Shopify History: When It Was Founded, Who Owns It and the Full Timeline (2004-2027)

TL;DR

Shopify was founded in 2006 in Ottawa, Canada, by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, after the three built the software for their own online snowboard shop, Snowdevil, in 2004. In 2025, merchants sold $378.4 billion through Shopify, and the company earned $11.6 billion in revenue.

craftberry is a Shopify Premier Partner agency, one of Shopify's highest partner tiers, and has built on Shopify since 2015, the year it went public. Since then our in-house team has delivered more than 800 Shopify projects for mid-sized and large brands.

This timeline covers the facts people look up most about Shopify and adds what each change meant for the brands we work with.

Key takeaways:

• ✓Shopify was founded in 2006 in Ottawa by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, and grew out of Snowdevil, the snowboard store they opened in 2004.
• ✓Shopify is a public company listed on Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange. CEO Tobi Lütke owns about 6% of the shares and controls 40% of the votes.
• ✓In 2025, merchants sold $378.4 billion through Shopify, and the company earned $11.6 billion in revenue.
• ✓For merchants, the biggest turning points were the App Store (2009), Shopify Plus (2014), Online Store 2.0 (2021) and selling inside AI assistants (2025).

Shopify at a Glance: Who Founded Shopify, Where Is It Based and How Big Is It?

Shopify was founded in 2006 by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, and is a public company listed on Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange. In 2025, merchants sold $378.4 billion through Shopify, the company earned $11.6 billion in revenue, and it had about 7,600 employees.

Shopify's company profile, as of October 2026:

What Are the Key Milestones in Shopify's History From 2004 to 2027?

Shopify's key milestones are the Snowdevil store (2004), the Shopify platform launch (2006), the App Store (2009), Shopify Payments and POS (2013), Shopify Plus (2014), the IPO on the NYSE and TSX (2015), Online Store 2.0 (2021), the move to Nasdaq (2025) and Agentic Storefronts for selling inside AI assistants (2025). In 2027, Shopify is scheduled to stop loading script tags on storefronts on March 1.

Shopify's history, year by year:

When Was Shopify Founded?

Shopify was founded in 2006, when its founders turned the software behind their snowboard shop into a platform any merchant could use. It launched publicly in June 2006, which makes it 20 years old as a platform in 2026.

Some sources give 2004 instead. That is the year Snowdevil opened, and Shopify's own investor pages date Lütke's co-founding of the company to September 2004.

How Did Shopify Start?

Shopify started because its founders could not find software good enough to run their own online store. In 2004, Lütke, Weinand and Lake set out to sell snowboards online from Ottawa under the name Snowdevil.

The options available at the time meant stitching together hosting, a storefront, payments and order management. Lütke, a programmer, built one system that handled all of it, using Ruby on Rails, a web framework that had only just been released.

Other retailers soon asked to use Snowdevil's software, and the founders concluded it was worth more than the snowboards. They rebuilt it as a product for any merchant and launched it as Shopify in 2006, at first under the company name Jaded Pixel.

One early decision still shapes every Shopify store. Liquid, the template language Lütke created so developers could build custom storefronts, still powers Shopify themes, and the custom themes in our Shopify development work are written in it.

craftberry case study:

One example is the lightweight custom theme behind the SWT activewear redesign, which lifted conversion rate 9% and average order value 4%.

Who Founded Shopify?

Shopify was founded by Tobias "Tobi" Lütke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake. Lütke, a German-born programmer who moved to Ottawa in the early 2000s, wrote the original code, worked as CTO, and has been CEO since April 2008.

Scott Lake ran the business side as Shopify's first CEO until he left in 2008, and Daniel Weinand co-founded Snowdevil and the early company with them. Lütke is the founder most associated with Shopify today because he still runs it and controls 40% of its votes.

Who Owns Shopify Today?

Shopify is a public company owned by its shareholders, and its most powerful owner is co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke, who holds about 6% of the shares and 40% of the votes. No parent company owns Shopify, and most of its shares are held by institutional investors.

The gap between Lütke's stake and his voting power comes from a founder share that shareholders approved in June 2022. Combined with his other shares, it gives him 40% of total voting power for as long as he stays with the company, and it cannot be transferred. Shopify's other senior leaders are President Harley Finkelstein and CFO Jeff Hoffmeister.

Amazon does not own Shopify. The two companies compete for merchants and also work together on features such as Buy with Prime.

When Did Shopify Go Public?

Shopify went public on May 21, 2015, on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange. The shares priced at $17, the offering raised $131 million, and the stock closed its first day 51% higher.

