Shopify Sidekick is the AI assistant built into your Shopify admin. If your store has the Sidekick pilot enabled, you can use Sidekick to work with your Subi subscriptions using plain language — finding contracts, answering questions about your subscription numbers, pausing or resuming subscriptions, skipping orders, setting up new subscription plans, and changing your loyalty program — without leaving the chat.
What you can ask Sidekick to do with Subi
When you use Shopify Sidekick with Subi, you can ask it to:
Find subscription contracts — search by customer name, product, status, or date, or simply ask “show me my contracts” to see them all.
Pause a subscription — stop upcoming orders for a contract until you resume it.
Resume a paused subscription — restart deliveries on a contract you previously paused.
Skip the next order — leave the subscription active but skip its next scheduled order.
Set up a Subscribe & Save plan — Sidekick opens Subi’s plan creation page with your products and options already filled in, ready for you to review. One plan can cover several products.
Change your loyalty program — Sidekick opens Subi’s loyalty page with the change already filled in: the points one way to earn gives, or a new reward.
For example, you can ask Sidekick things like “show me Jane Smith’s active subscriptions”, “pause this subscription”, “set up a Subscribe & Save plan for Coffee Beans with monthly delivery and a 10% discount”, or “give 200 points on birthdays”.
What you can ask Sidekick about your subscription business
Can Sidekick tell you how your subscriptions are doing? Yes. Sidekick reads the same numbers Subi shows you, and every answer links to the Subi page the numbers come from, so you can check them there. You can ask about:
Your business at a glance — monthly recurring revenue (MRR), active subscribers, churned subscribers, and payment failure rate for the last 30 days — the same figures as the cards on Subi’s Home page.
A date range — MRR, new and churned subscribers, and active, new, paused and churned subscriptions for the dates you name — the same figures as Analytics overview. The Analytics link opens on the last 30 days, so pick the same dates there to compare.
Failed renewals — how many subscriptions currently have a failed renewal payment, how much they are worth per billing cycle, and up to 25 of them with the reason the last payment failed — the same list as the Needs attention view.
One subscriber’s history — what happened to a subscription (paused, resumed, skipped, cancelled and other events, with dates) and its renewal payment attempts, as shown on the subscription’s page.
For example, you can ask “how many active subscribers do I have?”, “how many subscribers did I gain in September?”, “which renewals failed and why?”, or “what happened to Jane Smith’s subscription?”.
Failed renewals are always the current count. If you ask about a past week or month, Sidekick links you to the Failed Payments Over Time report in Analytics instead of giving a number. Answering these questions never changes anything in your store.
How Sidekick proposals work: you always approve the change
Sidekick never changes anything in your store by itself. When you ask Sidekick to pause, resume, or skip a subscription, it stages the action as a proposal. You then review and approve the proposal on the contract page in Subi — nothing happens to the subscription until you approve it, and you can reject a proposal if you change your mind.
Plan creation works the same way, one step earlier: when you ask Sidekick to set up a Subscribe & Save plan, it opens Subi’s plan creation page with the form prefilled. The form shows a banner — “Opened from Sidekick. Check the products, discount and interval before you save.” — so you know which values the assistant entered. You can edit anything before saving, and the plan is only created when you click Save yourself. If you close the form without saving, no plan is created.
Want a different value after the page opens — for example a 20% discount instead of 10%? Change it directly in the form. Sidekick can’t edit a form that is already open, so it asks you to make the change yourself.
Sidekick doesn’t always find out that you saved. If you ask it afterwards whether the plan was created, it may ask you to check: every saved plan opens on its own page in Subi and is listed on the Plans page.
Proposals are time-limited: a proposal expires 30 minutes after Sidekick creates it. If a proposal expires before you approve it, nothing is changed — just ask Sidekick again to create a fresh one.
What Sidekick can prefill in a Subscribe & Save plan
When Sidekick prefills a Subscribe & Save plan for you, it can fill in:
The products you named
The delivery interval (for example, every month)
A percentage discount
Prepaid cycles
A minimum commitment
Sidekick only fills in options that your plan setup includes. If you ask for something your plan doesn’t support, that option is simply left out, and the plan form tells you which options were left out — Sidekick never adds anything you didn’t ask for.
As a worked example: if you ask for “a Subscribe & Save plan for Coffee Beans, delivered monthly, with a 10% discount”, the plan form opens with Coffee Beans selected, a one-month delivery interval, and a 10% discount already entered. On a $20.00 product, subscribers on that plan would pay $18.00 per delivery once you save it.
Changing your loyalty program with Sidekick
Can Sidekick change my Subi loyalty program? Yes — ask Sidekick to change how many points a way to earn gives, or to add a reward, and it opens Subi’s loyalty page with the edit window already filled in. Nothing changes until you click Save yourself, and if you close the window without saving, nothing changes at all.
Sidekick can change one thing at a time:
Points for a way to earn — sign-up, birthday, points per dollar on one-time orders, or points per dollar on subscription orders. If sign-up or birthday points are switched off, the window tells you that saving also switches them on.
A new reward — a percentage discount, a fixed amount discount, or free shipping, with the points required, the discount amount and a minimum order value.
The window shows a banner — “Opened from Sidekick. Check the values before you save.” — so you know the values came from Sidekick. If your loyalty program is paused or not activated yet, the banner adds: “Your loyalty program is off, so customers see this change only after you turn it on.” Your change is still saved, and your program stays off until you turn it on.
As a worked example: if you ask Sidekick to “give 200 points on birthdays” and birthday points are off, the Birthday window opens with 200 points and a note that saving switches it on. After you click Save, the birthday row on the loyalty page shows 200 points and is on.
Requirements and limitations
Availability — these Sidekick actions and answers are available on stores with the Sidekick pilot enabled for Subi.
Specific products only — plan prefill works with named products, not collections or your entire catalog. For those, Sidekick points you to Subi’s plan creation page, where you can choose all products or a collection.
Check the form before saving — on some stores Sidekick may open the form without every detail you asked for, such as the discount or the delivery interval. Check them before you click Save.
Loyalty on your Subi plan — changing your loyalty program from Sidekick needs loyalty included in your Subi plan. Without it, the loyalty page opens with the usual upgrade offer and no edit window, and Sidekick may not tell you why.
Loyalty changes Sidekick can’t make — editing or deleting an existing reward, referrals, social follow rewards, and switching the whole program on or off. Do these on Subi’s loyalty page.
One plan type — Sidekick can prefill Subscribe & Save plans only.
Proposals expire — a pause, resume, or skip proposal expires after 30 minutes if you don’t approve it. Ask Sidekick again to create a new one.
Next steps
To review or manage the changes you approve through Sidekick, see our guide on managing subscriptions and recurring orders.
If you have questions about using Shopify Sidekick with Subi, or something doesn’t work as expected, reach out to our support team through the in-app chat — we’re happy to help.