The theme editor's first reset in 15 years.
"Now everybody knows code. It's called English."
On October 1, Shopify launched Canvas, a new theme editor built around Sidekick. Ben Sehl is Director of Product for Online Store at Shopify. He built themes as a partner, cofounded the clothing brand Kotn, and led Hydrogen from zero to one. Now he's replacing a theme editor that has worked for 15 years, and he says Canvas will be the only one in time.
Ben explains what Shopify rebuilt under the hood, who should use Canvas today and who should wait, and why he thinks agencies are worth more now than before AI.
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What you'll learn:
Guest: Ben Sehl, Director of Product, Online Store at Shopify. Cofounder of Kotn.
Ben Sehl on X: https://x.com/benjaminsehl
Ben's site: https://sehl.ca
Kotn: https://kotn.com
Commerce-UI (Kotn's agency): https://commerce-ui.com
Introducing Canvas (Shopify): https://www.shopify.com/news/introducing-canvas
Canvas changelog: https://changelog.shopify.com/posts/design-a-fully-bespoke-store-with-canvas
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt • 00:00.000
This episode is brought to you in part by Swym. Here's the thing about wishlist apps. Most of them just sit there. A customer saves a product, and then nothing happens. Swym actually activates that data. When someone wishlists a product, you can trigger price drop or back-in-stock alerts and feed that intent directly into Klaviyo or your CRM. You're not guessing what people want, because they've told you. Plus, customers can share wishlists for gifts, and your team can view them to offer personalized service online or in-store. And unlike card abandonment, wish list data is permission-based. These are people raising their hand saying, hey, I want this, just not right now. Swym's been around for over a decade. It powers 45,000 stores and installs in about five minutes. You can try it for free today at getswym.com slash kurt. That's G-E-T-S-W-Y-M dot com slash kurt. I am excited today to talk on the show about a new Shopify feature that really might have, when I saw it announced, may have ruffled some feathers in the Shopify partner community because it absolutely changes a paradigm. For 15 years, changing your Shopify online store, the theme, meant you went into the theme editor. Maybe if you were really fancy, you were a developer doing it purely in code. Like us, on October 1st, Shopify launched Canvas. They have rethought that theme editor experience, totally different, AI focused, new editor, new view. And you know what? I played with it early and I like it. I really did. It has some limitations. It has some features that are new. Today we are going to talk to the man behind it, our guest leads online store at Shopify. Ben Sehl has the experience you want for something like this. He ran a brand. He worked on hydrogen and he recently told a room full of partners at .dev that the future of themes is simpler liquid. Okay, that's interesting. So today we're covering what Canvas is. Who should use it now and what that means? Ben, welcome to the show. And all right, 15 years of a working theme editor at least. Why blow that up now? We had a good thing going, man.
Ben • 02:31.674
like we we had a good thing going you know it's funny i actually you said you you had the two ways of doing it either through the theme editor or like the fancy way and when i started on shopify it was in during you know i did it the fancy way i guess uh i and the thing that made me fall in love with it what was the simplicity and beauty of liquid and i um had had i was a dev you know like i was a designer but i was a developer who who knew like html and css and like enough jquery to be dangerous and um and and i played with a lot of the different frameworks that were out there and one thing i didn't really like about a lot of the wizzywig ones was they kind of like mutilated your code and and there's just something in me that like just wants the view source to look look pretty you
Kurt • 03:15.326
Yes,
Ben • 03:15.576
know um
Kurt • 03:16.426
it
Ben • 03:16.576
i
Kurt • 03:16.676
should
Ben • 03:16.826
think
Kurt • 03:16.876
be neat
Ben • 03:16.976
it's just and like
Kurt • 03:17.276
tidy.
Ben • 03:17.376
yeah it's like a thing that it's it we care a lot about craft and um like i think all the people in shopify uh inside and and like in the community um that's that's like one of the things that's part of the partner world that like really draw draws us to here and kind of like binds us together and a reason that i love this community and a year ago ai models got really great and Pretty soon, I found myself having more fun in a CLI than I did in our editor.
Kurt • 03:46.968
Me
Ben • 03:47.018
And
Kurt • 03:47.368
too.
Ben • 03:47.418
it would be more fun to just type in this little thing. Wow. Oh my gosh, what can I do here? This is crazy. And all I was speaking was English. I wasn't even reading the code.
Kurt • 03:55.636
I stopped using the theme editor this year. I use... It's all CLI now.
Ben • 04:00.386
I think not and not everybody not my mom,
Kurt • 04:02.886
Right, yeah,
Ben • 04:03.186
you
Kurt • 04:03.336
it's like
Ben • 04:03.486
know or whatever if
Kurt • 04:03.986
you need to be real technical for that workflow to work.
