Sidekick can’t flip a switch and make your store multilingual. What it can do is write the localized content — translated UI strings, market-adapted policies, corrected currency copy — and advise on the Shopify Markets configuration around it. The actual localization plumbing (markets, domains, locale files) stays in your hands. Once you accept that split, the workflow gets fast.
Here’s the order that works.
1. Fix currency formatting before anything else
Most stores that “already sell internationally” have a quiet problem: prices hardcoded into product descriptions. Shopify’s automatic currency conversion handles the price field, but the $49.99 typed into the body copy three years ago stays $49.99 in every market forever.
Ask Sidekick to scan a collection for exactly this. Give it:
- Target market and currency —
[YOUR MARKET, e.g. Germany, EUR], plus the convention (comma as decimal separator, symbol after the number) - Scope —
[YOUR COLLECTION OR PRODUCT LIST]
Sidekick pulls the current descriptions, flags every mismatch with the exact offending text, rewrites it in the correct local format, and saves the corrected description back to the product. Ask it for the root-cause note too: which of these were hardcoded prices that should rely on Shopify’s automatic formatting instead, so the problem stops recurring.
This is one of the few localization tasks where Sidekick writes and applies. Take advantage of it.
2. Generate the storefront UI microcopy set
Theme translation is where localization projects stall. The product pages get translated; “Your cart is empty” and “Enter a valid email” stay in English for six months.
Fix it in one pass. Hand Sidekick the exact source strings — not a vague request to “translate my theme” — and ask for:
- Each string translated in UI tone: short and action-oriented, not full sentences where the original isn’t one
- Character-length notes for languages that run long (German is the classic offender) so the text still fits your buttons
- A consistency check flagging strings that must match across the storefront, so you don’t end up with two different translations of “Add to cart”
- Output as a clean key → value list you can paste into the theme’s locale files or Translate & Adapt
That last point matters. Sidekick is producing a deliverable for you to apply, not editing your theme. Ask it to flag if any of those strings happen to live somewhere it can update directly — sometimes a few do.
3. Adapt the legal pages per market
Selling into the EU, UK, or Australia changes your policy obligations. Tell Sidekick where you’re based, where you’re selling, and what you sell ([PHYSICAL / DIGITAL / SUBSCRIPTION]), and ask it to produce:
- Privacy policy additions — GDPR sections for EU customers, data processing and storage disclosure, right to erasure and portability, cookie/tracking disclosure, a CCPA section for California, and a data protection contact
- Terms of service updates — international shipping terms, governing law and jurisdiction, an exchange-rate disclaimer, and a clause on who pays import duties and taxes
- Refund and return policy — the EU 14-day cooling-off period, UK Consumer Rights Act considerations, Australian Consumer Law requirements, international return shipping costs, and which currency refunds are issued in
- Cookie consent setup — banner requirements per region and what belongs in the cookie policy
- An implementation plan — how to serve different policy versions per market, and which pages to translate first
Ask for template text you can customize, not advice. And ask it to tell you explicitly where a lawyer is required rather than a template. Sidekick can save the finalized page directly into Content > Pages, which is genuinely useful — but only publish after review.
4. Get the geolocation and market setup right
This one is advisory. Sidekick won’t configure Markets for you, but it will talk you through decisions that are expensive to reverse:
- Popup vs. automatic redirect — and how to handle returning visitors, VPN users, and preference persistence
- Domain strategy — subfolders (
/fr/) vs. subdomains vs. country-code domains, and how to map countries to markets - Selector placement — where it goes in the theme, whether to show flag, language, or currency, plus a Liquid snippet for a custom selector
- SEO — hreflang for each market, canonical strategy, avoiding duplicate content
- Popup copy — how to phrase “We detected you’re in
[COUNTRY]” so it doesn’t read like a robot
Tell it to exhaust native Shopify features before recommending third-party apps. Left alone, it will suggest apps you don’t need.
5. Lock the language before any batch job
The single most annoying Sidekick failure in localization: you ask for 40 Spanish product descriptions, the first eight are perfect, and item nine quietly reverts to English. On a long batch, the language instruction fades.
Front-load a guardrail. Before the real task, state:
- The content language for this task is
[YOUR LANGUAGE, e.g. Spanish (es)]— not English - The scope it applies to:
[e.g. all product descriptions and meta fields in the Spring collection] - Confirm the target language back to me before starting
- Keep each item in its assigned language if multiple locales are in play, and label which language each output is in
- Re-check your own output before showing it — if anything reverted to English, fix it and tell me which items needed fixing
- If you can’t produce fluent content in that language, say so instead of falling back to English silently
The self-check step is what actually saves you. Catching a drift in review costs one message; catching it after you’ve pasted 40 strings into Translate & Adapt costs an afternoon.
The honest boundary
Sidekick writes localized content and reasons about localization strategy. Shopify Markets, Translate & Adapt, and your theme’s locale files do the deployment. Anyone promising you a one-prompt multilingual store is selling something — but a one-prompt draft of every string, policy, and price fix you need is real, and it’s most of the work.