Cross-Border Product Partner Manager - Cross Border

Shopify debuts Canvas, a way to build online stores by chatting with AI. Shopify's new Canvas site builder lets merchants create and customize their online stores by chatting with its AI agent Sidekick, while watching the c 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. 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.

Shopify buys shop.com domain. With potentially lucrative purchase, e-commerce giant appears to be shoring up its branding. Shopify has purchased the shop.com domain name in a potentially lucrative deal for US firm Market America. The news: Market America, an e-commerce brokerage company, announced on Tuesday that it had sold the web address to Shopify. The company intends to rebrand its online presence away from shop.com and toward MarketAmerica.com, which is being built on Shopify's platform. From the source: Shopify did not respond to a question about what it paid for the domain but said in an emailed statement that "acquiring the Shop.com domain gives shoppers an easier way to use Shop on the web to discover and buy from the brands they love." Popular domain names often carry million-dollar price tags, with previous highly sought-after names such as cars.com ($872 million USD) and business.com ($345 million USD) going for even more. The context: This is not the first time shop.com has exchanged hands. In 2003, the domain name was sold for $3.5 million USD ($4.9 million CAD) to Altura International by the Internet Real Estate group. It was again sold in 2011, this time to Market America, for an undisclosed amount. Final thought: Domain names are big business; the market has become so hot that it has spawned its own ecosystem of brokerages and domain flippers. Shopify's acquisition of shop.com comes not long after it purchased the web address' Canadian counterpart, shop.ca, in 2025 for $536,000 CAD. With this purchase, it appears Shopify is using its capital position - the company boasts more than $3 billion USD in quarterly revenue - to shore up its branding and customer pipeline. The news came just ahead of Shopify's announcement that it has added a new tool to its repertoire called Canvas. Powered by Shopify's agentic AI Sidekick, Canvas gives merchants more control over the design of their online store. Disclosure: BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar. Feature image courtesy Burst.

Amazon and Shopify reported Q2 2026 results revealing sharply divergent AI shopping strategies. Amazon grew revenue 19.6% to $200.61 billion, with over 350 million customers using Alexa for Shopping in the past year. The company is building a closed ecosystem, blocking external AI agents whilst keeping transactions internal through tools like price alerts and auto-buy. Shopify grew revenue 33.7% to $3.58 billion, with AI-driven orders tripling year-over-year. The company is pursuing an open model, allowing any AI agent to build carts and check out through its platform via the Universal Commerce Protocol. However, Shopify's transaction and loan losses rose to $141 million from $80 million, raising questions about the profitability of its open approach as it scales.