Shopify is a Canadian e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. It is also the name of its proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Shopify offers online retailers a suite of services “including payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools to simplify the process of running an online store for small merchants.
Shopify was founded in 2004 by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake after attempting to open Snowdevil, an online store for snowboarding equipment. Snowdevil was closed after two weeks because the founders realized that building a web store was more complicated than they thought. Lütke, Weinand, and Lake then decided to build their own software that would be easy to use.
Shopify was initially written in Ruby on Rails by Lütke. The first public version was launched on June 21, 2006. Shopify has been profitable since 2009. In 2010 it raised $7 million Series A funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital.
In 2012 it raised $15 million Series B funding from Felicis Ventures and Georgian Partners. Shopify went public on the New York Stock Exchange on May 21, 2015, under the symbol SHOP. On December 1st 2016 Shopify acquired warehouse and shipping software company Orderbot for $100 million.
In March 2006 Shopify launched an iPhone app called “Shopify Mobile”, allowing users to access their shop’s data from their iPhone.
Shopify earns revenue by taking a cut from each sale made through its platform. It also offers other services like payments, marketing, shipping, and customer engagement tools to simplify the process of running an online store for small merchants.
