If you have spent any time on Shopify lately, you have seen Sidekick. It sits in the admin, answers questions, helps with tasks, and gives Shopify merchants an assistant baked right into the platform.
Then you go back to your own store, which runs on WooCommerce, Magento or PrestaShop, and there is nothing like it waiting for you. Sidekick is Shopify-only. It does not install anywhere else.
So the question is not "how do I get Sidekick", it is "what is the Sidekick-style assistant for the platform I run". That is what this post answers.
First: Emporiqa does not run on Shopify
Let us clear this up before you read further. Emporiqa is not a Shopify app and it is not a Sidekick clone for Shopify. If your store is on Shopify, Emporiqa is not an option for you.
Emporiqa is built for the other side of the market: the self-hosted and open-source platforms that Shopify-native tools tend to skip. If your store runs on one of those, you have probably noticed that a lot of the shiny new assistants never ship a plugin for you. Emporiqa does.
What Emporiqa does
Sidekick is aimed at the merchant in the admin. Emporiqa is aimed at the shopper on the storefront. It is AI chat in your widget that sells before the purchase and serves after it.
A shopper opens the chat and asks for what they want in plain words, or uploads a photo of a product and asks if you carry something like it. Emporiqa reads your synced catalog, recommends the right products, answers questions about them, suggests a different size or variation, and adds products to the cart. The shopper writes in their own language and Emporiqa answers in it.
It also answers "where is my order?" with an order card from your shop, and passes return, cancel, order change, quote and invoice requests to your team by email. Your team decides; the chat never refunds or cancels by itself. Handoff to a person is there when the chat needs one. After the sale, Emporiqa can also draft replies to your customer emails from the same catalog and pages, and from orders on Gmail, Google Workspace and Microsoft (Outlook.com and Microsoft 365); your team sends them from your own address (how customer emails work). The core job is the one a good shop assistant does in a shop: help the shopper find the right thing and buy it.
The platforms it installs on
This is the whole point of a cross-platform tool. Emporiqa ships official plugins and modules for:
- WooCommerce, through the WordPress.org plugin. See the WooCommerce integration.
- Magento and Adobe Commerce, through the Adobe Commerce Marketplace module. Only your public catalog reaches the chat; B2B pricing and login-only SKUs stay behind login. See the Magento integration.
- PrestaShop 8.1+ and 9.x, through the PrestaShop Addons module. See the PrestaShop integration.
- Drupal Commerce, through the drupal.org module. See the Drupal integration.
- Sylius, the Symfony-based platform. See the Sylius integration.
Shopware 6 installs today via Composer (composer require emporiqa/shopware-plugin) or the GitHub release zip; the Shopware Store listing is still pending review.
Install is a plugin and a click
You do not need a developer for the basic setup. You install the official plugin or module from your platform's marketplace, then click Connect in the plugin admin. No API keys to paste, no custom build. Your catalog syncs, and the chat starts working from your products.
That matters more on the open-source platforms than it does on Shopify, where store owners often expect to hire someone for anything beyond a theme tweak. Here, the bar is install and connect.
The pricing model, and no platform lock-in
Sidekick comes bundled with your Shopify plan, which is fine until you leave Shopify. Emporiqa is the opposite shape: it is not tied to any one platform, so the tool follows your store rather than the store following the tool.
The price is pay-as-you-go. You pay no monthly fee, a charge per conversation and per AI-drafted email reply you send, with the AI model costs included in that price (see the pricing page). It is free to start, and no card is asked for at signup. You set a monthly limit. You can raise, lower or remove it, and at the limit the chat is hidden from your store until you raise it or the next billing period starts. There is no per-seat fee, no monthly minimum, and no annual contract. If you ever migrate platforms, you reinstall the plugin on the new one and keep going.
The short version
Sidekick showed a lot of store owners what a built-in assistant feels like. If you are not on Shopify, you do not have to envy it. Emporiqa gives WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, Shopware, Drupal Commerce and Sylius stores AI chat in the widget that sells before the purchase and serves after it, installed with a plugin and a click, on a pay-as-you-go price with no lock-in.
Want to see it first? Try the live demo at demo.emporiqa.com, a stocked electronics store where the chat behaves the same way on any catalog. Ready to add it to your store? Create a free Emporiqa account. No card needed.
More on what this kind of assistant does on your store: an AI sales agent for e-commerce.
