Shopify on October 1 began rolling out Canvas, a design surface where merchants build and edit their online store with Sidekick, the company’s AI agent. Shopify presents Canvas as a new way to build storefronts, but says it is an early release that does not yet replace the existing theme editor.

According to Shopify’s changelog entry, Canvas lays out every page of a store in one interactive, infinite workspace. Merchants can pan across all pages, zoom in on details, click any element to edit it directly, or describe a change to Sidekick in chat. Changes appear in real time, whether they affect a single section or the whole store, and merchants can preview the working store with its interactions and animations, with different products and collections, and at different screen sizes.

Shopify said Canvas is rolling out to existing stores over the coming days. Merchants open it from Online Store > Themes, where they can create a new theme in Canvas or duplicate a Shopify-built or custom theme into it. The original theme stays in the current theme editor.

How Sidekick works inside Canvas

In its announcement, Shopify said Sidekick now edits a theme’s files directly, guided by store-building instructions and skills, and that the company simplified its theme architecture so the agent can understand and change it more easily. Sidekick validates its code and reviews screenshots of its own output before handing work back to the merchant, the company said. It can also ask questions, propose options, take feedback and remember earlier design decisions.

Shopify said Sidekick made more than 25 million edits to themes in the first half of 2026. Ben Sehl, Director of Product at Shopify and co-founder of Kotn, described the change in build times from his own experience: “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,” he said. Sehl said an entrepreneur on Shopify can now build a fully custom store in twenty minutes. The announcement does not describe any testing behind that figure.

Austin Knight, design director at Shopify, said design quality, not code generation, was the harder problem. “Getting Sidekick to write code was easy, but guiding it to make good design decisions took a great deal of time and attention,” he said. Knight added that “Every theme has a unique design contract, a curated set of patterns to draw from, and a mountain of opinionated eval data.”

What Canvas does not support yet

The changelog lists several limits at launch:

  • Third-party themes from the Shopify Theme Store are not supported.
  • Markets, rollouts, translations, app blocks and app embeds are not supported.
  • Themes edited in Canvas do not receive theme updates.

A launch post on the Shopify Developer Community forum, aimed at theme partners, said Canvas does not yet have full backwards compatibility with third-party themes and that Shopify is working toward that compatibility before Canvas begins to become the default editor. The post said the gap is not intentional and reflects how early the product is. It added that the Theme Store remains an important destination for merchants who want a polished, ready-made theme, and that Shopify is working on a future in which theme developers play a significant role. It did not give details.

Why it matters

For merchants, Canvas brings AI-driven storefront design into Shopify’s own admin. The trade-offs documented at launch are specific: a theme edited in Canvas stops receiving theme updates, and merchants cannot customize for Markets, manage translations, or add app blocks and app embeds inside Canvas. Because merchants can duplicate a theme into Canvas while the original stays in the existing editor, they can try the tool on a copy without changing the theme they already use.

For theme developers and agencies, the developer post indicates that Shopify is reconsidering how the Theme Store fits a model in which merchants start from a theme and then reshape it with Sidekick. The same post refers to Canvas eventually becoming the default editor. Shopify has not published a timetable for that step.

What to watch

Shopify has said the product will change quickly. “Things will change quickly, and there are gaps we still need to close,” Sehl said. Points to track include support for Theme Store themes, which the developer post says Shopify is working toward, and support for Markets, rollouts, translations and app blocks, which the changelog lists as unavailable at launch. Merchants can follow changes on Shopify’s changelog.

The caveats

The figures and claims in this story come from Shopify’s own announcement, changelog and developer forum post. The twenty-minute build time and the 25 million theme edits are company statements that have not been independently verified. Shopify describes Canvas as an early release that is reaching stores in stages, so the features individual merchants see may differ during the rollout.