Shopify

Shopify is a Canadian e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario that develops computer software for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems.

Shopify was founded in 2004, and was initially based on earlier software written by its founders for their online snowboard store. The company reports that it has 200,000 merchants using its platform, with total gross merchandise volume exceeding $10 billion.

History

Shopify was founded in 2004 by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake after attempting to open Snowdevil, an online store for snowboarding equipment. Unsatisfied with the existing e-commerce products on the market, Lütke, a computer programmer by trade, decided to build his own.

Lütke used the open source web application framework Ruby on Rails to build Snowdevil's online store, and launched it after two months of development. The Snowdevil founders launched the platform as Shopify in June 2006.

In June 2009, Shopify launched an API platform and App Store. The API allows developers to create applications for Shopify online stores and then sell them on the Shopify App Store. Several companies have developed apps that integrate with the Shopify platform.