Shopify’s new site-building tool, introduced Thursday, allows merchants to set up a storefront through a conversation with
artificial intelligence (AI).
The tool, “Canvas,” aims to provide store owners with greater customization through chat with Shopify’s AI agent Sidekick to create the website,
following an agreement with Meta Platforms to allow its agentic agent Muse to integrate it with Shop Pay in September.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke wrote on X in September that the company was “partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores.” Two days later it announced that Shop Pay was available as a wallet in Muse.
In Canvas, AI makes the
changes to help merchants build the stores, and Canvas displays the results in real time.
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The two allow merchants to see how the store comes together. In theory, Muse assists to feed the Shopify
stores with traffic.
An AI-driven ecosystem will drive Shopify using its Canvas for backend store creation and Meta Muse
for frontend customer acquisition and agentic traffic.
Ben Sehl, director of product at Shopify and co-founder of Kotn, explained in the blog post that an entrepreneur on Shopify now
can build a custom store in twenty minutes, “helping more entrepreneurs get closer to the version of their store that exists in their head.”
Canvas is part of a shift for Shopify
that steers it more toward a future where a website no longer requires a lot of coding.
Wix and other site-building tools host online merchant stores, but they handle the ecommerce
infrastructure differently.
When Shopify released Q3 earnings in August, it reinforced a clear signals that AI continues to reshape the way consumers shop online.
It reported sales growth of 34% and
projected sales to grow at a low-thirties-percentage rate during the third quarter. FactSet estimates Wall Street consensus of about 27%, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A 32%
surge in gross merchandise volume -- the measurement of the total value of goods sold across its platform -- helped Shopify’s momentum, which reached $115.57 billion in the second quarter.
Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said during an earnings call that the company is seeing an early increase from AI --
particularly for smaller merchants, which make up the majority of its customers.
These are brands that also happen to make up the majority of Shopify's merchant base, smaller businesses with
specialized products built for a particular customer.
Finkelstein said AI search began to disproportionately benefit the long tail in 2025 -- a trend that continued, with 75% of AI-attributed
orders in the second quarter coming from outside the top 100 categories in Q2.
"While search engines rank by popularity against a handful of keywords, AI agents make multiple calls into
Shopify's Catalog working with richer structured data to match products with the buyer's specific intent rather than just keywords," he said during the earnings call. "So when a buyer asks an AI
assistant for the best car seat that fits three across the Sedan, traditional search focuses on the keyword car seat."
Finkelstein said an agent understands the actual need, dimensions,
vehicle type, and the fact that they need three seats across. The AI agent then searches across all of those criteria to find the product that works best -- not just the one that ranks highest.
Shopify expects Canvas to do the same. The merchant will verbally tell the AI what it needs, and the agent will build it.