AI can answer just about any retail question you throw at it, but the value of its responses depends heavily on what it knows about your business.

Ask a general-purpose AI assistant how to increase average order value, for example, and it can suggest plenty of proven tactics. What it can’t necessarily tell you is which products your customers are showing an interest in, whether that interest is growing, how often it turns into a sale or how demand compares with the stock you have available.

For retailers, that distinction becomes particularly important as AI starts to play a bigger role in day-to-day commerce. There’s a big difference between asking AI for general advice and being able to ask a question about what’s actually happening in your store.

The more relevant context an AI assistant can access, the more specific those questions can become. That’s one of the things we’ve been exploring with Shopify Sidekick and our latest update to Wysh.

Built-in advantage

That access to business context is one of the things that makes Shopify Sidekick particularly useful. Because it sits directly within Shopify admin, it already understands the store a merchant is working with.

Retailers can use natural language to ask questions about their business, analyse performance, create content and carry out a growing range of tasks without moving between Shopify and a separate AI platform. And because Sidekick can draw on data from the merchant’s Shopify store, they don’t have to provide all of that context themselves every time they ask a question.

But plenty of useful info also sits within the apps connected to Shopify. Loyalty platforms, review apps, marketing tools and other parts of the commerce setup all generate their own data, some of which can add valuable context to the questions merchants are asking.

Sidekick app extensions open up that wider pool of data, allowing merchants to ask questions that draw on info held within the apps they already use. Our latest update to Wysh, our wishlist app for Shopify, does exactly that, making wishlist data available to Sidekick and adding another view of customer behaviour - what people are interested in before they buy.

Reading the right signals

A single wishlist action tells you that someone is interested in a product. But as that activity builds across a store, it can start to reveal much more about demand, from the products attracting the most attention to how that interest changes over time and whether it eventually turns into a sale.

Wysh already brings that activity together within its reporting dashboard, giving merchants a view of how customers are using wishlists across their store. Our Sidekick extension provides another way to explore the same data, allowing merchants to easily ask questions about wishlist activity, such as:

• What’s my average wishlist value?

• Are any products wishlisted more than we have in stock?

• What percentage of wishlist items convert to sales?

• Which products are trending right now?

Those questions become particularly useful when wishlist activity is considered alongside other store data. Comparing the number of times a product has been wishlisted with available inventory, for example, could highlight where customer interest is beginning to outpace stock. Wishlist-to-sale conversion can show how often that interest translates into revenue, while changes in wishlist activity can give merchants an early indication of products gaining attention.

Instead of opening a report, finding the relevant data and working out what it means, merchants can start with the question they want to answer and use Sidekick to get there more quickly.

Adding more value with AI

Wishlist activity is just one of many sources of useful data across a retail business. Inventory, loyalty, reviews, marketing and fulfilment all provide different information about what’s happening across the store, but finding and interpreting that data can take time.

As more of that info becomes accessible through Sidekick, merchants can ask more specific questions about their business and get answers that take the relevant data into account. The context will depend on what they’re trying to understand, whether that’s stock availability, customer behaviour, product demand or something else entirely.

That makes the role of apps particularly interesting. As well as adding functionality to Shopify, they often hold detailed information about specific parts of the retail operation. Sidekick app extensions provide a way to make that information more accessible, without merchants having to find the right report or piece together data from different places before they can get to an answer.

With Wysh, we’re doing that with the customer intent captured through wishlist activity, giving merchants a different perspective on what their customers are interested in and how that interest relates to the rest of their business.

And that’s where we see the real potential for Sidekick app extensions. As more useful data becomes available within Sidekick, merchants can spend less time searching for the info they need, and more time actioning insights.

Want to see what else Wysh can do? Get a free trial today to discover all the ways you can make more of your wishlist data.