Ben • 04:06.586
you have to type CD into a thing we can probably do better because there are people who are starting their businesses every day like a hundred thousand something people starting their business on Shopify and uh you might know pottery it might be amazing at pottery but you're like the internet you know that doesn't mean that you're like don't have a vision for what you want your home on the web to be right you you care very deeply about this and so we've you know toby's always said like the future is already here it's just not evenly distributed not
Kurt • 04:37.434
The game
Ben • 04:37.834
it's
Kurt • 04:37.884
gets the
Ben • 04:38.184
never
Kurt • 04:38.234
quote.
Ben • 04:38.384
been more true than like february of this year when we're playing with with cli's and building all these things and like oh my gosh we got to get this in the hands of everybody and now is the time for us to like go scorched earth on this thing fix every problem we've ever had and create like a whole new foundation so that we can be getting these people like ready for the next era and it is going to be a wild ride because we literally rebuilt everything from scratch and so that was that was crazy
Kurt • 05:08.660
there's a paradigm shift that occurs here that i want to spell out for people in the world of software development as software engineers in the last two years we have all gone through some kind of existential crisis as we all slowly accepted the models are really good for me it was like when this summer when the rogue hacking agent things start that was the indicator in the past you know two years ago you could be like oh it's not good enough you cannot not true anymore is like coding essentially is a solved problem for AI so that's where we're at like that is it feels like that's informing the vision here you know top down from Toby
Ben • 05:43.096
i think everybody it wasn't even like a from toby it was like everybody was just like yep obviously you know i at dot dev you mentioned i i i talked there and the very first question i asked was like how many of you guys are writing code by hand right or actually that's the opposite how many of you use models everybody's hands are up how are you using it for 100 Most of the room's hands were up 100% of code. So that's not actually the value you bring. You bring a ton of value. That's not the value. It was never about typing keys in a keyboard.
Kurt • 06:10.268
That brings us up to speed to what makes this possible.
Ben • 06:13.300
back when i started my career as a designer i worked at this firm called bruce mount and we would have these like white boards these like cort boards and we would pin up like all of the pages we'd print off the websites like from a printer and we'd pin them up and we'd all stand back and we'd look at the thing cohesively and then we would take our sharpies and we'd like sharpie up the thing and then we go back to photoshop and we go you know we'll twiddle around um and that was like the only way we could see the whole thing click and it just felt like all right if we're going to do this like let's freaking do it and see like i think being able to bring that to people there's something about shopify like you you're learning about commerce as you're onboarding you're learning about a gift card you're learning what a SKU is a variant right like when you're starting a business there's you just know pottery you just know how to make a pot or whatever i'll keep using that example that doesn't mean you know logistics and operations and warehousing and order routing rules and all these things let alone that you have these templates and these multiple resources mapped into these templates and all this stuff so we wanted you to just be able to like see this is my store this is my whole this is the whole thing this is this is my to-do list of stuff to design and as i go and do these prompts there's ramifications that can happen i can like edit we had so many problems in the past with the editor like oh i'm editing the header here well do you realize that the header is actually editing over there too you know and so now we're able to actually show you in one place what is happening and you can see when your changes are local to something or when they're actually global changes and you can you can say hey you know i'm going to work on this over here i'm going to get sidekick to work on this over here and so you're like vibe coding with sidekick um but in a visual medium that is trying to feel like that that tactility that i had like when i was starting my career
Kurt • 07:59.188
that UI for Canvas for our alternative theme editor experience is an artboard like I in the theme editor was a web browser view right
Ben • 08:08.288
Yeah
Kurt • 08:08.588
and that's it was a responsive web browser view cool this canvas that's an art board where it is it's like you know i used to i would take like sometimes take full page screenshots of something so i could just like see the whole thing now this is that's what i get out of this i can see the entire page in an art board view and so i have kind of like a holistic overview visually of my shopify store of my online store experience in canvas before i even edited or touched anything that's the first thing you see and i went like as soon as i saw that i was like this is just valuable on its own just
Ben • 08:43.030
Yeah.
Kurt • 08:43.430
for that having that overview built within shopify um and i love that it came you know i also a big agency world years ago before i discovered shopify and yeah i mean that was how you did things it collaborated because it made sense and so seeing that applied here and hearing where it came from oh like no wonder i appreciate this thing um but then for for The changes continue there like once I is I zoom, you know I'm looking at it. It's got my home page and I zoom in and I see my hero image and I want to change something about my headline. In the past, I'm going to click it and I'm editing settings in the theme settings of the theme editor. You know, like this thing looks like a settings pane in Windows 11 or something, right? What is different in Canvas?
