Shopify 推出 Canvas：通过与 AI 对话构建在线商店

Shopify 于周四推出了一款名为 Canvas 的新建站工具，让商家能够通过与 AI 对话来搭建自己的 Shopify 商店。尽管 Shopify 在 Canvas 之前已提供功能相当完善的无代码建站工具，但用户需要通过重新排列模块化区段和区块来编辑选定主题。至于更深层的定制，则仍需要修改代码或聘请开发者。

如今，借助 Canvas，商家只需与 Shopify 的 AI Agent Sidekick 对话，即可创建网站。AI 进行修改时，Canvas 会实时展示结果，让商家能够在店铺逐步成形的过程中查看整体外观，或放大以聚焦某些细节。

值得注意的是，据 Shopify 表示，这并非静态预览，而是商店背后的实际代码正在被渲染。这意味着商家可以测试页面完整的交互功能和动画效果，并查看页面在不同屏幕尺寸下的呈现方式。Sidekick 还会对工作过程截屏，从而在网站更新时看到与商家相同的画面。

Canvas 的发布是更广泛转变的一部分：未来，建设网站将不再要求用户直接编写代码。它加入了 Wix、Squarespace、Webflow 和 Framer 等公司推出的众多 AI 驱动建站工具之列，也与 Lovable 和 Replit 等氛围编程（vibe-coding）平台并行。

[视频/嵌入内容：Canvas 建站工具演示]

如果商家愿意，仍可点击单个元素直接进行修改。不过，更可能的情况是，他们只需在聊天中告诉 Sidekick 想要完成什么操作。

Sidekick 本身并非新产品，它已经被用于编写代码、构建应用、定制主题以及进行其他编辑。但此前，它尚未被整合为像 Canvas 这样完整的建站产品。在 Canvas 中，用户可以一次查看整个商店，并在更新网站实际文件时进行缩放和平移浏览。

为实现这一功能，Shopify 赋予 Sidekick 直接操作主题文件的能力，并简化了主题架构，使商店的结构、逻辑和设计更容易被 Sidekick 理解和修改。

该产品目前仍处于早期阶段，因此还有许多方面需要扩展和改进。例如，初始版本尚不包括第三方主题支持、应用区块和扩展、市场、多语言翻译、发布流程以及主题更新。此外，Canvas 仅支持桌面端。不过，该公司告诉 TechCrunch，这些功能都计划随着时间推移得到支持；只是该产品目前仍较新。

未来，随着功能日益完善，Canvas 可能让那些没有预算聘请开发者和设计师、或没有时间学习编程的人，也能更容易地成为在线卖家。

Shopify introduced a new site-building tool Thursday called Canvas that lets merchants set up their Shopify store by chatting with AI. While Shopify already offered a fairly capable no-code builder before Canvas, it involved editing a selected theme by rearranging modular sections and blocks. Deeper customizations, however, would require editing code or bringing in a developer.

Now, with Canvas, merchants simply chat with Shopify’s AI agent, Sidekick, to create their site. As the AI makes changes, Canvas displays the results in real time, allowing merchants to see how the store looks overall as it comes together or zoom in to focus on certain details.

Notably, this isn’t a static preview, but the real code behind their store being rendered, according to Shopify. That means merchants can test the page’s full interactivity and animation, and view pages as they’d appear across different screen sizes. Sidekick also takes screenshots of the work so it can see the same thing the merchant sees as the site updates.

Canvas’s launch is part of a broader shift toward a future where building a website no longer requires coding it directly. It joins numerous other AI-powered site-building tools from companies like Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, and Framer, alongside vibe-coding platforms like Lovable and Replit.

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Merchants can still click on individual elements to make changes directly, if they choose. But more likely, they’ll just tell Sidekick in a chat what they want to do.

Sidekick itself is not new, as it’s already been used to write code, build apps, customize themes, and make other edits. But it had yet to be pulled together into a full site-building product like Canvas, where users can see the entire store at once and zoom and pan around while making updates to the site’s actual files.

To make this work, Shopify gave Sidekick the ability to work directly with the theme’s files and simplified the theme architecture so the store’s structure, logic, and design would be easier for Sidekick to understand and change.

The product is in its early days, so there are areas where it will need to expand and improve. For instance, third-party theme support, app blocks and extensions, markets, translations, rollouts, and theme updates are all not part of the initial launch. Plus, Canvas is desktop-only. But the company told TechCrunch these are things the company plans to support over time; the product is just still new.

In the future, as it becomes more robust, Canvas could make becoming an online seller more accessible to those who don’t have the budget for developers and designers, or the time to learn to code.