Shopify announced Canvas on October 1, 2026, a new design surface where merchants build their online store together with Sidekick, Shopify's AI agent, rolling out over the following days. Canvas turns the entire store into a single workspace, so merchants can see every page laid out together, pan across them to judge how the store feels as a whole, and zoom in to work on details.
Merchants can still click on elements to edit them directly, or ask Sidekick in chat instead of navigating a settings panel, and Sidekick's changes appear in Canvas in real time. Shopify says this is not a static preview but a render of the real code behind the store, so each page can be previewed with full interactivity and animation across different products, collections and screen sizes.
While it builds, Sidekick asks questions, proposes approaches, takes feedback and remembers earlier design decisions. It now works directly on the theme files, guided by instructions and skills for building stores, then validates its code and reviews screenshots of the result in a loop before handing it back. Shopify says this lets Sidekick handle anything from small section changes to store-wide redesigns, and that it made more than twenty-five million theme edits in the first half of 2026.
Ben Sehl, Director of Product at Shopify, said Canvas is early and is not replacing the existing theme editor yet. According to Shopify's changelog, the first release does not yet support third-party themes, Markets, translations, rollouts, or app blocks and embeds.