Shopify

Shopify Inc. is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Shopify is the name of its proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. The Shopify platform offers online retailers a suite of services, including payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools. The company reported that it had more than 2 million businesses in approximately 175 countries using its platform as of December 2022, geographically dispersed as follows: 55% of North America, 25% of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 15% of Asia Pacific, Australia and China and 5% of Latin America (Mexico and South America). According to BuiltWith, 1.58 million websites run on the Shopify platform as of 2021. According to W3Techs, 4.4% of the top 10 million websites use Shopify. The total gross merchandise volume exceeded US$197 billion for calendar 2022. As of July 2022, Shopify is among the top 20 largest publicly traded Canadian companies by market capitalization. History 2006: Founding Shopify was founded in 2006 by Tobias Lütke 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. Shopify created an open-source template language called Liquid, which is written in Ruby and used since 2006.