Hello there. Shopify launched Canvas so Sidekick can design a whole store from a chat, Analytics now lets you pin notes to your reports, and one seller says carrier adjustments nearly double their shipping bill. Friday for anyone who runs a store and wants the weekend quiet.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into:

• Shopify launched Canvas, a workspace where merchants design and redesign a store by chatting with Sidekick, rolling out over the coming days and not yet replacing the theme editor.
• Shopify Analytics now supports annotations, so you can record a campaign launch or supplier change right beside the report that shows the shift.
• One seller says nearly every shipment gets a carrier price adjustment that roughly doubles the label cost, even after auditing dimensions and weight.

SELL & CONVERT

🤖 Two stores report more AI-referred traffic that converts better. A Shopify founder says they and another store owner are both seeing a considerable rise in traffic from AI tools, with a higher purchase conversion than other sources. They also point to Adobe and McKinsey reports predicting a huge jump in AI agent shopping traffic, which we have not checked. They ask how others are getting ready for agentic shopping. The thread is a prompt to look at your own referrers.

🚚 A free pickup option keeps getting chosen by buyers who live far away. A seller offers pickup at craft-group locations that are not tied to the business address, so they listed those spots as free shipping options. Buyers who do not read closely end up on the cheapest option by default, and the seller then has to chase payment or eat the cost. They want standard postage preselected. The question is how to reorder the rates so the free option is not the default.

MONEY & OPS

📦 Carrier price adjustments are nearly doubling one seller's shipping cost. A seller says almost every shipment gets a price adjustment that works like a second charge. They already ran a full audit, changed shipping dimensions and checked dimensional weight, and still get hit. One adjustment cited a wrong package type, although the type is correct, and the dimensions and weight were lower than stated. They would pay someone to audit the shipping process.

🇪🇺 A free tool drafts GPSR paperwork for handmade sellers, with caveats. A community member built GPSR Kit after seeing small makers switch off EU shipping over paperwork. It produces a checklist, a written risk assessment, label and listing text and safety warnings in the languages you ship to. The author says it is not legal advice, does not replace an EU responsible person, and covers only jewelry, candles, home decor, adult clothing, bags and prints. Read the post before sharing your details.

🏬 Which multi-vendor app actually handles payouts and commissions? Someone planning a marketplace on Shopify asks which apps are practical once there are many sellers, products, orders and payouts. They care about vendor onboarding, commission tracking, order management and keeping the catalog organized. Nobody has a verified answer yet, but the thread is where replies about what people use, like and hate will pile up. Worth watching if marketplace payouts are on your roadmap.

STORE & TOOLS

🔎 Merchants miss the admin search bar that Shopify removed. Store owners say the always-visible search bar is gone from the admin, along with the dropdown that showed SKU, price and stock. One merchant adds that bulk editing lost its easy next-50 paging. A reply says Ctrl K on Windows or Cmd K on Mac opens global search, and points to the admin feedback form. The thread follows Shopify's recent admin redesign, where search now lives in the side navigation.

🧩 A B2B Flow variable throws an error until you type it by hand. A merchant building a Flow for new B2B orders picked the purchasing company's location ID from the variable list, then got an error saying the variable was invalid. A reply says to type the variable yourself with a capital P in PurchasingCompany. Another notes the field is missing on customer orders, so gate the step on the entity type. Check any Flow that sends company data to other systems.

🏷️ Free shipping for tagged customers can stack with discount codes. A developer asks how to give customers with a certain tag free shipping while still letting them use discount codes automatically. Replies say a Shopify Function can do it. One adds that if you create it as an automatic discount, set combinesWith for order and product discounts to true, or it will block any code the customer tries to stack with it. Useful for wholesale or loyalty tags.

🛒 A cart-protection widget disappears after the cart is emptied. A merchant using the Shipaid app says its checkbox shows in the cart drawer on the first add, but vanishes if the customer empties the cart and adds an item again. Replies say this pattern usually means the drawer markup is swapped without re-running the app's render hook. They suggest testing on the dedicated cart page and asking the app's support whether it re-initializes on cart updates.

SHIPPED

🎨 Canvas lets Sidekick design a whole store from a chat. Shopify introduced Canvas, a design surface where you pan across every page, zoom into details, click elements to edit or ask Sidekick to build. It renders the real store code with interactions and animations, and it rolls out over the coming days under Online Store, then Themes. At launch it skips third-party Theme Store themes, Markets, rollouts, translations, app blocks and embeds, and Shopify says it is not replacing the current theme editor.

📝 Analytics reports can now carry your own notes about why numbers moved. You can add annotations to supported time-series reports for moments like a campaign launch, creator mention, supplier change or promotion. Each has a title, description, date or range and a type, using auto-detected categories or your own. Annotations are shared with staff who have Reports permission and sit beside context from Shopify and installed apps, giving your team one shared history of what changed.