Shopify Launch
Shopify Launch refers to the 2006 debut of Shopify, a hosted e-commerce platform that Tobi Lütke and his partners built in Ottawa after writing store software for their Snowdevil snowboard shop.
What happened and why it matters
Shopify's launch made it easy for small brands to run their own online stores, which created much of the direct-to-consumer order volume that ecommerce 3PLs handle today. Lütke built the software in Ruby on Rails for Snowdevil, an online snowboard store opened in 2004, and turned it into a hosted platform in 2006 when other merchants wanted to use it. Because Shopify exposes orders, inventory, and fulfillment through apps and an API, a Shopify integration is now a standard part of 3PL onboarding. Many brands that start on Shopify reach a point where outsourcing pick, pack, and ship costs less than doing it themselves.
People
Related events
Sources
- Shopify (Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org
- Tobias Lütke (Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org
- Shopify's Tobias Lütke (NPR) npr.org