Shopify Brings Sidekick Store Editing Into Its Canvas Workspace

Shopify introduced Canvas, a visual workspace that lets merchants build and edit online stores through its Sidekick AI assistant, bringing code and theme changes into a single view.

As Sidekick updates a store, Canvas displays the results in real time. Merchants can view the storefront as a whole, zoom in on details or make changes by selecting individual elements.

Canvas renders the store’s actual code, allowing merchants to inspect how pages work and appear at different screen sizes. Shopify gave Sidekick the ability to work directly with theme files and simplified the theme architecture so it could understand and change a store’s structure, design and logic.

Shopify’s existing no-code builder let merchants customize themes by rearranging sections and blocks. More extensive changes required editing code or getting help from a developer. Sidekick already handled code and theme edits, but Canvas brings those capabilities into a workspace where merchants can see and adjust the full store.

The launch is part of Shopify’s broader effort to support AI-assisted commerce. The company recently expanded tools that let authorized AI agents complete checkout on eligible merchant sites through browser-based checkout tools.