Ben • 09:30.792
you wouldn't believe how hard everybody was like why don't you just freaking click on text in the editor and change it in the editor you don't know how hard it is because we had we had all this these these things wired up up to make that possible you would have to like click it has to round trip back to our infrastructure to like render on the server to come back to here you have to have a setting to have it connected well not everything is a setting so like now you don't know when it's text and when it's not so one of the things that we did was we said what if we just completely change the architecture of this thing We're going to have the entire thing rendered client side. So all the stuff renders locally. what's really key for that is that we had no way before to actually know like where is this thing coming from sometimes it's a setting great sometimes it's like a locales file sometimes it's like just hard-coded in in a p tag or span or something and so uh we made this thing like why are all text settings because don't you also want to like translate them all and don't you actually want them all like connected together and don't you want so uh so one of the things we do with our new theme architecture now we will be very short right now we're not supporting themes for the theme store but that should come in like days or you know hopefully soon but we're trying to support all themes but we also made a whole new theme architecture that's like liquid-based which i talked about at dot dev a few months ago and one of the things that we're doing with that one is is making some new opinions on like how you should use settings and where for for text for example our now opinion is have every single piece of text in a locales file or coming from a resource like product.title How do we how do we do that? Well, you can just write it in the things directly doesn't have to be connected to any setting. And because of this new way that we've architected the renderer in the browser, we actually are writing all liquid in JavaScript, there's like a new way of rendering, you know, like all of internally, it's like all of your liquid is rendered through Ruby or Rust now and but we in the browser are actually able to render it with with javascript one of the things that lets us do is we actually leverage our like ast which which tells us like the tree of where everything is to to attach source maps to say anything you click on we can tell you you know it's yes it's in this block or template but the template's actually importing from this block which is importing from the snippet which is importing from this locales file and we can go where is it actually editing and so if you hard coded it in the p tag or you have it in a locales file or if you have it in a settings we can actually now put it there and you can like predictably know and and edit all the text and we can update it real time and before updating it real time like was a real challenge I think the thing with this is we launched a pretty bare bones you could start to use for real, but clearly we're not at the thing that everybody can start to use for real for that person who's like starting their business today and is in like one of the most vulnerable. you know points and of of their life if they're starting quitting a job and like going all in on a new business i want to give them like the least friction possible and the least extra things to have to learn like you're probably setting up a business number you're probably dealing with like taxes or something you know like you're you're ordering inventory you're like dollars stretched in i want to give you like the fewest things needed to be able to get your business online in a way that you go oh my god this part went great and so that's what we were able to come out with was like this feels great now where um and and then like how do we build the the the tightest sort of infrastructure and the fewest moving parts of the system design of this thing is really good so that we aren't don't get caught ourselves in another knot in the future because there's so much that we want to build this is like day one um but we first had to set ourselves up with a lot of groundwork to let the future go so much faster if you watch my twitter this has been a quiet year for me up until now um and that's why because we've been like just sort of rebuilding all these foundational pieces to now set us up to to go move at a very crazy pace
Kurt • 13:43.206
So it sounds like to me canvas is a theme that like We've got two theme editor experiences within the Shopify admin. Canvas is meant for, it is very visual and it is meant for people starting out on Shopify. It's like, this is your introduction to your store. So yeah, who's it for?
Ben • 14:02.612
who's it for now and who's who will it be for i think are are two questions um it's for anybody who's a little bit you know wants to totally redesign a site wants to just like play around is like tinkering and likes this stuff um is starting a store from scratch um and you know or is a user of lms is is like you and was already using cloud code to just do it and they're not really in the editor anymore any more great this should hopefully be just as good like or better i really hope better otherwise what are we doing here um and uh then there's also like why not just be the one editor why don't we just switch well guess what guys about most companies in the world are going to make half their revenue for the year in the next three months as if we're gonna change things on them and when they're like in the heat of it and dealing with bfc and focusing on filling orders and like making all the revenue there's also some folks on their team who are going to be thinking about next year and are going to be thinking about placing longer term bets and the thing i hear all the time is like when we ship something a little too late and they're like if i would have known this about this a little bit earlier i would have done things differently that happened for me with done i it it shipped a month after i released my headless site that we took like 18 months to build and i was like maybe i didn't need all these bells and whistles and maybe i should have used this and it would have actually helped me a lot um and so we want to get out there as soon as we can so that everybody could really start to see that stuff that's why we called it a research preview we don't really do that at Shopify very often but we we thought this is like just too much value to hold back and just keep baking um because we we have millions of people on here and they're all at different levels and they all have different things and i know that this can't work for everybody we don't support markets yet we don't support apps yet and there's a few other little limitations rolling
Kurt • 16:05.438
So it's available now, Canvas is available now, or should be, or is rolling out now?
Ben • 16:10.838
out yeah i
Kurt • 16:11.588
Okay,
Ben • 16:11.738
mean
Kurt • 16:11.838
rolling
Ben • 16:11.938
right
Kurt • 16:11.988
out
Ben • 16:12.138
now it's like 40 or something so it'll it'll
Kurt • 16:13.908
Okay.
Ben • 16:13.958
be like everybody in the coming days
Kurt • 16:16.258
Phase rollout will be on all plans.
Ben • 16:19.258
all plans right
Kurt • 16:20.458
And I don't, I'm in no way forced to use this. And if I start using it, I can go back to the theme editor, my traditional theme editor if I want.
