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. Lütke, a former software engineer at Algonquin College, was the company’s CEO until 1 February 2019.
Weinand was Shopify’s COO until July 2019; he resigned to pursue other projects. Shopify has been profitable since 2015.
In 2006, Shopify launched its own platform as a service, allowing anyone to create an online store with the company’s tools. In 2012, Shopify announced that it had processed over $3 billion in total sales through its platform.
In 2013 it launched POS (point of sale) capabilities for retailers, and in 2014 it introduced a mobile commerce platform. In 2015, Shopify acquired Boltmade (a web design agency) and PayStack (a Nigerian payment gateway).
In 2016, Shopify announced that it was expanding its services to include an enterprise-level product called Shopify Plus. This product is aimed at larger businesses with more complex needs. In 2019, Shopify acquired Tobe Agency, an ecommerce design and development agency based in Toronto.
Shopify has been profitable since 2015. In 2019, it reported a net income of $136 million on revenues of $1.58 billion. This represents a net margin of 8.6%.
