Shopify started as a website for selling snowboards. Tobias Lütke, a German programmer in Ottawa, could not find store software he liked, so he wrote his own. The store mattered less than the code behind it. By 2015 Amazon set the pace of online shopping, and millions of small brands wanted a way to sell on their own websites. Shopify sold them the tools, and it went public on two exchanges at once, in New York and Toronto.

Snowdevil on Rails

Lütke and Scott Lake opened Snowdevil, an online snowboard shop, in Ottawa in 2004. Lütke built the store with Ruby on Rails, then a new open-source web framework. In June 2006 the founders launched that store software as Shopify. Daniel Weinand is also named as a co-founder. The bet was that thousands of merchants had the same problem Snowdevil had. Shopify charged them a monthly fee to run their shops.

A Fifty Percent Pop

Shopify priced its offering at $17 a share on May 20, 2015, above its raised range. It sold 7.7 million shares and raised $131 million. On the first day the stock opened at $28 on the New York Stock Exchange and closed at $25.71, up 51 percent. In March 2025 Shopify moved its U.S. listing from the NYSE to Nasdaq. It still trades as SHOP on Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Cover: The Lantern Shop, Suzuki Harunobu. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a small shopfront (the merchant's own store).