Description
Shopify Inc. is a Canadian multinational 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".
The company reported that it had more than 1,000,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries using its platform as of June 2019. The total gross merchandise volume exceeded US$61 billion for calendar 2019.
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. Dissatisfied with the existing e-commerce products on the market, Lütke, a computer programmer by trade, instead built 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 2020, the company announced new hires in Vancouver, Canada, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to lifting stock prices.
On February 21, 2020, Shopify announced it would join the Libra Association, the Facebook-led group aiming to create the Libra digital currency, to help build a new payment network.
On March 11, 2020, Shopify announced it is going fully remote, over 5000 employees will start working from home, in response to rapid spread of Coronavirus disease 2019.
It was reported that Shopify's valuation would likely rise on the back of options it had in the company Affirm that was expecting to shortly go public.
