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Shopify Lets Sidekick Use 20 Apps Per Person. Its Own List of Apps That Work With Sidekick Has 18
Sidekick app extensions went generally available on June 17, 2026, and Shopify's merchant-facing guide lists 18 apps that use them. The platform cap is 20 apps per user on a store, so supply is the constraint, not the cap. This article reads the developer documentation for what merchants actually get: app data extensions are read-only, app actions navigate you to a pre-filled page and stage the change — Shopify's own walkthrough ends with "Click Save in the form. The change is committed by your app, not by Sidekick." App actions are also limited to 13 declared intent types, and an unsupported type fails at deploy with no silent fallback. Four of those types — FAQ, quote, ticket, shipment — have no matching app on Shopify's list. Three build requirements explain the short list: existing MCP servers can't be reused, legacy OAuth installs are excluded, and each app gets 5 intents, 20 tools, and a 4,000-token response budget. Two of the guide's own cards show only "Free trial available" for apps that list at $49.99 and $299 a month. And no app listing shows a Sidekick badge at all: Seguno had to put "Sidekick-able" into its 62-character tagline. Ratings, pricing, and the app list verified on the Shopify App Store on September 8, 2026.
Shopify Turned Off Custom App Creation in the Admin — and Took the Copyable Access Token With It
Since January 1, 2026 you can no longer create a custom app from Settings > Apps > Develop apps. New custom apps live in the Dev Dashboard instead — and Shopify's own documentation says you can't copy an access token from the admin for one. Tokens now come from the client credentials grant, expire in 24 hours, and only work on stores inside the same Shopify organization. Here is exactly what changed, what your existing legacy custom app can still do, the four constraints that break agency and spreadsheet workflows, and three App Store apps — Matrixify, syncX: Data Export Reports PDF, and Mechanic — that cover the jobs merchants built custom apps for. Researched September 7, 2026.
Shopify's AI Product Video Apps Charge $0.04 to $1.29 a Video — and One Won't Tell You the Number at All
Shopify Magic's own media generation tools cover background removal, logo generation, and hero banners — images only, per Shopify's Help Center. There is also an unrelated app literally named 'Magic: Product Photos & Videos' that charges $19.99–$49.99/month and has nothing to do with Shopify. Meanwhile, eight real AI product-video apps bill on five incompatible units: credits, videos, points, a flat $1 per video, and one-time packs with no subscription at all. Normalized to a real cost per finished video, the spread runs from about $0.04 to $1.29 — roughly 32x — and one app's $39–$99/month plans don't disclose a video quota at all. Researched September 6, 2026.
ChatGPT Never Got In-Chat Checkout for Shopify Merchants — Google AI Mode, Copilot, and Meta Quietly Did
OpenAI's September 2025 Instant Checkout launch promised Shopify's 1M+ merchants native in-chat purchases. By March 2026 that plan was scaled back for ChatGPT specifically. Shopify's current Help Center documentation confirms ChatGPT is discovery-only with a redirect to your own checkout, while Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta got real Shopify-powered direct checkout instead — and none of your GA4 or Meta pixels fire when a customer buys there. Researched from Shopify Help Center and official sources, September 4, 2026.
Shopify's New Flexible Collections (2026): What's Actually Native for AI Merchandising, and What Still Needs an App
Several blogs claim Shopify shipped native "AI Collection Sort" and "predictive cross-sell blocks" in 2026. Shopify's own documentation says something different. Verified against shopify.com, shopify.dev, and the Shopify Help Center as of September 4, 2026.