Shopify unveiled a new site-building tool on Thursday called Canvas, which enables merchants to create their Shopify store through AI-powered conversation. Previously, Shopify provided a fairly robust no-code builder, but it required users to modify a chosen theme by rearranging modular sections and blocks. More advanced customizations demanded code editing or hiring a developer.

With Canvas, merchants now simply converse with Shopify's AI agent, Sidekick, to construct their site. As the AI applies changes, Canvas shows the results in real time, letting merchants observe how the store looks as a whole while it takes shape, or zoom in to examine specific details. Importantly, according to Shopify, this is not a static preview — it's the actual code behind their store being rendered. This means merchants can test the page's complete interactivity and animation, and see how pages appear across various screen sizes. Sidekick also captures screenshots of the work so it can view the same thing the merchant sees as the site updates.

Canvas's release reflects a broader movement toward a future where building a website no longer requires direct coding. It joins a range of other AI-powered site-building tools from companies such as Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, and Framer, along with vibe-coding platforms like Lovable and Replit.

Merchants can still click on individual elements to make direct changes if they prefer. But more often, they'll simply tell Sidekick in a chat what they want to accomplish. Sidekick itself isn't new — it has already been used to write code, build apps, customize themes, and perform other edits. However, it hadn't been consolidated into a full site-building product like Canvas, where users can view the entire store at once and zoom and pan around while making updates to the site's actual files.

To enable this, Shopify gave Sidekick the capability to work directly with the theme's files and streamlined the theme architecture so the store's structure, logic, and design would be simpler for Sidekick to comprehend and modify. The product is still in its early stages, so there are areas where it will need to grow and improve. Nevertheless, Canvas could make becoming an online seller more accessible to those who lack the budget for developers and designers, or the time to learn coding.