Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake launched Shopify in Ottawa in 2006.
The founders originally wanted to create an online store for snowboarding equipment. Dissatisfied with the available e-commerce software, Lütke built a custom platform using Ruby on Rails. The founders then turned that store-building technology into a product that other businesses could use.
Shopify was initially connected to an online snowboard shop called Snowdevil. Its software allowed merchants to create storefronts, manage products, accept payments, and handle orders without building an entire commerce system from scratch.
The company’s story is sometimes confused with that of Etsy or BigCommerce, which also serve online merchants but were founded separately. Shopify went public in 2015, listing shares on both the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange. Its headquarters remain in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.