Shopify Launches Canvas, AI Chat for Store Creation

Shopify unveils Canvas, a tool that generates a store by interacting with Sidekick, its AI agent, and displays changes in real-time on the actual code. The service starts with restrictions—no third-party themes or mobile support—while Shopify announces a gradual expansion of its scope.

Canvas launches on desktop without third-party themes, translations, or deployments

Canvas is presented as a product still in development, with several features missing at launch. Merchants cannot use third-party themes, app blocks, or extensions, nor access markets, translations, deployments, or theme updates. The tool is only available on desktop. Shopify plans to add these features in the future.

Creation through conversation and real-time rendering of actual code

With Canvas, merchants can create their Shopify store by chatting with Sidekick, the platform's AI agent. Requested changes are applied and visible in real-time, allowing users to visualize the entire store or focus on specific details. According to Shopify, this is not just a simple preview, but the display of the store's authentic code, which allows for testing interactivity, animations, and rendering across various screen formats. Sidekick also takes screenshots to provide the user with the same visual context during updates. Merchants can still directly modify individual elements if they wish, but most are likely to prefer giving instructions to Sidekick through conversation. Before Canvas, Shopify's no-code builder required rearranging sections and blocks of a theme, while more advanced customizations required modifying code or hiring a developer.

Sidekick gains direct access to theme files and a simplified framework

Sidekick was already used to generate code, develop applications, adjust themes, and make various other modifications. However, it was not yet offered within a comprehensive site-building tool that allowed for displaying the entire store, zooming in, or navigating while editing the original files. To make this usage possible, Shopify has enabled Sidekick to intervene directly on the theme files and has revamped the architecture of the theme so that its structure, logic, and appearance are more easily understandable and modifiable by the agent.

An industry shift towards AI-assisted no-code and an access challenge

The launch of Canvas is part of a broader trend towards creating websites without needing to code, already seen with players like Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Framer, as well as on vibe-coding platforms such as Lovable and Replit. As Canvas evolves, it could facilitate access to online selling for those who neither have the budget for developers or designers nor the time to learn coding.