Swipe Right on Shopify’s AI?

While working with a new client who needed a simple landing page to collect data and pre-orders for their product, I decided to try out Shopify’s new foundation theme: Horizon.

Horizon is Shopify’s latest move into the AI space, a free theme that’s fully customizable using their new AI agent. Shopify is already known for its robust e-commerce infrastructure and powerful features, but from a designer’s perspective, their theme blocks were never very flexible.

Horizon changes that. It offers a blank canvas where you can add custom sections with any blocks you want, offering complete flexibility. The MVP of this experience? The Custom Section powered by AI. Just prompt what you need, and it designs the section for you, whatever you have in mind.

I’ll admit, starting with a completely blank canvas felt a bit intimidating. When working with Shopify’s premium themes, you usually get a clear layout and aesthetic upfront (thanks to demo stores), which helps you plan. But Horizon gave me 1,000 possibilities and suddenly, I wasn’t sure where to begin.

After some brainstorming and mental wireframing, I had a clear idea of what I wanted for the landing page. I explored the few built-in sections available in the theme but decided to try the AI-powered Custom Block to create a multi-column section with images.

Just like with any AI tool, prompting is everything. You have to be specific: Should it include hover animations? Should it become a slider on mobile? Are the image corners rounded? All these details need to go into your prompt to get exactly what you want.

I tested a few prompts and let me tell you, it delivered. Fast. I was amazed at how quickly it generated the exact section I described, down to the details. (And if anything was off, tweaking the original prompt was easy.) Once I had the structure, I edited the photos and text, and tested it on both mobile and desktop.

That’s when I noticed a glitch: swiping left on mobile caused the website’s container to disappear, leaving a large white margin at the end. I tried regenerating the section with an updated prompt to fix the issue, but the problem persisted, and some of the fixes even broke other sections on the site.

Despite the early promise, using Horizon felt a bit like beta testing in real time. What should’ve been a fast setup turned into hours of trial and error. It’s not that the concept doesn’t work. It does, but it needs refinement. The tool is powerful, but right now, it requires patience and a willingness to troubleshoot.

Shopify’s push into AI with Horizon is a solid step forward. But after using it, it’s clear the theme isn’t quite ready yet. The idea of prompting your way to a fully custom layout is compelling, and when it works, it works impressively fast.

Still, the glitches and limitations made the process more time-consuming than expected. It’s a good first effort, but not quite there. I’m looking forward to seeing how this evolves because the promise of designing flexible, beautiful pages without a developer is one worth chasing.

So, final thoughts?
Shopify has been at the top of their game in the e-commerce world for many years, so I’m sure they’ll be on top of their AI technology very soon. Right now, it does feel a bit early to jump in, mainly because of the glitches. (I spent more time trying to figure out a fix than actually setting up the website.)

Still, I’m excited about what this could offer for design in the near future. Being able to fully customize a Shopify theme without coding is a dream come true.

I guess the future is brAIght.