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Products & Applications

Shopify Debuts Canvas, an AI Chat Tool for Building Online Stores

Shopify introduced Canvas on Thursday, a tool that lets merchants build and edit their online stores by chatting with its AI agent Sidekick. Canvas renders the store's real code in real time, allowing merchants to test interactivity, animation and different screen sizes without direct coding.

AI News Feed · 2026-10-02 05:32

Before Canvas, Shopify already offered a no-code builder. It worked by editing a selected theme through modular sections and blocks, but deeper customizations required editing code or hiring a developer. With Canvas, merchants chat with Shopify's AI agent, Sidekick, to create the site. As the AI makes changes, Canvas displays the results in real time, so merchants can view the store as it comes together or zoom in on specific details.

According to Shopify, Canvas does not show a static preview. It renders the real code behind the store. That allows merchants to test the page's full interactivity and animation and to view pages as they would 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.

Merchants can still click on individual elements to make changes directly if they choose. More likely, Shopify expects they will tell Sidekick in a chat what they want to do. Sidekick is not new: it has already been used to write code, build apps, customize themes and make other edits. Canvas pulls those capabilities into a full site-building product where users can see the entire store at once, zoom and pan around, and make updates to the site's actual files.

To make Canvas work, Shopify gave Sidekick the ability to work directly with the theme's files. It also simplified the theme architecture so the store's structure, logic and design would be easier for Sidekick to understand and change.

Canvas joins a broader shift toward building websites without coding them directly. Other AI-powered site-building tools include products from Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and Framer, as well as vibe-coding platforms such as Lovable and Replit.

TechCrunch reported that the product is still in its early days, with areas where it will need to expand and improve. Canvas could make becoming an online seller more accessible to those who do not have the budget for developers and designers, or the time to learn to code.