Black Friday and Christmas are close, and getting an online store ready takes far more than products and promotions. The homepage banner changes, the product display gets updated, a new promo section goes in, and once the sale ends, the whole page is reworked for the next launch. An AI assistant for ecommerce can take a lot of that repetitive work off your plate. Athena, the AI operations agent built into Shoplazza, already covers store design, product management and marketing. Its latest update adds AI online store design: you describe the change in chat, and Athena builds or edits the page inside your existing theme.
To see why this update matters, it helps to look at what a store refresh actually involves for most sellers.
Say you want a promo section on your homepage. First you dig through your theme looking for a card template that fits. If none does, you brief a developer, and by the time the work comes back, the sale date is already close. Even changing one button color means finding the right section, opening its settings panel and scanning a long list of options. When the sale ends, those sections have to be hidden or restored, and the whole cycle starts again for the next campaign.
None of these tasks is hard on its own. The trouble is that they repeat, and they use up time you would rather spend on sourcing products, running ads and talking to customers.
The update focuses on four areas, and each one below comes with a sample prompt you can adapt for your own store.
Black Friday is coming, and you want a countdown above your popular products to create a limited-time feel. Your theme has no template for it. Describe what you want:
"Add a Black Friday countdown card above the popular products list on the homepage. Title it BLACK FRIDAY SALES, match the current theme’s style, and make the limited-time offer stand out."
Athena builds a custom theme card from that description. A product comparison table or a brand highlights block works the same way. The card is not a one-off result, and a few details make it reusable:
For newer sellers, this means you do not need to learn how a theme is structured or wait for a developer’s schedule. If you can describe the section, you can have it.
Sometimes the idea does not come from you. A designer sends over a mockup for a campaign section, or you spot a color palette and layout you like on another store. Send the image to Athena along with your requirements:
"Use this mockup to build a TOP OFFERS section on the homepage. Make three cards, each one showing a single product and linking to its product page. Match the colors, layout, buttons and the red discount badge in the top right corner exactly. Don’t change the style."
Athena reads the layout, colors and content structure in the image, then fills the card with real products from your store. A few things are worth knowing before you try it:
Going from seeing a good design to having it in your own store no longer requires design or coding skills.If you have a reference image you want to try, log in to your Shoplazza admin and send it to Athena.
Day to day, most store work is small adjustments rather than new sections. Changing a button color or a layout used to mean finding the section, opening the settings panel, locating the right option and editing each one by hand. Now you can open Athena inside the theme editor, select the area you want to change and say what you want. For example, after selecting the NEW IN carousel on your homepage:
"Restyle the NEW IN carousel to match the theme’s minimal editorial look. Use an off-white background and remove the rounded corners, discount pills and white floating cards. Show product names and prices as small plain text, left-aligned under each image, with no containers or shadows. Move the arrows to the right of the title, on the same line as NEW IN."
Here is how Athena handles an edit like this:
The old routine of locating, opening, searching and editing one setting at a time is replaced by describing the result you want. In practice, the theme editor turns into an interface you can talk to.
A good-looking page is only the first step. It also has to show your real products clearly and make the case for buying them.
Take a home furnishing seller targeting the US market. They have just listed a batch of sofas, coffee tables and floor lamps, and they want to feature them on the homepage while showing shoppers how the pieces look together in a real living room. They could tell Athena:
"Below the Popular products section on the homepage, create a card with an image on the left and products on the right. Show the living room furniture products on the right, generate a living room scene image on the left using those products, and write the copy in English."
Athena works from the products and collection information already in your store. In this example, it does three things:
Shoplazza has spent years working in cross-border ecommerce, and Athena reflects that. Product visuals, marketing content and page design sit in one workflow, so each display card looks good and also serves a real sales goal.
The main worry for most merchants is not whether AI can do the work. It is whether a bad edit goes live before anyone can stop it.
Athena saves every design change to your theme draft first, so nothing touches the live store right away. You can preview the result, keep adjusting, or undo the parts you do not like, and publish only when you are happy with it. Athena handles the execution, and you stay in charge of the final result.
That also makes peak season easier to manage. You can add a promo card before the sale, hide the marketing section once it ends, and update the product display when new items arrive. These small, repeated design tasks can go to Athena, which leaves more of your time for product operations, campaigns and brand building.
From Black Friday to new product launches, and from small page tweaks to a full brand refresh, a store’s design needs keep changing. Athena’s new design capability covers four steps in that cycle: generating custom sections, building cards from a design reference, editing any selected area by chat, and creating scene displays from real products. Because every change is saved as a draft and published only after you confirm it, the process is faster and also easier to trust.
As a practical test of how an AI assistant for ecommerce can support AI online store design, pick one repetitive task from your next campaign, such as a promo banner or a product display. Then log in to your Shoplazza admin and describe the result you want to Athena.
It covers four things. Athena can build a custom theme card from a written description, and it can turn a design mockup or reference image into an editable card. You can also select an area in the theme editor and change it through chat. On top of that, Athena can use your product and collection information to generate scene images and copy in your target market’s language.
No. You describe the section, style or change you want in plain language, or send a reference image, and Athena builds or edits it for you. You do not need to find a template, write code or search through a settings panel. It is a good fit if you are newer to running a store and have no developer on hand.
The examples in this article follow a similar pattern. They say where the change goes on the page, what it should show, what style it should follow, and what to leave alone. When you are editing something that already exists, select that area in the theme editor first so Athena changes only that part. You can always add detail in follow-up messages.
No. All design changes are saved to your theme draft first, so your live store stays the same until you decide otherwise. You can preview the result, adjust it or undo it, then publish once you are satisfied.
Yes. Custom cards from Athena are saved in the "AI generated" group of your current theme, and you can add them to other pages whenever you need them. They are also kept after a theme upgrade, so a promo layout that worked well this season can come back for the next one.
Yes. When Athena builds a display card, it can write the marketing copy in the language of your target market. In the home furnishing example, the instruction asks for English copy, and Athena pairs it with a scene image and your real products. You can state the language you want in the instruction.