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What is Shopify?

Shopify Inc. is a multinational Canadian e-commerce company based in Ottawa, Ontario. It is also the name of the company's proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail POS systems.

The Primary Distinction Between Shopify and Amazon

The key distinction is that Shopify is a specialized ecommerce platform, whereas Amazon is an online marketplace. Shopify provides you with the tools to create your own online store, whereas Amazon allows you to sell alongside other online sellers on its marketplace.

Shoptify or Shopify:

Many people know it's the wrong spelling. The correct word is "Shopify itself."

As of May 2021, the company reported that its platform was used by over 1,700,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries. According to BuiltWith, the Shopify platform will host 1.58 million websites by 2021.

Shopify is used by 4.4 percent of the top 10 million websites, according to W3Techs.

For calendar 2019, the total gross merchandise volume exceeded US $61 billion. Shopify is one of the top ten largest publicly traded Canadian companies by market capitalization as of 2022. The total revenue for the fiscal year 2021 was $4.611 billion.

Tobias Lütke and Scott Lake founded Shopify in 2006 after failing to open Snowdevil, an online store for snowboarding equipment. Lütke, a computer programmer by trade, built his own e-commerce product after being dissatisfied with the market's existing offerings.

After two months of development, Lütke launched Snowdevil's online store using the open source web application framework Ruby on Rails. In June 2006, the Snowdevil founders launched the platform as Shopify. Since 2006, Shopify has used an open-source template language called Liquid, which is written in Ruby.

In February 2021, Shopify announced the formation of a new esports organization called Shopify Rebellion, as well as the formation of a professional StarCraft II team to compete in international tournaments. The team members include former 2016 world champion Byun Hyun-woo and Sasha Hostyn.