Echoing other commentators' sentiments that Shopify is a remarkable company:<p>Last year, we found out that a group of folks at Shopify were using my company's product, iDoneThis, when Tobi Lutke (CEO) emailed me about a customer service issue. They were by far our highest profile customers and we were super amped to have them. We thought, how cool would it be to visit Shopify up in Ottawa, get to know them and see how they were using iDoneThis?<p>I emailed Tobi and basically invited ourselves up there to visit with them. He not only said yes, he got excited, told me that he thought it was an awesome idea and that he wished he'd spent more time with customers in the early days of Shopify. They made space in their office and everyone on the team made time to talk with us, and we ate lunch and hung out with them and talked iDoneThis and Shopify for a week!<p>My co-founder and I were blown away by how good those guys are. Meeting the team was the kind of experience where it's just like, man, those guys are really good at their jobs and they're doing it their way. The culture had a distinctiveness and authenticity that made the concept of "culture" real to me. Shopify is an original. I joked that we had to leave Silicon Valley and go to freezing cold Ottawa, Canada, to learn about how to start a company.<p>And we became friends--I still play Starcraft with one of the engineers there and email and hang out with others when they visit the states. Because of the Shopify guys, we have a bunch of Ottawa-based companies that use iDoneThis and when we raised a round, Tobi invested in us, too.<p>Our visit counts up there as one of the best learning experiences as a company and it opened my eyes as a founder to what entrepreneurship could mean.
Great news. Shopify is the one piece of ecommerce software we use that isn't completely maddening. (Having a fantastic API is a large reason why.)<p>I was struck by this comment, though:<p><pre><code> "Using Shopify and Shopify POS together reveals our true
ambition: To be the first company in the world that fuses
all the distinct parts that are needed to run a complete
modern commerce business - all in one amazing product."
</code></pre>
If anyone thinks they can run a complete business using only Shopify, they're sorely mistaken. It's only a shopping cart. If you want to actually ship items, you need to use one of their third-party apps or roll your own. Those apps are the reason that ecommerce with Shopify is still frustratingly difficult -- unnecessarily so.
A big congratulations to them but I have a slightly different experience to share than the other posters here. I was just in our shopify store trying to decide if I should pull the trigger and migrate to a weebly [1] site I've created.<p>Weebly is starting to be a real competitor in the lower end of the online store market.<p>The Real-time carrier shipping calculation feature shopify has might have kept me around but I can't justify the 2k+ a year plans just for that feature (that frustrating realization is why I started looking around) and I like weeblys layouts and site builder tools better.<p>Also, the shopify admin console was really really slow when I was working with it yesterday and I've had that experience at other times in the past as well.<p>[1] www.weebly.com - same price as the shopify basic plan for commerce.
As someone who hails from Ottawa, where Shopify is headquartered, this is wonderful news. From my perspective, they have contributed more to the tech and startup community in Ottawa than anyone since Nortel. Kudos to them on their success!
I don't work at Shopify, but I've been grateful to them for allowing many of the local dev meetups here in the Ottawa area to use their fantastic space for our meetings. So I am glad to see things going so well for them.
As an Ottawan living in the Bay Area, and a very happy customer, I couldn't feel more proud. Tobi, Harley, Mark, and everyone else, keep being awesome!
Congratulations to Shopify. As an e-commerce agency it's going to be remarkable when we can offer our clients a relatively low cost solution that also improves their bricks and mortar situation. I know Shopify PoS already helps with this, but there's a long way to go and I imagine this is where much of the money is going.<p>It would also be good to see Shopify Payments launch in the UK - hopefully this money will speed that up. Our clients are often concerned about the double commission (payment gateway + Shopify) on the lower plans, though I know it's money well spent and an equivalent bespoke/self-hosted ecommerce solution would be orders of magnitude more expensive. We have to explain this to our clients a lot though and a simplified and cheaper setup via Payments would be great.<p>We've watched Shopify since 2009 when we started our business and even in that short time the progress in what the platform offers has been outstanding, as has the support. Today we rarely use anything else for our clients as we don't need to, even 'high end' features are available when you take in to account the app store.<p>A lot of people here are commenting on the limitations of Shopify, which I agree exist, but the key thing is that they don't matter to a huge number of small/medium businesses. Shopify has enabled so many fantastic businesses that would have been otherwise stuck on crap platforms.<p>All this from a RoR developer that was dissatisfied with the existing market offering.<p>If you watch Tobias speak - interview on TWIT <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBaDs0sGPw" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBaDs0sGPw</a> - you'll be enamoured with his vision, which this funding will let Shopify pursue.<p>This is a refined and enlarged version of a comment I posted on the OP.
As a Shopify customer I am very pleased to hear this - they do a great job but there are areas that need tightening up, hopefully this will allow them to grow in the offline world and improve their core offering.
I got to speak with Harley F once, and I was blown away by how thoughtful he was. He was very, very present and gave me his fullest attention. It was a pleasure talking with him. I've also interacted with some of the Shopify folk on Twitter from time to time and they're all just lovely, lovely people.<p>I think a world with Shopify in it is a happier place than a world without, and I wish them all the success in the world.
Founder Tobias Luettke was the first person I interviewed for the Ruby on Rails podcast back in 2005. Glad to see him doing so well!<p><a href="http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/tobias_luettke" rel="nofollow">http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/tobias_lu...</a>
No slight to the people at Shopify, I'm sure they are good, but I still can't any company in their right mind would choose to pay both a monthly fee and a % of sales for this product. When I saw the % of sales adder, dealbreaker!
Not the move I expected. POS integration has always been a huge challenge so I guess they're saying their online experience is good enough to shift focus away? It will be interesting to see how this move pans out.