emitting positive and negative feedback events per response. Dialog calls this no black box. For a conversational agent the transcript is a genuine record of what it did. There is no audit log, run history, decision trace or record of which catalog item or rule produced a given answer, so the transcript is the only record. The analytics layer describes shopper behavior, not agent execution.

Sourceaskdialog.com/solutions/conversation-insights and the npm SDK feedback eventsread 2026-09-01

Logs serve the developers who build extensions, not merchants. Extension builders get Sidekick events written to their app's logs in the Dev Dashboard, with the security scan outcome, the scan target and the time it ran, so they can see whether an extension integrated or was blocked.

Merchants get no audit log of what Sidekick did on their behalf, no record of which extension or data source answered a question, and no way to tell an admin change made by the agent from one made by the user. There is no retention policy over conversations. Builders cannot see Sidekick's UI during development, so Shopify points them to comprehensive logging as their best debugging tool.

Sourceshopify.dev Sidekick documentation and Shopify developer education materialread 2026-09-02

Dialog is delivered only as a hosted service, embedded through a script, an npm package or a Shopify app, with nothing the customer selects. There is no region choice, data center disclosure, VPC, private tenancy or self hosted option. The developer mode option for an agent by country is audience segmentation, not data residency.

Sourceaskdialog.com/agentic-commerce and npmjs.com/package/@askdialog/dialog-sdkread 2026-09-01

Shopify moves data between regions as part of how it operates. It dynamically rebalances storage between multiple Google Cloud Platform regions to keep its infrastructure reliable and scalable across its merchant database, and it needs to move data geographically to run its services, with mechanisms in place to do so lawfully. Even where merchant customer personal data is stored in Europe, Shopify relies on international transfers to process it.

Personal data from EEA, UK and Swiss customers is initially processed by Shopify International Limited in Ireland, and group and subprocessor DPAs carry protections for Canada, the United States and Singapore. Customers cannot choose a region. There is no on premises, private VPC or single tenant option and no residency commitment for Sidekick or the platform beneath it, and Shopify Plus has no residency option either.

Sourcehelp.shopify.com international data transfers and subprocessors pagesread 2026-09-02

Four prebuilt agent modules ship by name, each with its own product page. AI Personal Shopper handles conversational discovery across the catalog, AI PDP Assistant answers questions and handles objections on the product page, Smart Reengagement identifies hesitant shoppers and captures contact details, and Conversation Insights turns conversations into merchandising and content signals. A brand switches these on instead of assembling them.

Sourceaskdialog.com solutions pages and site navigationread 2026-09-01

Merchants get one agent, not a catalog of agents. There is no library of named, purpose built agents for a merchant to browse, no marketplace of agent templates and no way to compose, clone or start a new agent. Sidekick's capabilities grow through the ecosystem instead. Sidekick App Extensions launched with more than fifteen named partners, each adding data and action tools, so Sidekick can do more without Shopify shipping new agents. Builders also get scaffolding templates through the Shopify CLI.

Sourceshopify.dev Sidekick documentation and Spring 26 Edition announcementread 2026-09-02

The model provider is not named, and the customer cannot select a model or route across providers. ChatGPT, Gemini and other assistants are places the agent is distributed, not model choices.

Sourceaskdialog.com/agentic-commerceread 2026-09-01

No model provider is named for Sidekick. Merchants get no model selection or routing and no way to bring their own model or key, and extension developers register tools but do not choose the model that calls them. Shopify manages the model as infrastructure on the merchant's behalf, inside a product bundled into its commerce platform and sold to merchants who are not technical, and it gives the merchant no lever over the model and no disclosure of it.

Sourceshopify.dev documentation and Shopify 2026 Edition announcementsread 2026-09-02

The TypeScript SDK ships on npm as @askdialog/dialog-sdk, instantiated with an API key, with a CDN build exposing DialogSDK on the window for teams not using a package manager, and covering assistant interactions, product fetching, cart management, appearance customization and feedback events such as userSendPositiveFeedback and userSendNegativeFeedback. Alongside it, a developer mode triggers external API calls, injects custom rules, fires webhook triggers and manages multiple agents per country, catalog or persona.

Sourcenpmjs.com/package/@askdialog/dialog-sdk and askdialog.com/agentic-commerceread 2026-09-01

Third party developers build for Sidekick through Sidekick App Extensions, set out at shopify.dev. Extensions are scaffolded through the Shopify CLI, declare their capabilities in tools.json and instructions.md, target modules, run a local round trip against the Sidekick preview and deploy atomically. Two extension types ship, data and action. The program launched with more than fifteen named partners and is open to any developer through Shopify Partners. Several MCP servers sit around it.

A Dev MCP server, distributed as an npm package, connects Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Codex and VS Code to Shopify's documentation and API schemas, and there are Storefront, Catalog and Checkout MCP servers. Shopify co-developed the Universal Commerce Protocol with Google, and developers can register their own agent profile and call its public endpoint. Sidekick extensions work like MCP but are not MCP. An existing MCP server cannot be reused, because tools run in Shopify's sandbox under its auth, against a Shopify specific schema that is statically indexed.

Sourceshopify.dev/docs/apps/build/sidekick and Shopify developer announcementsread 2026-10-01

The customer runs an optimization loop on the agent, which Dialog calls Continuously test, evaluate and improve. It has four steps, all in one interface. Teams review past conversations, understand how users behave, fine-tune how the agent answers, recommends and escalates, and improve performance. Dialog frames it as no black box. The loop tunes and measures the agent's own behavior, not a downstream business metric. There is no A/B testing of agent versions.

Sourceaskdialog.com/agentic-commerceread 2026-09-01

Extension builders can test before release, but merchants cannot. Builders run a local round trip of their app against the Sidekick preview, and hot reload reruns the security scan automatically on save, with pass or fail shown as Sidekick events. Deploys are atomic and reject an unsupported intent type outright instead of shipping it broken. Merchants get no sandbox to rehearse Sidekick against their own store, no evaluation of answer quality, no regression check when the catalog or an installed app changes, no scoring and no way to compare configurations.

Sourceshopify.dev Sidekick documentation and Shopify developer education materialread 2026-09-02

Dialog is an embedded conversational agent (including photo based multimodal input) but performs no browser automation or general computer use.

Sourceaskdialog.com/agentic-commerceread 2026-10-01

All of Sidekick's work happens in Shopify's own interface, through Shopify's own APIs. It navigates the Shopify admin, modifies themes, fills forms and generates applications, all inside Shopify's own product and through its programmatic surface. It does not control a browser or operate a screen, uses no robotic process automation and cannot act in software outside the Shopify surface.

Sourceshopify.dev Sidekick documentation and Shopify 2026 Edition announcementsread 2026-09-02