Ben • 16:28.408
correct our
Kurt • 16:29.108
Okay.
Ben • 16:29.558
intention is to make this the default theme editor like this will be the only theme editor in time But there's a road for us to get there, right?
Kurt • 16:37.226
All right. What do we think on, that's a tough question. What do we think on timeline for that?
Ben • 16:42.176
It's impossible to know, but I think we're moving extremely quickly. I'm not going to say that we're going to be the only theme editor in the Q1 of next year, but I want to be at the place where most people are feeling pretty comfortable. They're using it. And I think if we do our jobs right, we're not going to be forcing anybody to do that. They're all going to just want to switch over. But there's a few things that we got to get right to be able to get there.
Kurt • 17:08.564
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Ben • 18:08.988
Yeah, or you double click and just type something or, you know, I think there's still there's still. i think for a lot of things telling sidekick is actually just so fun and like if you i'd build stuff on the side and i work with claude and i work with chat gbt or codex or whatever and and like i do the remote thing and i'm like texting my mac mini from my phone and then i come home and i have like a new app built and there's like all these crazy you know like it's it's actually just so fun to do that um and so for a lot of things now this like way of declaratively doing it of telling it the goal that you want it to get to and that that it just finding its way to that is is kind of amazing and you can remove like most most things to get there and I think that leads to a much simpler user experience but there's some things that are that's extremely frustrating for like if I want to re-edit some text to like say like you know new arrivals instead of like latest in or something for a headline saying can you rename this and then it takes like 20 seconds for it to type some text that you just had to type to it is extremely annoying um
Kurt • 19:09.508
Okay.
Ben • 19:10.008
and so that's where we had what we call like imperative edits so there's still a place for settings there's still a place for rich text editing there's still going to be a place for like um you know changing your images on your site all that content content and right i think is are things where you already know what you want you already want to type this thing you could say psychic rewrite my whole homepage or you just want to change your headline you should just be able to do that and those things because of the way we did it don't actually have to go through psychic at all they just save directly into the code but code is now the source of truth and so that's been like the and the place where it all is for anybody who was building themes 15 years ago like me like we're actually back to that experience it's not too different it's just that you are telling somebody else to go and do it and that person is a robot you know um so it's it's more like that workflow um and uh but yes we still have settings we still have those things and the way we think about settings now if you've used figma or something like that with like components you'll usually have like two or three variants of something where you'll have a button and you'll have like a primary button like an outline button where you'll have text where there's like a heading and like a body and like a you know you you usually only have like two or three settings or like uh like things that are like variants of the thing because that's how a design system works you have like a set of rules you kind of design it up that's your brand you want to lock it in and then that's it and what we had in the past with horizon and stuff which became very flexible but it also meant that there's like some blocks had like 30 settings and it's like again you're like i know potter i'm like trying to run my business i'm not trying to like learn all this stuff this map of how to use my thing just to become productive um and so we the the i think we found this like much simpler way to do all that where like actually for most of the time you're probably just going to want to talk to sidekick and you might want to explore multiple things um no
Kurt • 21:04.530
I always thought I wanted more theme settings like more and more and more right up until I experienced Horizon and then I was like all right we get peak theme settings here here
Ben • 21:14.330
we're
Kurt • 21:14.430
they it
Ben • 21:14.580
peak
Kurt • 21:14.630
it was intense
Ben • 21:15.860
i i think that was i'm like glad that ai hit at that time because i think we looked at it and we're like there is a lot that you can do here now and i don't and what does this leave for the rest of the world what does this leave for the partner community i don't know like beyond horizon how much everybody could have done different remixes of things but all of our free themes from the horizon era are it's and they also lock you into a lot of things like if you want to have a button beside another button what do you do or do you have another button setting or do you have to have a group block that now has two blocks in it like it's just a much simpler paradigm for developers this has always been simpler the problem is it's you have to learn code well now everybody knows code it's called english right and so uh or any language um and and uh these machines will just go and do it for you so um so yeah it's a crazy it's a crazy new world
Kurt • 22:24.456
What does this still work with GitHub? Can I still sync everything into GitHub or no?
Ben • 22:32.196
yes but um github is just a syncing mechanism i
Kurt • 22:36.746
Yeah.
