Building a custom Shopify storefront has meant wrangling theme blocks or hiring a developer. Shopify’s answer, unveiled October 1, is to let merchants describe what they want in a chat instead.
The new surface is called Canvas. It pairs a merchant with Sidekick, Shopify’s existing AI agent, and shows every page of the store laid out side by side. Merchants pan across pages to judge the overall feel and zoom in to adjust details. Clicking an element still edits it directly, but the chat box is meant to be the main control.
Canvas renders the store’s live code rather than a still image, Shopify says, so interactivity, motion and different screen sizes can all be tested in place. Sidekick captures screenshots of its own output, letting agent and merchant look at the same thing.
That required giving Sidekick direct access to theme files. Shopify also simplified its theme architecture so a store’s structure and logic are easier for the agent to parse and rewrite. Sidekick has been writing code for a while, the company noted, logging more than 25 million theme edits in the first half of 2026.
Canvas is desktop-only and early. Third-party themes, app blocks, markets, translations and theme updates are not included yet. Shopify said a merchant can now assemble a fully custom store in about twenty minutes.
