Shopify is currently Canada’s most valuable company.
Here’s how a snowboarder built this $180 billion dollar company from scratch.
In 2004, Shopify emerged as an online marketplace that sold snowboards. The store was called Snowdevil at the time and didn’t even run on its own software.
In 2005, Snowdevil transitioned into an e-commerce platform when founders Tobias Lütke and Scott Lake were dissatisfied with all the existing e-commerce platforms on the market. This platform went on to become Shopify as we now know it.
Lutke and Lake programmed their e-commerce platform to feature tools that would make online selling easier, creating a whole new market of emerging online vendors.
The initial response to Shopify was greater than the duo had ever received on Snowdevil. Which is why they decided to abandon that idea and invested all their resources into Shopify.
In 2006, Lutke, Lake and their third partner and programmer Daniel Weinand officially launched Shopify as a set of tools that merchants could use to build their own websites. With features like automated inventory tracking, uploading images, adding tags, and grouping items along with payments through PayPal or credit cards, their platform was one of its kind when it came to e-commerce.
A year later, in 2007, Shopify was growing but at a slow rate, making around $8000 dollars a month with a very small customer base. This is when Shopify switched to a subscription-based payment plan, replacing the transaction fees they charged merchants on every sale. This was a turning point for the company.
That same year, a Toronto-based angel investor John Phillips wrote Shopify a $250,000 check that put their valuation at $3 million.
In 2009, Lütke and Weinand’s targeted a larger market which enabled them to transition from tool to platform by building an API and an app store to help merchants build out their own customizations and apps for their Shopify stores.
In 2010, the rise of smartphones influenced the launch of Shopify Mobile - an app for sellers to monitor their online stores, look up customer information, and fulfill orders right from their phones.
By 2011, Shopify was supporting 11,300+ stores, and generating over $125 million in revenue across those store owners.
In the following years, Shopify introduced features such as offline shopping, integration with apps like Facebook Messenger, Shopify QR codes and even a Shopify Virtual Assistant Kit to help out their merchants.
For over 13 years, Shopify has been dominating the e-commerce industry and if they continue to evolve with the rise in technology, this $180 billion dollar company is in a strong position to keep growing.
“The company's decentralized approach to e-commerce, which empowers small businesses to open their own online stores instead of relying on big online marketplaces like Amazon, is certainly powerful”
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