Ben • 22:37.096
it's a whole other thing to get on but i i also want to go scorched earth there and totally redo that because i think that whole workflow could be a lot more flexible a lot easier like there's a lot of people doing a lot of crazy hacky things on the outside of it to to make that work for us um internally we don't even really use it we have our own uh github action workflows that then use the cli to push into and so um i think like we got to make github a lot better and frankly i think for larger merchants that's one of the keys uh to making canvas uh available to them because github has a lot of things like um workflows right like there's like a pull request and you have to approve the pull request to get it merged in the main
Kurt • 23:19.200
Yeah, so we could do like automated. or enforced you know code checks you essentially like a qa process can get layered in and we get you like versioned backups that's the the advantage why especially like in an agency where you're supporting client merchants that you want that that github functionality
Ben • 23:40.900
so you're actually you're getting at so yes 100 and inside canvas actually we one of the things below it is this whole virtual file system and we actually have a sort of get implementation and so now one of the things we've never had is autosave now we have autosave you don't actually save your changes you just work well what if i run rollback well we just version history everything we have a little clock icon you click on Nice. the clock you can scroll back and then you can just restore any past checkpoint um so that's like a really crazy thing that we have in it and it just works with with um just uses git under the hood um and then when you hit publish you're going live you're pushing those changes live but otherwise you can just like work and then leave um and that lets sidekick work on it while you're not working on it so you can tell sidekick to rebuild your site you can close your laptop on top you can go have lunch you can come back you can open it up and psychic will just still be building um or be done you know um and uh and and you can go and say oh i didn't really like what it did there and you can just go check the version history there um but what you're seeing and you're totally getting it the correct thing we already do have we use theme check psychic actually uses our cli under the hood so we have theme check that runs like linters and and um like checks to make sure that everything's actually valid but if it did screw up and hallucinate on something when you try and publish it won't let you and we have a little fix with sidekick button you click that button it prompts sidekick with the errors and psychic goes oh okay
Kurt • 25:02.596
So at hand, like all these processes that a developer would have to think through and implement on their own, this is baked into it. So me as a merchant, I never have to think about it like the guardrails, it is set up as a coding agent the same way, you know, a big boy dev would do it.
Ben • 25:18.146
that's that's like a good developer experience is a good agent experience and so you if you make these things verifiable if you give it like all the tools to be able to check its work and do these things i'm like this is like so exciting for me because it's
Kurt • 25:29.848
This
Ben • 25:30.148
the the
Kurt • 25:30.248
is music to thing my ears.
Ben • 25:30.948
that i wanted 15 years ago you know i'm like oh we got to invest in the dx it's like oh yeah but these merchants need these features they're not developers blah blah blah like now it's everybody's a developer so we so our goal is like let's make the best freaking developer experience out there possible i think um no timelines or roadmaps but i will like spill the tea on some things for people who are listening that are uh as as nerdy as uh you would have to be to follow along with this convo i'll go so far um we i i really want to be able to support um you know extensibility through our linting as well i think that there's like a huge amount of opportunity for you to keep sidekick on the right guardrails if you can give it things like um you can sort of extend our theme check to be you know add your own sort of sets of rules to that i do this with my own workflow through oxlent and stuff like that um There is like, as I said, approval workflows like I think are going to be a key to be able to make this thing accessible to merchants. You mentioned I'm a merchant, I have a. a fairly large business on the side of this not on the side but like Kotn is my you know what i spent like a decade doing before coming to shopify i'm still involved with that and like i knew canvas was happening and and we hired an agency and i was like this is the agency go build this thing and i can't put them on canvas yet because we're going to go spend a ton of money with an agency and i need it this thing to be like rock solid and as much as i love the interns at Kotn i don't know if i want to give them the keys to say go edit all the code across my whole site so who's it for it's like for people who are like trusting that everybody on the team is like able to go and change any of the code on the site who's it not for people who don't want everybody on the team to go and edit the code on their site but we can solve this because we have these solutions already we have pull requests we have github we have like linters right we have design systems that we can say this is you're actually not allowed to make it that color of purple it can only be this color of purple these are things that you can already do in a developer's workflow they've just never been accessible to average people and like now that is so easy for us to solve so that's that's kind of like where we see things going and how we make this possible for every merchant to be able to get in there is like say look we want to give we want to let you Give your team members as much autonomy as you want to give them. And we want to let you have the right guardrails around this thing to keep it on track and to make sure that your brand stays your brand and like it looks beautiful and the way that you crafted it to be so that the entrepreneurs who are building all these businesses just like feel like they have the right tools and empowerment to like keep their vision of their brand, you know, expressed online in the best possible way.
Kurt • 28:09.028
What about there's always going to be partners or people that go, OK, you will see something you see an AI do something really impressive and then you go, wow, that worked. Crap, I just took my job. I don't think that's the case anymore. You know, I think these are. I think these are tools. I don't think they're taking people's jobs in the same way that a power drill did not take a carpenter's job. It just enabled them to work faster.
Ben • 28:34.676
That's right.
Kurt • 28:35.476
That's how I view it.
Ben • 28:36.676
Yeah,
Kurt • 28:36.776
But how do you address it? What do you say to that concern?
