Shopify launches Canvas: visualize all the pages of your eCommerce from a single panel

Designing an online store tailored exactly to your dreams has always been something of a high-risk sport. For years, achieving a standout eCommerce design meant facing two equally daunting options: devouring coding tutorials, shelling out thousands of euros to development agencies, or ending up frustrated after hours spent navigating endless configuration panels.

However, Shopify has announced the gradual rollout of Canvas, a new visual design interface where merchants can build and customize their entire online store side by side with Sidekick, its Artificial Intelligence-powered assistant.

An interactive visual canvas for the entire store

Until now, the typical editing experience was limited to modifying elements view by view within static templates. Canvas breaks away from that model by introducing a global canvas.

Sellers can see every page of their eCommerce store displayed simultaneously within a single overview panel, zoom out to assess the store’s overall visual consistency, or zoom in to fine-tune specific details.

Among Canvas’s most notable new features are:

• Interactive editing on real code: this is not a flat prototype. Canvas renders the store’s actual code, making it possible to preview animations, interactive components, and responsiveness across different devices or product catalogs.
• Real-time changes: merchants can edit elements by clicking directly on the screen or request changes from Sidekick through chat. As the AI works, the modifications appear live on the canvas.
• A shared view between AI and merchant: Sidekick takes internal screenshots to visually assess its own changes, ensuring the design meets aesthetic standards before showing the final result.

As Shopify explains: «When I created Kotn 12 years ago, I knew how to code and it still took me two weeks to get a basic store up and running,» explains Ben Sehl, Chief Product Officer at Shopify. “Today, an entrepreneur on Shopify can build a fully customized store in 20 minutes that far surpasses what I built back then.”

How Sidekick works in Canvas

Shopify has been working on its AI agent for years. They had already gotten it to write code, but something more was needed. In the first six months of 2026, Sidekick had already logged more than 25 million theme edits, but Shopify wanted to take its agent to a new level.

To make that happen, the company has restructured its template architecture, making it easier for the AI to interpret the website’s logic, structure, and design. In addition, Sidekick now has highly defined aesthetic guidelines and a continuous learning system.

The agent acts as a creative collaborator: it asks questions, suggests design paths, remembers the user’s previous preferences so it does not repeat decisions that have already been made, and operates in a continuous self-evaluation loop.

With this move, Shopify aims to democratize custom design. Traditionally, the more creative an entrepreneur’s vision was, the more difficult and expensive it became to bring it to life. Canvas aims to eliminate that friction entirely so that any brand, regardless of its technical knowledge or budget, can project its true visual identity.

That said, the platform notes that Canvas will coexist with the traditional editor for now while it continues gathering feedback from the community and fine-tuning details over the coming weeks.

The Canvas rollout has already begun gradually and will be available to all Shopify merchants over the next few days.