Shopify debuts Canvas, a way to build online stores by chatting with AI

Shopify introduced Canvas on Thursday, a site-building tool that lets merchants create their Shopify store by chatting with Shopify's AI agent Sidekick. Canvas renders the store's real code in real time rather than a static preview, so merchants can test interactivity and animation and view pages across screen sizes, and Sidekick takes screenshots to see the same output the merchant sees. Shopify said it gave Sidekick the ability to work directly with theme files and simplified the theme architecture so the store's structure, logic, and design are easier for Sidekick to understand and change.

Shopify introduced https://www.shopify.com/news/introducing-canvas a new site-building tool Thursday called Canvas that lets merchants set up their Shopify store by chatting with AI. While Shopify already offered a fairly capable no-code builder before Canvas, it involved editing a selected theme by rearranging modular sections and blocks. Deeper customizations, however, would require editing code or bringing in a developer. Now, with Canvas, merchants simply chat with Shopify’s AI agent, Sidekick https://www.shopify.com/sidekick , to create their site. As the AI makes changes, Canvas displays the results in real time, allowing merchants to see how the store looks overall as it comes together or zoom in to focus on certain details. Notably, this isn’t a static preview, but the real code behind their store being rendered, according to Shopify. That means merchants can test the page’s full interactivity and animation, and view pages as they’d appear across different screen sizes. Sidekick also takes screenshots of the work so it can see the same thing the merchant sees as the site updates. Canvas’s launch is part of a broader shift toward a future where building a website no longer requires coding it directly. It joins numerous other AI-powered site-building tools from companies like Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, and Framer, alongside vibe-coding platforms like Lovable and Replit. Merchants can still click on individual elements to make changes directly, if they choose. But more likely, they’ll just tell Sidekick in a chat what they want to do. Sidekick itself is not new, as it’s already been used to write code https://www.shopify.com/news/winter-26-edition-merchant , build apps, customize themes, and make other edits. But it had yet to be pulled together into a full site-building product like Canvas, where users can see the entire store at once and zoom and pan around while making updates to the site’s actual files. To make this work, Shopify gave Sidekick the ability to work directly with the theme’s files and simplified the theme architecture so the store’s structure, logic, and design would be easier for Sidekick to understand and change. The product is still in its early days, so there are areas where it will need to expand and improve. However, Canvas could make becoming an online seller more accessible to those who don’t have the budget for developers and designers, or the time to learn to code.