Ben • 28:39.576
I think it's absolutely taking people's tasks. I think I think your tasks are changing now. You don't do the same job you did. And what we found through building this is that we've been able to build some like amazing things or like engineers on our team have been able to build some like incredible things that were absolutely impossible before. and but then like i couldn't build what they were building well why not well because they asked the right questions of the thing they had been there they had trodden that path they are now the director of their own team and and that has unlocked them to do just insane work and the way i think about this is that like if you hold scope and time as constant then now like the the good enough of today is the best of my entire life from one year ago, right? It's the best thing I could have ever imagined is now what is good enough. and that's really what we want to get to what was shipping was good enough now good enough what we just shipped with canvas is that i couldn't have even dreamed about that a year ago and now i'm like this this is like just the beginning just the day one and i think that's the same for everybody out there that's why like with Kotn i just spent a lot of money on an agency because you know what they drive so much value they are like they have judgment they have taste they've been there before they know
Kurt • 29:59.438
experience
Ben • 29:59.588
what great looks like on the web that's we're a pretty big business we're like a like a you know mid or middle eight figure business it's like a we got to get this thing right i don't want to save a couple bucks so that i screw like millions of dollars so i want the best people in the world building this thing and telling us how it should be And that is a huge amount of value. The value was never in the code. It was never writing the code. You can get anybody in the world to write code for you. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. It doesn't really matter. The value is in the business outcome. And the business outcomes are better if you can work with these people who've been there before that know what calls to make. and there's incredible people in the community who've been through thousands of builds like thousands and they just know like this is not going to work for you like this is going to make you more money and now they can make those decisions 100 times faster than they could before maybe more right and they can get that they can just wish those things into being and then they're like just there at basically the pace of them saying it and so the crazy thing is i actually think that the the these people had a it was a zero or one is you have these skills or you didn't have these skills and now I think it's that everybody's at a one and these people are at 100 these people are like just absolutely multiplied and i think their value is more valuable than ever your the taste and judgment that they have to be able to create great experiences is critical and people are now having to make more decisions than ever because you're having to talk to these freaking agents to make these calls all the time and that's really fatiguing and so if you can have somebody who can like take that off and actually go and solve it and get it to you faster well it's worth a ton of money if you can deliver me like the build that we did with Commerce-UI is the agency we hired for Kotn phenomenal agency they
Kurt • 31:47.486
Yeah, they did Lady Gaga's site. They were on
Ben • 31:49.386
yeah
Kurt • 31:49.486
the show.
Ben • 31:49.636
i think they're we're shipping we're shipping the Kotn one i think like now ish um that would that was like three months for them and to total rebuild we are headless with the craziest setup like with so many services and stuff and now they're like just brought it all native onto shopify way better design absolutely beautiful polish everything up able to do it in like four months that's like crazy
Kurt • 32:10.498
It's
Ben • 32:10.748
that's
Kurt • 32:10.998
yeah,
Ben • 32:11.248
like
Kurt • 32:11.348
the timeline, the
Ben • 32:12.948
and
Kurt • 32:13.248
speed
Ben • 32:13.548
ship
Kurt • 32:13.648
at
Ben • 32:13.798
it
Kurt • 32:13.898
which
Ben • 32:13.948
and
Kurt • 32:14.098
you can
Ben • 32:14.398
ship
Kurt • 32:14.448
execute
Ben • 32:14.598
it in
Kurt • 32:14.798
now.
Ben • 32:14.848
october the most important month you know i'm like one of like one of the three most important months like this is psychotic it would only be possible because of ages and like and now more than ever i'm like yes please take this thing and go and do it and i'm leaving canvas so i know it's not going to take the jobs like they're more valuable like that's so i'm i actually think this is like the there's this thing i think it's jevin's paradox like um the paradox is you make these things more approachable the demand actually goes up it doesn't go down
Kurt • 32:45.764
That's what we're seeing.
Ben • 32:46.914
so it's the same thing with coders now it's more in demand than ever there's more software developers than ever we're gonna have a lot more businesses maybe the businesses will have smaller fewer people in them but they're going to be more successful they're going to be more empowered and that's like what Shopify is all about so I think this is like the best possible era to be in Shopify except for next year which will be even better like it's just only going up
Kurt • 33:09.636
This episode's brought to you by Promo Party. Full disclosure, that's my app. We made it. So here's a Black Friday tip. Skip the 20% off. I know you're thinking about just doing 20% off again. Offer a free gift instead. Free gift when customers spend about double whatever your average order value is. So we checked 300,000 holiday orders. One store ran spend 50, get a free gift three years straight. Their usual order? About 50 bucks. Their gift order's around 100 every year. PromoParty does exactly this. You set the threshold, pick the gift, and then it drops into the cart automatically. A progress bar shows every shopper how close they are so they keep adding to increase that cart size. Bigger orders without slashing prices or leaking discount codes. Search PromoParty in the Shopify app store. Install it free. and have your Black Friday gift running this week. I'm coming away from this genuinely excited about what the future holds. I'm like, man, next year is going to be my best year ever. This year has been my best year ever in business.
Ben • 34:19.224
Next year will be better than this.
