Shopify Canvas: New Store Designer Built on Sidekick

Until now, designing a Shopify store meant working through the theme editor one template at a time, using a panel of sections and settings, or paying a developer to change the theme code. Canvas changes the starting point. Every page of the store sits side by side in a single workspace that you can pan across and zoom into, and a change can come from a direct click on an element or from a plain-English request to Sidekick in the chat. Shopify's pitch is that anyone, "whatever their design experience, coding skills, or budget", can now build a bespoke store.

Canvas is rolling out to existing stores over the coming days, so most UK merchants will find it in their admin soon. It also arrives with a list of things it cannot do yet, and several of those gaps land on common UK set-ups: Shopify Markets, translations, rollouts and app blocks are all unsupported at launch. This article covers what Canvas is, how it works, and what to check before you move a live store onto it.

How it works

Canvas is reached from Online Store > Themes. From there you can create a new theme in Canvas, or duplicate an existing Shopify theme or a custom theme into Canvas. The original theme is left alone and keeps working in the current theme editor, so trying Canvas does not touch the store your customers are using. Inside the workspace, every page is laid out together. You can pan across the whole store to judge how it hangs together, zoom in on a single detail, click any element to edit it, or describe what you want in the Sidekick chat. Shopify says Sidekick's changes land in real time, whether the request is a single section or a store-wide redesign.

The preview is not a mock-up. According to Shopify's announcement, Canvas renders the real code behind the store, so pages can be previewed with their interactions and animations working, and key pages can be checked against different products, collections and screen sizes. Sidekick now works directly on the theme's files, and Shopify says it has simplified theme architecture so the structure, logic and design are easier for the agent to understand and change. As it builds, Sidekick validates its own code and takes screenshots to see how each change landed, then refines the result before handing it back. Shopify also says it asks questions, proposes approaches and carries earlier design decisions through the conversation, so the merchant does not have to restate them.

Shopify frames Canvas as a visual home for work Sidekick was already doing. The company says Sidekick made more than twenty-five million edits to themes in the first half of 2026, generating apps and custom theme sections along the way. Ben Sehl, Director of Product at Shopify, is open about how early this is: "Canvas is not replacing the existing editor yet. Things will change quickly, and there are gaps we still need to close."

Examples and use cases

The clearest fit is a small brand on one of Shopify's own themes that wants a store that looks less like a template. A founder who knows the feel they want but cannot write Liquid can ask Sidekick to rework the homepage hero, rebuild a collection page layout or restyle the product page, and see each change in context with the rest of the store. Because Canvas works on a new or duplicated theme, the live theme keeps trading while the new version takes shape.

A second use is exploration before a paid redesign. A merchant planning a rebrand can try two or three directions quickly, with real products and collections in the preview, and arrive at a design brief with something concrete to point at. Shopify's own description is that whether a merchant arrives "with only a sense of how the store should feel or a pixel-perfect mockup", Sidekick gives them something to react to and refines it from there.

A third is page-level work around trading peaks. Seasonal landing pages, gift guides and campaign collections are the kind of change Sidekick can turn round in a conversation, which suits a team without a developer on call in November. The catch is covered in the next two sections. If a page relies on an app block, such as a reviews widget, a bundle builder, a subscription option or a size guide, the Canvas version will not show it yet.

What this means for UK merchants

The launch limits matter more than the headline suggests. Shopify lists five things Canvas does not support at launch: third-party themes from the Shopify Theme Store, Markets, rollouts, translations, and app blocks and app embeds. Each one maps onto a set-up that plenty of UK stores already run.

Markets and translations. Many UK stores sell into Ireland, the EU or the US through Shopify Markets, often with their own pricing, domains or languages. Canvas supports neither Markets nor translations at launch, and Shopify has not published how a Canvas theme behaves on a store that uses them. Until it does, a store with more than one market or a translated storefront should treat Canvas as a sandbox for ideas rather than the place to build the theme it will publish.

App blocks and app embeds. Shopify told app developers that if a merchant creates or duplicates a theme in Canvas, the app's blocks and embeds will not be available in that theme for now, and Canvas themes will not appear when an app lists a store's themes (Shopify developer forum). Reviews, loyalty, subscriptions, upsells and chat widgets commonly reach the storefront this way. One UK item deserves its own check: if your cookie consent banner comes from an app that loads as an app embed, confirm it appears in the Canvas theme before you publish anything. The ICO's guidance on cookies and similar technologies states that you cannot set non-essential cookies on your site before the user has consented to them, so a theme that drops the banner is a compliance problem, not a cosmetic one.

Theme updates. Themes edited in Canvas do not receive theme updates. In practice a Canvas theme leaves the update path as soon as you start editing it, which makes it closer to a custom theme than to a settings change. Someone has to own its maintenance from then on, whether that is you, Sidekick or an agency. If you would rather have a bespoke build with support behind it, that is the work our Shopify web design team does, and an hour spent in Canvas is a good way to arrive at the brief.

Third-party themes. Themes bought from third-party developers in the Shopify Theme Store cannot be opened in Canvas at launch. Shopify staff say the lack of full compatibility is "not an intentional omission" and that they are working towards it before Canvas becomes the default editor (Shopify developer forum). For now, Canvas starts from Shopify's own themes, including the free ones we compared in our guide to the best free Shopify themes, or from a custom theme.

Practical considerations

Start from a duplicate and leave the live theme alone, which is how Canvas is designed to work anyway. Before you build, list every app that puts something on the storefront and note which of them use app blocks or embeds, because those features will be missing from the Canvas version until Shopify ships support. A Shopify staff member said on 1 October that theme app extension support is planned "within the next few weeks", and Shopify has told developers it does not expect apps to need updating when it arrives. A store that depends on apps therefore loses little by waiting. Asked whether merchants would be warned about the gap, Shopify staff said yes, and that Sidekick is aware of it.

Rollouts is on the unsupported list too. That matters because Rollouts is how Shopify lets you schedule a theme change or run an A/B test between two themes, which we covered when Shopify added scheduling and A/B testing for themes. Without it, a published Canvas theme goes live for every visitor at once. Record a baseline from the current theme first (conversion rate, add-to-cart rate and average order value) so the new design is judged on numbers rather than on how it looks in the workspace. Custom reports can now plot two metrics against each other, a job that got easier when scatter plots and radar charts arrived in Shopify Analytics.

Finally, expect the picture to move. The release note links to a Shopify Help Center guide on designing a store in Canvas, and a Shopify staff member described the product as "still early and evolving daily". Re-check the list of unsupported features before any launch date rather than relying on what was true in the first week.

Rollouts has since gained discounts too: you can now schedule and test discounts with Shopify Rollouts, which matters for Black Friday plans that pair a new offer with a theme change.

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