Updated October 2026: we’ve refreshed this article with Shopify’s latest milestones, current figures and a full timeline of its history.
Shopify was founded in 2006 in Ottawa, Canada, by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake. It started as the software behind a small online snowboard shop, and 20 years later merchants sell more than $378 billion a year through it.
Shopify is all around us. Whether shoppers know it or not, it has become a quiet part of daily life, powering millions of businesses in more than 175 countries. You have almost certainly bought something through Shopify without noticing. Here is how a frustrated snowboard seller ended up building one of the biggest commerce platforms in the world.
Shopify: the quick facts
- Founded: 2006 (the Snowdevil store that started it launched in 2004)
- Founders: Tobias "Tobi" Lütke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake
- Headquarters: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Shopify has been remote-first since 2020
- CEO: Tobi Lütke, CEO since the start. Harley Finkelstein is President
- Who owns Shopify: it is a public company, listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq under the ticker SHOP. There is no parent company. Lütke holds a founder share that keeps his voting power at 40%
- Went public: May 2015, at $17 a share
- Size in 2025: $378.4 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) and $11.6 billion in revenue
The Beginning - Unleashing The Snowdevil.
The company was founded in 2006, but the Shopify story really began in 2004. Three friends in Ottawa who shared a love of snowboarding, Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, set out to open their own online snowboard store called Snowdevil. When they went looking for software to run it, they hit a problem. Nothing suitable existed.
Blogging had already been made easy by tools like WordPress and Blogger. Selling online had not. Merchants had to build a site, find hosting, process payments and manage customer data, often with a different tool for each job and nothing to tie them together.
So Lütke, a talented software engineer, built the store himself. Using Ruby on Rails, a web framework that was brand new at the time, he created a single system that handled everything Snowdevil needed. After a few months of work, the shop was ready to launch.
The Lightbulb Moment.
Other online retailers noticed Snowdevil and started asking if they could use its software. The founders realised they had built something more valuable than the snowboards. After one season, they turned the software into a platform any merchant could use, and in 2006 it launched to the public. The company was first called Jaded Pixel before adopting the name Shopify.
Early on, Shopify created Liquid, an open-source template language that let developers build fully custom store designs. It made the platform flexible enough for both small sellers and ambitious brands, and Liquid still powers Shopify themes today. Merchants in Canada and around the world quickly took notice.
There’s An App (Store) For That.
In 2007 Apple launched the iPhone, and a year later the App Store. Anyone could now add new features to their phone with a tap, built by an army of independent developers.
In 2009 Lütke and the team asked an obvious question: why not do the same for eCommerce? Shopify could not build every feature every merchant needed. Instead it opened the platform to developers, letting them build and sell their own apps for Shopify stores.
Apps soon appeared for marketing, social media, shipping, SEO, design and automation. The App Store made Shopify almost endlessly flexible, and it brought even more merchants on board.
Payments, POS, Plus And Beyond.
In 2013 Shopify launched Shopify Payments, letting merchants take card payments without signing up to a separate payment gateway. The same year it stepped into the physical world with point of sale (POS), so retailers could run their shops and online stores from one system. Today Shopify POS is used by everyone from single boutiques to multi-location retail chains.
As bigger brands moved onto the platform, Shopify launched Shopify Plus in 2014. Plus is the enterprise tier, built for high-volume merchants with more complex needs, and it now powers brands such as Gymshark, Heinz and Staples.
More tools followed. Shop Pay made repeat checkout a one-tap job. Shopify Markets made selling internationally simpler. Shopify Capital began offering merchant cash advances and loans based on a store's sales. Shopify also built its own fulfilment network, before selling its logistics business to Flexport in 2023 to refocus on software.
Going public
Shopify listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Toronto Stock Exchange in May 2015, pricing its shares at $17. The shares closed their first day about 51% higher. At the time, around 165,000 stores used Shopify.
Ten years later, in March 2025, Shopify moved its US listing from the NYSE to Nasdaq to sit alongside other big technology companies. That May it joined the Nasdaq-100 index, keeping its Toronto listing throughout.
The pandemic boom and the reset
When lockdowns closed physical shops in 2020, businesses of every size rushed online, and many of them chose Shopify. The same year Shopify declared itself "digital by default", closing its offices as the main place of work and becoming a remote-first company.
The boom did not last forever. As shoppers returned to stores in 2022, growth slowed and Shopify's share price fell sharply. That year shareholders approved a 10-for-1 stock split and a new founder share for Lütke, guaranteeing him 40% of the company's voting power for as long as he stays with the business. In 2023, Shopify sold its logistics arm to Flexport and doubled down on what it does best: commerce software.
The AI era and agentic commerce
Since 2021, Shopify has released its new features twice a year through Shopify Editions. Recent Editions have been dominated by AI. Shopify Magic brought AI writing and image tools into the admin, and Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant for merchants, handled nearly 34 million conversations in the second quarter of 2026 alone.
The biggest shift so far is agentic commerce, where shoppers find and buy products through AI assistants instead of browsing a website. In the Winter '26 Edition, Shopify launched Agentic Storefronts, a sales channel that puts merchants' products inside ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, AI Mode in Google Search and the Gemini app, all managed from the Shopify admin. Shopify also co-developed the Universal Commerce Protocol with Google, an open standard for how AI agents transact with merchants.
We have covered this in more depth in What agentic commerce means for Shopify brands, Google's UCP update and Shopify launches llms.txt.
Shopify by the numbers
Shopify timeline at a glance
The platform continues to grow, creating new partnerships & new ways for merchants to sell. Here are some of Shopify's major milestones over the years.
What comes next
When three snowboarders set up Snowdevil in 2004, they had no idea their side project would end up powering millions of businesses. Twenty years on, the platform has gone from online stores to shop tills, B2B wholesale and AI shopping assistants, and it is still growing at more than 30% a year.
The next chapter is likely to be written as much by AI agents as by shoppers. Whatever it looks like, we will be keeping a close eye on it.
Thinking about moving to Shopify? Explore our migration services or get in touch.
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