Kurt • 34:21.604
and it it is because of this ai revolution it is because i have hitched my cart to the right horse with shopify of
Ben • 34:27.354
and like there's gonna be some people groaning and moaning about this i i because
Kurt • 34:31.004
course yes
Ben • 34:31.254
it's because it's not all everybody all at once on the same smooth path it's crazy out there like it's a really bumpy ride and there's a lot of change that's happening
Kurt • 34:39.604
and like everybody's in different places with adopting it and their experience and like i went through i mean i went through a period of burnout this year and it was from this change and trying to adapt to it and now i'm on the other side of it and i'm like wow i'm you know i'm glad i went through that because now i feel like i got shot out of a cannon i mean i am like supercharged and we have leaned fully into agentic workflows for everything and got the whole team to adopt it and what you're telling me and the stuff you did you're confirming all these things we're discovering on our own through experience and i'm going like yes yes yes you're
Ben • 35:11.830
i'm going to hit the partner's head on because i think you could be like yeah easy for you to say but why doesn't canvas support apps and why don't you guys support third-party
Kurt • 35:18.330
right i'm yes come
Ben • 35:19.680
so sorry i really wanted to get them earlier i hated that we launched without them we were so close
Kurt • 35:24.830
on i thought i could just do all this for us Of course,
Ben • 35:26.500
it
Kurt • 35:26.650
you just
Ben • 35:26.750
was knock it
Kurt • 35:27.050
it out,
Ben • 35:27.200
was
Kurt • 35:27.350
man.
Ben • 35:27.500
a few more prompts but but here's the thing we it does work with third-party themes but there were some rendering issues that are our fault And right now, third-party themes have to go, the theme developers have to do all the support requests. So you go and use this cool tool that Shopify is hyping up and then it doesn't render properly and then you email the person and they're hamstrung. I can fix that. I don't want that to be your fault. So we needed like a couple more weeks to bake that. It's coming. That's going to maybe by the time the podcast is out, I don't know. third-party themes will absolutely come apps also i saw we had prototypes as early as september that were like oh nice we have it working but there are a few ux things to figure out one of the biggest challenging things with canvas was you only do this type of a reset like once every 15 years so it is very important for us to make sure that we don't just cargo cult all the old decisions into this editor and just shove everything in there because we're just moving from one mess to another mess i love our old error it's doing phenomenal it's the best thing in the world and yet i know that we can make something 100 times better than that and so
Kurt • 36:34.458
Yeah, I was going to say, I really don't mind the editor.
Ben • 36:37.008
we don't and hey we're the i think like what what's bad like shopify obviously has gotten us this far it's like i'm biased but i think it's the best e-commerce platform in the world i'm on a podcast about it But
Kurt • 36:50.180
I'm just going to go ahead and agree with you.
Ben • 36:52.930
for sure everything can be so much better. Like we have the tools now to be able to make things so much better. So it wasn't the – it's, oh, you could just add this. It's the decision of adding that. Now I can't really remove it without creating a lot of thrash, without creating a lot of confusion. And so – it it's finding the right patterns and ways to be able to to do things that is actually the slower harder part now um versus building it and once you've figured it out we've got it and so apps are very close third party is very close just like some more you know we as i said we we rebuilt everything from scratch so there was a few parts that were like a little bit harder to build and not you can't just one shot it with a prompt um
Kurt • 37:36.076
No,
Ben • 37:36.226
so
Kurt • 37:36.526
I empathize like the software development. development we're doing is child's play compared to the platform that we're building on trying to evolve itself, right?
Ben • 37:46.146
and like our standard is we break zero sites now that's like the we cannot knowingly ship something if it's going to create a breaking change the promise that toby made originally with liquid and that we've always been held up to was store number one snow devil cannot change with anything we do it must run as it did or better forever and so we've only made it faster so we will never make it breaking change we support everything in liquid that means everything that we do for the platform in terms of what apis you can use and which ways you can build your stores i'm going to support for eternity and unfortunately that's the thing that makes things slow but it's also hopefully the trust that we can build with community to know that that's why they should take a bet on Shopify and why should I do this hosted thing because you know what's where that's not true frankly is like my experience in headless whereas updating dependencies like every freaking week and in the time from me starting the build to finishing the build like we went through the world of like react didn't have hooks now has hooks we were like class components to functional components it was like everything was changing all the time and we've seen like time after time of these builds that are like oh that was like two years ago's convention of reddit maybe some of that stuff doesn't matter as much anymore with agents but like man again the pottery maker like as if he cares like
Kurt • 39:09.492
Yeah.
Ben • 39:09.592
he doesn't want to be my site looks beautiful why would it ever break dependencies blah blah blah version changes they doesn't care right so that's that's like our commitment and so again just snow devil you can go find it i think snow devil.shopify.com or snow devil.com i don't know uh still running still the exact same code from 23 years ago uh and it's faster than ever now um and so and we're just going to keep making it better
Kurt • 39:34.902
Assuming somewhat like Canvas is rolled out, it's in everybody's store. Give me one thing for a merchant to try.
