I believe that many e-commerce sellers have built their own brand independent stations(online shops),because compared with selling on Amazon and other platforms, their own brand independent stations are more conducive to precipitate brand value and build private domain traffic. So, what is Shopify? What can it be used for? Today\’s article will take you to learn more about it.

[Introduction to Shopify]

Shopify Inc. is a Canadian e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Shopify is the brand name of the company\’s Independent E-commerce platform.Tobias L ü tke, Scott lake and Daniel weinand cooperated in a startup project of Snowdevil, an online Snowboard retail website. Inspired by Snowdevil, Shopify was officially launched in 2006.Tobias L ü tke is a German Canadian who moved to Canada at the age of 22;Scott Lake withdrew in 2007 due to his disagreement with the company\’s development philosophy;Daniel weinand is a German programmer and a friend of L ü tke. He joined  in 2006 when Shopify was officially launched, but l ü tke and lake also think he is a co-founder.

Since its establishment, more than 1.75 million businesses have used Shopify to build online stores for sales, the number of websites has exceeded 3.76 million, and the total commodity sales (Gmv) has exceeded US $400 billion.

As of January 2022, Shopify\’s market value was $143.33 billion, ranking 92nd among the companies with the highest market value in the world and third among the Canadian companies with the highest market value

[The story behind Shopiy]

Tobias L ü tke, founder and CEO of Shopify, was born in West Germany in 1981 and grew up in Koblenz. His father is a physician and his mother is a special children\’s teacher.

L ü tke became very interested in computers when he was very young. When he was 11 or 12 years old, he had learned to use his Schneider (also known as Armstrong amstad) computer to program and rewrite the code of the game he played to create new games, and took modifying computer hardware as a hobby. Therefore, he took the train to get new parts for re welding.L ü tke never went to college. After the tenth grade, l ü tke dropped out of school and entered koblenzekal Benz school to participate in an innovative apprenticeship program to learn how to become a software engineer, which aims to train the next generation of computer programmers in Germany.

Once at his wife Fiona\’s family activities, l ü tke met Scott lake, who was 12 years older than himself. The latter worked for a start-up company founded by several friends and now wants to start his own business.At that time, l ü tke also had the idea of creating an online store to sell things through e-commerce. L ü tke liked to sell things in retail and was fascinated by the profits he could get in the right niche market.In his opinion, the implementation of online retail was still very bad at that time, so he hoped to use his technical expertise to build an online store to make money, so that he would no longer have to make money through programming.This is also the most direct reason why l ü tke decided to start a business later, because he was tired of programming and longed to get rid of his work of writing code. L ü tke loved programming, but he preferred programming as a hobby rather than a daily job to make a living.

[First shopfiy online store snowdevil]

\”I built our online stores based on a variety of different systems, such as Miva, oscommerce and Yahoo stores. To be honest, all these systems gave me goose bumps because they were too bad. The last straw that crushed me was that I made a design for my ski store, but it couldn\’t be used in Yahoo stores. We used these new ones \”Web standard\” has completed the layout based on CSS, but the customizability of Yahoo stores hardly allows me to change the background color of the top frame. \”– Tobias L ü tke, 2010

Dissatisfied with the existing e-commerce solutions, l ü tke decided to design a new tool to build his own online retail website. As Shopify said in its brand story, \”at that time, the e-commerce solutions didn\’t give us the control we needed to succeed, so we established our own solutions. “

https://www.snowdevil.ca/This is the first Shopify online store. Well, yes, the first Shopify website was opened by L ü tke themselves. Snowdevil can still be accessed until now, but it is no longer open for sale. It is only displayed as a demo site of Shopify.

But it is said that l ü tke also has a secret Shopify store called startup socks, which is used to sell socks. It is the following:

As the website went online, more and more people gradually noticed snowdevil. People liked the design of snowdevil website. Compared with the snowboard products sold on the website, people were more interested in the software developed by L ü tke. Soon, they began to ask L ü tke whether they could obtain the authorization of this software to build their own website and carry out their own business. At this time, Lü tke and Lake realize that their e-commerce software may be a better product for external sales, so they decided to turn the company from a snowboard company to a software company, and from selling snowboards online to establishing a better online sales solution. \”Well, skateboarding or software? Obviously, we should choose software.\” L ü tke said in a later interview.

L ü tke and Lake persuaded 10 friends and family members to invest about $200000 in start-up funds. At first, they named the company jaded pixel, and then added a descriptive \”Rockstar e-commerce\”, but in the end, they decided to take Shopify as the company name.

In June 2006, Shopify was officially launched as an online store software, focusing on the basic functions of customizable store template, tracking order source, inventory management, payment processing and Paypal / credit card integration.Shopify has created an open source template language called liquid, which is written in ruby. It is the backbone of Shopify theme and is used to load dynamic content on the website.

By October 2006, Shopify had earned a total of $8000.In 2007, Shopify launched the shopping cart system, and the net sales of merchants on Shopify amounted to US $100 million.In 2008, the number of Shopify employees increased to 10, with a monthly income of more than $60000. Since then, with its unique business model and flexible market strategy, Shopify has continued to grow and become the third highest company in Canada.

[Shopify development history]

December 2012: by the end of the year, Shopify had 150 employees and 40000 online stores in 90 countries around the world, with a total commodity trading volume (Gmv) of US $740 million

December 2014: by the end of the year, the number of Shopify online stores reached 100000, the number of employees reached 500, and the market valuation was US $1 billion.

September 2015: Amazon announced that it would close its Amazon webstore service for businesses and choose Shopify as the preferred migration service provider. After the news, Shopify\’s share price rose by more than 20%.

January 2017: Shopify announced its integration with Amazon, allowing merchants to sell goods on Amazon through Shopify stores. After the announcement, Shopify\’s shares rose nearly 10%.

June 2019: Shopify announced that it will launch its own warehousing and logistics network. The service promises to provide freight logistics services for merchants and will compete with Amazon FBA. Qualified merchants in specific states of the United States will be the first to enjoy the service.

December 2021: Black Friday & online Monday, Shopify online store sales reached $6.3 billion

Generally speaking, Shopify is an independent station building tool based on SaaS mode, which can help quickly build an online shopping website. Just register an account, select the package, complete some basic settings (such as theme template, freight, collection method, etc.), and then upload the products to open the door.

In addition, except the SaaS mode of Shopify, there are two common ways to build independent stations: using open source programs and independent development. Open source programs, such as WordPress, Magento, Opencart, prestashop, zenpart, etc., are free of charge, but they need to be installed and deployed manually. They also need to buy their own servers, configure databases, be responsible for load balancing, add backup, add SSL, load fault transfer and other technical maintenance. They need to have a certain technical foundation.

In contrast, using shopfiy to build an independent station is really easy to start. It is easy to use. Modular station building and filling content is simple and fast. It does not require a technical foundation, nor does it need to invest too much time cost and learning cost to quickly build an online website and start business. But you need to consider whether Shopify is suitable for you by integrating the product resources, supply chain, capital investment, personnel and equipment, market positioning, promotion strategy, etc.

At this time, I have to say that with a good Chinese agent, your Shopify road will be smoother!

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