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 was founded in 2004 by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake after attempting to open Snowdevil, an online store for snowboarding equipment. Shopify launched in 2006. Lütke, Weinand, and Lake spent $100,000 and converted a small shop in Ottawa into what became Shopify’s first office.
In 2012, Shopify acquired Select Start Studios Inc., a design and development agency based in Toronto.
Shopify has been profitable since 2015. It is publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) with the symbol SHOP, and on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with the symbol SHOP.
Shopify is a platform for businesses of all sizes to create an online store. Shopify offers users a 14-day free trial, after which they are charged a monthly subscription fee ranging from $29 to $299, depending on the features they need for their business. Users can also choose to pay an additional 2% transaction fee on every sale made through their online store.
Is Shopify Only for Us?
The simple answer is no – Shopify is not just for businesses in the United States. While the company is headquartered in Canada and most of its employees are based there, Shopify is available to anyone in the world who wants to create an online store. There are currently over 175,000 active stores using Shopify from more than 150 countries.
