Shopify AI Agents for UK Stores: Orders, Returns, Stock and Books

It is software that does a store job in several steps, using a language model to read messy input and Shopify’s official API to act. A trade purchase order (PO) arrives by email; the agent reads it, finds the buyer, matches the lines and builds a draft order. It prepares work and hands it to your team, under limits you set.

Shopify calls Sidekick its AI-powered commerce assistant. Its help page says it can edit orders, build Shopify Flow workflows, summarise store data and create custom apps, and that it shows changes for your review before applying them. It works for the person sitting in the admin. A custom agent starts on its own when an email, order or timer fires, and reads systems such as Sage or Linnworks.

No. An AI chatbot for Shopify sits on your store and answers shoppers’ questions in a chat window. A Shopify AI agent works behind the scenes for your team. It starts when an order, email or timer fires, reads systems such as Linnworks or Xero, and prepares drafts, tags and corrections. One store can run both: the chatbot talks to customers, the agent clears the back office.

Shopify’s help centre says Flow is free on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans. It runs a fixed action when a store event matches a rule, such as tagging every order over £500 for a manual check. Flow cannot open a trade buyer’s PDF purchase order and work out which company price list each line belongs to. In a typical UK set-up, Flow does the tagging and the agent does the reading.

Start with marketplace order exceptions, trade POs that arrive by email or where-is-my-parcel replies. Stock counts that disagree between Shopify and Linnworks come next. A good first job comes up a few dozen times a week, needs facts that sit in Shopify or the order inbox, and gives results your team can mark right or wrong at a glance. Refunds, trade credit and postings to Xero come later.

No. An agent is a custom app on your store, and that works on standard plans too. Plus changes two things. Shopify’s GraphQL Admin API allows Plus stores 1,000 points a second against 100 on standard plans, so a busy agent has more room. And Shopify’s B2B help page says B2B features vary by plan, which matters for a trade PO agent.

An API is the official door one piece of software uses to read and change data in another. Shopify’s developer site says its REST Admin API became legacy on 1 October 2024, and that from 1 April 2025 all new public apps must be built only on the GraphQL Admin API. We build new agents on GraphQL for that reason.

Yes. The books check agent reads Shopify orders, refunds and payouts, then compares them with what reached Xero, Sage 50, Sage 200, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks UK, Dynamics 365 Business Central, NetSuite or Odoo. It stays read-only on the ledger. When it finds a gap, it drafts the correction and your finance team approves it. Posting rules stay with your accountant.

Only through how it moves data. HMRC’s VAT Notice 700/22 says a digital link needs no manual intervention, lists API transfer and CSV import among accepted links, and says copy and paste is not a digital link. So an agent that writes corrections through the accounting API keeps the chain digital. Ask your accountant to check the whole set-up.

Yes, where those orders reach a system it can read. Many UK sellers pull marketplace orders into Linnworks or into Shopify itself, and the agent reads them there. It checks each order against your rules, such as a postcode that does not match the town or a SKU with no stock, and tags exceptions for a person. It never cancels a marketplace order on its own.

Yes, through whatever API or export your system offers, which we confirm in scoping before we quote. The stock agent compares Shopify stock by location with the warehouse count and open supplier orders. When the two disagree, it reports by how much and since when, and drafts a reorder list. The warehouse system stays the owner of stock; the agent never overwrites it.

Not by default on our builds: a person signs off every money decision. The ICO’s draft guidance, updated on 31 March 2026 to reflect the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, covers decisions based solely on automated processing that have a legal or similarly significant effect on a person. It lists safeguards such as human intervention and the right to contest. Your lawyer advises on your case.

Yes, if the agent’s output is used in the EU. Article 2 of the AI Act covers providers and deployers based outside the EU where the output of the AI system is used in the Union. Article 50 says systems meant to talk directly with people must tell them they are dealing with AI, unless that is obvious. The European Commission says these rules come into effect in August 2026. Take legal advice.

Yes. GOV.UK says customers who buy online can cancel up to 14 days after their order is delivered, and if you never told them about that right, they can cancel at any time in the next 12 months. The agent checks the delivery date and your own returns policy, prepares the return, and sends anything outside policy to a person with the rule quoted.

Yes. The delivery query agent finds the order, reads the tracking status and drafts a reply in Zendesk, Gorgias or your shared inbox with the facts filled in. Royal Mail’s developer portal describes APIs for generating postage and monitoring deliveries. Lost parcels and complaints go to a person. For agents that answer every kind of customer message, see our UK AI customer service page.

Only the access scopes its job needs, set on a custom app that you own. A trade PO agent might ask for read_orders, read_customers and write_draft_orders. A stock agent needs read_inventory. You see that list when the app is installed. Requests go over the GraphQL Admin API, and store events reach the agent as webhooks. To cut it off, uninstall the app. Its token stops working straight away, with no call to us.

Shopify’s developer docs warn that one webhook can be delivered more than once, that events within a topic can arrive out of order and that delivery is not always guaranteed. A repeat is matched on its X-Shopify-Webhook-Id header and dropped. The agent re-reads the order from Shopify before acting. A sweep on a timer compares recent orders with what the agent has handled, so a lost event is caught on the next run.

No, because each agent is paced. Shopify gives each app and store pair its own allowance on the GraphQL Admin API: 100 points a second on standard plans, 200 on Advanced and 1,000 on Plus, refilled continuously. A single query cannot exceed 1,000 points. We size each agent’s queries to stay well inside its allowance, so peak trading days do not hit the limit.

Yes, as drafts. Shopify’s help centre says B2B is available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans, with features that depend on the plan, and that buyers are set up as companies with their own catalogues and pricing. The PO agent matches each line to that company’s prices and builds a draft order. A person on your sales desk confirms it.

Before the build we agree a test set of your real past cases, each with the answer your best person would give, and a pass mark. The agent is scored against that set before launch and again after changes. Every input and action is logged in an account you control, so your team can open any case and see why it was handled that way.

Cloudswitched, a London IT services firm, published UK ranges on 12 April 2026: £15,000 to £40,000 for what it calls a reactive agent, £35,000 to £80,000 for what it calls a task agent, and more for its reasoning and orchestrator tiers. Its page does not say whether VAT is included. FactoryJet quotes a fixed price per phase in writing after a short scoping call.

Yes. Before a contract, we show working software on your own data. For a Shopify agent that means a batch of your real trade POs or customer emails run through the agent, with its drafts and hand-offs laid out for your team to check against what they would have done. You decide on the build after seeing it.

You own the code, the prompts, the test set and the logs from day one. The AI and hosting accounts can sit in your name, at cost with no markup. Defects are fixed inside the build price for a cover period agreed before work starts. Support is optional: each change is quoted and approved, with no monthly minimum.

Send it as it is; we read every brief. The useful parts are the job you want handled, your Shopify plan, every system involved (for example Xero, Linnworks, Royal Mail), a week of volumes, what goes wrong today and who approves money decisions. If you are running a formal tender, include the scoring criteria and deadline, and we answer in that format.