ChatGPT vs. Shopify Magic and Shopify Sidekick: What should merchants choose?

Kaci Carson August 13, 2024

Article E-Commerce

Shopify Magic and Sidekick are powerful tools for e-commerce stores. For employees and businesses alike, the dawn of AI chatbots most notably, ChatGPT, is a prevalent topic of discussion for all industries at the moment. Currently businesses are asking themselves the question, how can we apply the use of AI in our business for day to day tasks?

Shopify is one of the platforms seeking to bring solutions through AI via two of their own tools, Shopify Magic and Shopify Sidekick. In this article, we’ll be going through the features and benefits of these new solutions and how they compare to ChatGPT. We’ll help your business decide which tools may best suit your current business needs.

What is Shopify Magic and what can it do?

Shopify Magic is an AI assistant exclusively for Shopify store sellers, allowing you to access specialized AI tools at your fingertips. By tapping into your products, previous orders, and store data, Magic generates optimized content to help increase sales for your store.

From personalized product descriptions, to chatbot integration and customized marketing emails, this Shopify-specific AI can analyze your business and create content to unlock your store’s full potential.

More recently, Shopify introduced a media editor to Shopify Magic. The media editor allows users to remove or change photo backgrounds, and use generative fill. It can even suggest specific backgrounds or styles based on your existing images.

Using Shopify Magic for AI-generated product descriptions

Creating compelling product descriptions can be both tedious and time-consuming, however, one of Shopify Magic’s best features is the ability to generate optimized copy with just a few clicks. It uses large language models (LLMs) to process, understand and generate human language.

Start by selecting the “Write product descriptions” option within Magic. Then provide a few key details about the product like its features, uses, and benefits to give Magic some guidance on the tone and style you want to convey. Then, you’ll get a product description based on what you’ve prompted.

Magic analyzes your product info, brand voice, and previous top-selling items to generate descriptions. Magic descriptions provide a strong starting point rather than a final product. For example, you may need to make small adjustments to fit your brand voice or add specific keywords. With AI-generated foundations, you can create stellar product copy in a fraction of the time.

Introducing Shopify Sidekick

Magic already provides powerful AI optimizations for Shopify stores, but the capabilities are about to expand even further. Building on Magic’s foundations, Shopify Sidekick is an AI assistant that takes e-commerce optimization to new heights.

While not fully released yet, Sidekick was launched in early access in June 2024 as an addition to Shopify Magic. Currently, it’s Shopify Sidekick is available to thousands of sellers in North America who signed up for the Sidekick waitlist last year. It includes advanced financial analysis, improved reporting, blog post suggestions, support chatbot and enhanced automation designed exclusively for Shopify stores.

Using Sidekick for finances

For example, Sidekick can automatically generate and analyze financial reports. If you’ve seen a dip in sales of a particular product, you can ask Sidekick why. You’ll then receive an explanation which can include metrics based on analyzed reports as well as suggestions of what you can do next to improve sales. This could look like Sidekick asking if you would like to generate a 10% discount on the product among other helpful suggestions.

Using Sidekick for support

Shopify Sidekick is also able to offer suggested replies for any customer enquiries in your Shopify Inbox. Currently, you still have to approve these suggestions before they send. However, Shopify’s Vice President of Product, Vanessa Lee, has hinted at possibility introducing an AI chatbot that can speak to your customers on your behalf.

According to recent statistics from Master of Code, the introduction of an AI chatbot could reduce resolution time from 38 hours to just 5.4 minutes. Plus, they’ll save you significant resources.

If Magic can already create optimized product descriptions in seconds, imagine what Sidekick will be able to accomplish with even more advanced AI capabilities crafted just for your e-commerce business. Shopify continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI tailored specifically for brands and sellers.

How Shopify’s AI tools compare to ChatGPT

Although there are a plethora of both prompts and extensions to use with ChatGPT for the benefit of your e-commerce business, most of them are made for general use. This is unlike Shopify Magic, created specifically for Shopify store owners. While ChatGPT aims to be a generalist AI, Magic is focused on optimizing the Shopify experience.

Shopify’s tools do use OpenAI‘s ChatGPT APIs in combination with Shopify’s own proprietary data to bring a chatbot experience more specifically catered to the users of their platform. This means Magic and Sidekick can provide more relevant recommendations and insights for one’s specific store compared to using ChatGPT that possesses generic capabilities.

That said, we’re yet to see Shopify Sidekick in action and don’t know for sure whether it can do everything ChatGPT can. For example, ChatGPT may still have some unique skills like analyzing and auditing financial reports. Ultimately, Shopify store owners will likely find greater benefit from an AI tool like Magic that is purpose-built to enhance their business needs.

Implications of AI for e-commerce businesses

The rise of AI tools can easily become overwhelming and might involve a steep learning curve. E-commerce merchants should view AI assistants as important tools to elevate their abilities. AI optimization enables businesses to increase productivity and focus on a big picture strategy.

Listed below are some of the many important benefits of using AI tools for your e-commerce business:

• Increased Efficiency: AI tools can automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks like writing product descriptions, categorizing products, analyzing data, etc. This allows e-commerce businesses to focus on other prevalent areas of the business.
• Better Decision Making: AI systems can quickly analyze large amounts of sales, inventory, and customer data to uncover insights and trends. This enables data-driven business decisions.
• Continuous Optimization: AI tools can test variations of product listings, emails, etc. and automatically optimize them over time. This can easily become difficult for humans to match manually.
• Enhanced Customer Service: AI chatbots can handle common customer service queries efficiently, freeing staff for more complex issues. Natural language processing improves chatbot capabilities over time.

What to expect for the future of AI in e-commerce

At this point, the future of AI is becoming more advanced. Currently AI is progressing in completing advanced tasks. This could look like creating a business plan based on the data you provide and also making important decisions for your business. This could also look like advancement in creative tasks such as creating paintings or photography.

These tasks seem to point towards the advancement of AI tools only becoming greater and pushing the limit of what is possible. According to a recent statistic report from WifiTalents, e-commerce businesses that integrate AI into their strategies can achieve a 15% annual revenue growth.

It’s important to keep in mind that AI is a rapidly evolving space with new technologies and updates often on the horizon. Overall, AI will continue to advance to enable stores to deliver more results, seamless customer experiences and business operations.

Key takeaways on Shopify Magic and ChatGPT

Shopify Magic provides many benefits as they are created specifically to be used by Shopify merchants. Features, automations and capabilities are made to be the solutions to roadblocks or obstacles that only Shopify merchants would be accustomed to, unlike other AI tools that are more generalized. Shopify Magic and Sidekick will become essential tools for all Shopify merchants to drive sales and increase overall business capabilities.