Ben • 39:44.036
people say what do i prompt what do i actually do with this thing you know what's really fun is uh i was writing these like crazy prompts at the beginning and then this guy tom on my team was like i just write redesign my store and then you know it's like this really vague prompt where then it's like well what do you want it to be and it starts to ask you and so then you're kind of like interviewing and it's kind of like asking you these different things try something like really ambitious and fun and really just push it one of the things is you don't have to ship it because you
Kurt • 40:13.072
So
Ben • 40:13.222
know what's so nice you'll invest
Kurt • 40:13.972
there's
Ben • 40:14.072
just
Kurt • 40:14.272
no cost 10 minutes of time.
Ben • 40:15.322
about another one it's fine and so um just go have a lot of fun with it and try and do things you never could have done before and just try and be more creative be more ambitious like push your stuff way further i think you're going to be surprised with what you can do i i like uh discovered myself little things that are so crazy where i was like working on a new theme and i'm like yeah but can you make the fonts a little bit more modern it's like oh cool i'm gonna go use the ones that you approved from last from last week i said you
Kurt • 40:40.992
Oh,
Ben • 40:41.042
can do that it's apparently
Kurt • 40:41.592
got a memory.
Ben • 40:42.042
i knew it did i knew it had a memory i like i'm working building a system but i'm like you remembered that i had that fun i was like okay and it was custom fonts it wasn't like using you know helvetica or something it was like custom fonts that i uploaded to this site that i like did these and i was like wait can you just do my approved colors palettes too he's like of course oh my gosh this is incredible
Kurt • 41:04.516
And this is all like stuff we had to figure out on our own and this is just like, you know, anybody could get this baked in.
Ben • 41:11.166
and then you know i'm like we as devs we have things like storybook.js and stuff and i was like man i wish there was a way for me to like see everything on my site hey sidekick can you build me a page that shows me every component of my entire site sure oh of course okay cool now I have a little design system review template that I look to see every single component that on my thing I'm like these look like they're not really aligned psychic can you make a 12 column grid overlay that shows me what the grid system is that I use for my site so I can spot to see where of course and i had this little toggle i should screen share but i like add little toggle that overlays the whole grid system and i was like oh that's actually it looks like it's aligned but it's not quite aligned and that was always the thing as a designer that bugged me when it's like one pixel off i'm
Kurt • 41:51.764
Yeah.
Ben • 41:52.214
like oh make everything align to the grid oh my gosh this is phenomenal and i'd spend like an hour on a hero just making the perfect thing and then i'd be like now build the rest of the page and these systems are phenomenal pattern matchers they just like hey they they are there to help you you know it's kind of a bit be careful what you wish for scenario but like if you've got the right patterns in there and this is why we are sweating the details so much on like the new architecture and the right base base system because we want to make the right patterns for psychic to then like grab on to and replicate out elsewhere but i made this hero that i absolutely loved and i'm like kids you just build the rest of the page now and it's like oh i didn't realize you wanted to be good okay You like it just made the thing exactly the way I wanted it. I'm like can you do that for all the other templates we haven't worked on makes a really cool 404 page and made a really cool gift card page like the pages i never would have gotten to otherwise and i would have just left whatever it's 404 who cares like now get to be these fun crazy experiences um because like i have this design partner that's able to go and do it and never is tired and never you know like so um anyway i sold i said a lot of things in there but just go play like the thing i would say to everybody's go make hit the new button and start just playing and just have a lot of fun and just start to see This is now hopefully a lot easier to get into and just start messing with it and see like how far you can go.
Kurt • 43:31.444
It is it's a fun experience. And I think, you know, if you're like, oh, well, I tried, you know, I tried something like this two years ago and it didn't work. This is an entirely different world. Try it. Challenge it. What's the thing you think it can't do? Give it that task. I bet it doesn't.
Ben • 43:44.794
Yeah.
Kurt • 43:45.844
That's that would be my challenge to listeners today who have not experienced Canvas yet. But a great tool. And I'm I'm excited to see where this goes. Ben Sehl, where can we learn more about Canvas? Where can we learn more about you?
A • 43:58.476
good question probably twitter is the easiest one or x uh x.com slash benjamin sale i'm on there if you're uh in the shot by community and inactive you can find me there and tweet at me i try and get back to everybody i can um or also just you know harass me until i do um and then otherwise canvas is rolling out to everybody and should be there in the coming days um so probably by the time you see this it's in it's in your admin go to online store click the little new button um and and start it or you can hit the three dots and say try in canvas um and uh you know i did some tweets about it too so um yeah just go play with it and um let me know what you think we're just trying to make it better and shipping every week and uh really dying to hear feedback from the community and show me what you built i would love to see that more than anything is just seeing the crazy things people were able to build so yeah
Kurt • 44:48.628
Ben Sehl leading online store Shopify. Thank you so much.
Ben • 44:51.728
Thank you, Kurt.