Introducing Canvas: Opening the aperture on online store design

Every business on Shopify is unique. Behind each one is an entrepreneur with a story to tell, values they stand for, and a vision for how it should all come through in their online store.

Now anyone, whatever their design experience, coding skills, or budget, can create a beautiful, bespoke online store. Rolling out over the coming days, Canvas is a new design surface where merchants build with Sidekick, Shopify’s AI agent.

“When I built Kotn 12 years ago, I knew how to code and it still took me two weeks to get a rough store working,” says Ben Sehl, Director of Product at Shopify and co-founder of Kotn. “Today, an entrepreneur on Shopify can build a fully custom store in twenty minutes that’s head and shoulders above what I built then. That’s what we’re enabling with Canvas: helping more entrepreneurs get closer to the version of their store that exists in their head.”

A visual workspace for the entire store

Canvas turns the whole online store into a workspace for creativity and collaboration with Sidekick. For the first time, merchants can see every page laid out together, pan across them to understand how the store feels as a whole, then zoom in to work on the details.

Merchants can still click on elements to make changes directly, or work with Sidekick through the chat instead of navigating a settings panel. As Sidekick makes changes, those changes land in Canvas in real time so merchants can see how they feel in the context of their entire store.

In Canvas, Merchants aren’t editing a static preview, but a render of the real code behind the store they’re building with Sidekick. They can preview each page with full interactivity and animation, and see key pages with different products, collections, and screen sizes.

A collaborative design partner

As Sidekick builds in Canvas, it asks questions, proposes approaches, and takes feedback along the way. Like a great collaborator, it remembers preferences and carries earlier design decisions into its work, so the merchant can spend the conversation making new decisions instead of restating old ones.

Merchants and Sidekick work from the same design. Merchants review changes as they land, while Sidekick takes screenshots to inspect its work. Because both can see the result simultaneously, they can explore ideas and iterate quickly in tandem.

“Getting Sidekick to write code was easy, but guiding it to make good design decisions took a great deal of time and attention,” says Austin Knight, design director at Shopify. “Every theme has a unique design contract, a curated set of patterns to draw from, and a mountain of opinionated eval data. The result is that Sidekick brings merchants tasteful, distinct design directions that become a springboard for their own creativity.”

Whether an entrepreneur arrives with only a sense of how the store should feel or a pixel-perfect mockup, Sidekick gives them something concrete to react to, then refines it with them in Canvas until their vision is brought to life.

A coding agent designed for commerce

Sidekick has been writing code for some time, generating apps, building custom theme sections, and making more than twenty-five million edits to themes in the first half of 2026. To take on more ambitious store-building tasks, Sidekick needed to navigate all the templates and files that make up a theme, make coordinated changes across them, and evaluate the result.

Sidekick now works directly on the theme’s files, guided by instructions and skills for building stores. Theme architecture has also been simplified, making the store’s structure, logic, and design easier for Sidekick to understand and change.

As it builds, Sidekick validates its code and reviews screenshots to inspect how its changes landed on Canvas. It uses both forms of feedback to refine its work in a loop before handing the result back to the merchant.

Together, these changes let Sidekick take on work ranging from small section changes to store-wide redesigns, producing high-quality custom theme code that reflects each merchant’s distinct vision.

Bespoke is no longer the path of most resistance

For most of Shopify’s history, a bespoke store meant writing code, paying someone who could, or navigating an unwieldy settings panel. Bespoke was the path of most resistance: the more creative the vision, the harder it was to realize.

Today, we’re unlocking more of that latent creativity, building toward a world where every entrepreneur has a store that feels distinctly their own. We’re investing here because we believe entrepreneurs flourish when they see themselves, their business, and the truest form of their vision represented in what they build.

“We couldn’t wait to put it in the hands of merchants who want to explore, play, and help us shape what comes next,” says Ben Sehl. “We’re early here and Canvas is not replacing the existing editor yet. Things will change quickly, and there are gaps we still need to close. In the meantime, we’re excited to build alongside you.”

Canvas is rolling out to merchants over the coming days. Learn more about how to get started.