Shopify Rolls Out Canvas, a Sidekick-Powered Store Design Surface

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Shopify introduced Canvas on October 1, 2026, a new design surface where merchants build and customize their online stores with Sidekick, the company’s AI agent, and watch the agent’s changes land in real time. Shopify said Canvas is rolling out to merchants over the coming days.

Shopify said the surface is intended to let anyone create a custom online store regardless of design experience, coding skills, or budget. “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,” said Ben Sehl, Shopify’s director of product and a co-founder of Kotn.

Sehl said a merchant on Shopify can now build a fully custom store in twenty minutes, describing Canvas as a way to help entrepreneurs build the store they envision.

Canvas turns the entire online store into a shared workspace for the merchant and Sidekick. For the first time, Shopify said, merchants can see every page of a store laid out together, pan across those pages to judge how the store feels as a whole, and zoom in to work on the details. Merchants can click elements to change them directly, or work with Sidekick through a chat field instead of navigating a settings panel, and Sidekick’s changes appear in Canvas in real time as it makes them.

According to Shopify, Canvas renders the real code behind the store rather than a static preview, so merchants can preview each page with full interactivity and animation and check key pages with different products, collections, and screen sizes. Shopify’s Canvas documentation states that Canvas displays all of a store’s templates side by side and that merchants open it from the Themes page in the Shopify admin, on desktop devices only.

Shopify said that as Sidekick builds, it asks questions, proposes approaches, and takes feedback along the way, remembers a merchant’s preferences, and carries earlier design decisions into later work, so the conversation can move forward rather than revisit settled choices. The agent also takes screenshots to inspect