Sidekick: Agentic Merchant Tools

Eytan Seidman, VP of product at Shopify, joins the podcast to unpack Shopify's Winter '26 Edition and how AI is emerging into the market for developers and merchants.
They discuss the new Dev MCP server, showing how tools like Cursor and Claude Desktop can rapidly scaffold Shopify apps, wire up Shopify functions, and ship payment customization and checkout UI extension experiences that lean on Shopify primitives like meta fields and meta objects across online stores and point of sale.
Eytan also breaks down how Sidekick connects with apps, why the new analytics API and ShopifyQL open fresh analytics use cases, and more.

Links

Shopify Winter '26 Edition: https://www.shopify.com/editions/winter2026

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Chapters

01:00 — AI as the Focus of Winter ’26
02:00 — MCP Server as the Ideal Dev Workflow
03:00 — Best Clients for MCP (Cursor, Claude Desktop)
04:00 — Hallucinations & Code Validation in MCP
06:00 — Developer Judgment & Platform Primitives
07:00 — Storage Choices: Meta Fields vs External Storage
09:00 — Learning UI Patterns Through MCP
10:00 — Sidekick Overview & Merchant Automation
11:00 — Apps Inside Sidekick: Data & UI Integration
13:00 — Scopes, Data Access & Developer Responsibility
14:00 — AI-Ready Platform & Explosion of New Apps
16:00 — New Developer Demographics Entering Shopify
17:00 — Where Indie Devs Should Focus (POS, Analytics)
18:00 — New Analytics API & Opportunities
19:00 — Full Platform Coverage via MCP Tools
20:00 — Building Complete Apps in Minutes
21:00 — Large Stores, Token Limits & MCP Scaling
22:00 — Reducing Errors with UI & Function Testing
23:00 — Lessons from Building the MCP Server
25:00 — Lowering Barriers for Non-Experts
26:00 — High-Quality Rust Functions via MCP
27:00 — MCP Spec Adoption: Tools Over Resources
28:00 — Future: Speed, Quality & UI Precision
29:00 — Model Evolution, Evals & Reliability
31:00 — Core Shopify Primitives to Build On
33:00 — Docs, Community & Learning Resources