Shopify's Canvas lets merchants build an online store by chatting with Sidekick

Shopify introduced Canvas on Thursday, a site-building tool that lets merchants set up and adjust an online store by chatting with the company's AI agent, Sidekick. As Sidekick makes changes, Canvas displays the results in real time, letting merchants see how the store looks overall as it comes together or zoom in on certain details.

Real code, not a static preview

Canvas is not a static preview: according to Shopify, it renders the real code behind the store. That means merchants can test a page's full interactivity and animation and see how pages 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.

How it works

Before Canvas, Shopify already offered a fairly capable no-code builder, but it worked by editing a selected theme and rearranging modular sections and blocks; deeper customizations required editing code or bringing in a developer. To make Canvas work, the company gave Sidekick the ability to work directly with a theme's files and simplified the theme architecture so that a store's structure, logic and design would be easier for Sidekick to understand and change. Merchants can still click on individual elements to make changes directly, but, more likely, they will simply tell Sidekick in a chat what they want. Sidekick itself is not new; it has already been used to write code, build apps, customize themes and make other edits. Canvas is the first product to pull those abilities into one place, showing the entire store at once while users zoom and pan around the site's actual files.

A wider shift

Canvas is part of a broader shift toward a future where building a website no longer requires coding it directly. AI-powered site builders from Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and Framer are pushing in the same direction, alongside vibe-coding platforms such as Lovable and Replit. The product is still in its early days and has areas where it will need to expand and improve. Even so, Canvas could make becoming an online seller more accessible to people who lack the budget for developers and designers, or the time to learn to code.