About 165,000 stores used Shopify at the time of the IPO. Ten years later, on March 31, 2025, Shopify moved its US listing from the NYSE to Nasdaq and kept both the SHOP ticker and its Toronto listing.

Where Is Shopify Headquartered?

Shopify is headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, where it was founded and is incorporated. Its Ottawa office is at 151 O'Connor Street.

Its US presence has grown since the Nasdaq move. The 2025 annual report added New York as a principal office, and Shopify's 2026 quarterly filings list Las Vegas, Nevada, as its principal executive office. Most employees work remotely: Shopify has been "digital by default" since 2020 and datelines its press releases "Internet, Everywhere".

How Big Is Shopify in 2026?

Shopify is one of the largest commerce platforms in the world. Merchants sold $378.4 billion through it in 2025, and Shopify's revenue for the year was $11.6 billion, with both up about 30% on 2024.

Growth has continued into 2026. The table shows the latest reported quarter alongside the figures Shopify uses to describe its reach.

Shopify does not publish an exact merchant count and describes its base as "millions" of businesses. We track third-party estimates in our article on how many Shopify stores there are. Shopify reports its Q3 2026 results on November 3, 2026.

How Did Shopify Grow From a Store Builder Into a Commerce Platform?

Shopify grew by letting other companies build on it. The App Store in 2009 turned a single product into an ecosystem, and Shopify Payments, POS and Shopify Plus in 2013 and 2014 made the platform credible for larger brands.

The App Store came first. Shopify could not build every feature merchants asked for, so in June 2009 it opened its API and let developers sell apps to Shopify stores. That ecosystem now covers subscriptions, search, reviews, ERP connectors and most other functions a growing brand needs, and choosing the app stack has become one of the first architecture decisions on any Shopify build.

craftberry experience:

In our experience, that flexibility has a cost. Every app adds scripts to the page and another point where two apps can conflict, so past a certain point a private app is cheaper and more stable than several rented ones.

For On Running, we used Gadget as the connection layer between Shopify Plus and MuleSoft to automate stock updates, order sync and fulfillment data, and the full Plus store launched in 11 weeks.

For Pepper, an embedded team building private apps and features cut development costs by 60% and brought the average feature release time to five days.

Payments and POS followed in August 2013. Shopify Payments, built with Stripe, removed the need for a separate payment gateway, and Shopify POS put physical stores on the same inventory and customer records as the online store.

Shopify Plus launched in February 2014 for high-volume merchants that needed more control, higher limits and dedicated support. It meant a brand could start on an easy platform and stay on it as order volume grew, and it is still the main reason mid-sized brands move to Shopify Plus from Magento, Shopware, WooCommerce and custom platforms today.

From our migration team: in a replatform, the data is the hard part. We moved more than 500,000 customer records from Shopware to Shopify Plus for Shelly, an IoT brand that now sells in 100+ markets. For Takomo, we migrated about 2,120 products while consolidating duplicates and keeping five years of catalog structure. For Biotrade, we planned the data structure before moving anything, and the migration finished with 0% data loss.

Planning a replatform? Our Shopify migration page explains how we plan product, customer and order data, integrations and SEO redirects before a move.

What Changed for Shopify Between 2017 and 2023?

Between 2017 and 2023, Shopify rebuilt its checkout and theme architecture, grew sharply during the pandemic, and then sold its logistics business to focus on software.

Shop Pay arrived in April 2017 as Shopify Pay. It saves a buyer's details across Shopify stores, so returning shoppers skip most of the checkout form.

Fulfillment turned out to be a detour. Shopify announced its fulfillment network in June 2019, bought 6 River Systems that year and Deliverr for $2.1 billion in 2022, then sold the logistics business to Flexport in May 2023.

In between, the pandemic pushed many businesses online at once in 2020, and Shopify became a remote-first company.

Online Store 2.0, released in June 2021, had the biggest effect on how stores are built. Sections on every page, app blocks and metafields let marketing teams change pages without a developer ticket, and merchant-editable sections are the standard behind our Shopify design work.

When we rebuilt Carpet Warehouse on Shopify Plus, editable sections simplified content and catalog management for the internal team, while the lighter theme improved LCP by 55% and conversion rate by 8%.

Shopify Markets, announced in September 2021, changed how brands sell internationally from one store.

For Innermost, we first merged several storefronts with custom geo-routing and then moved the setup to Shopify Markets in 2022. On the Takomo rebuild, one Shopify Plus storefront with Global-e now serves 195+ countries and handles currency, duties and order routing.

For brands that need a fully custom front end, Shopify released Hydrogen (a React framework) and Oxygen (hosting) in 2022.

craftberry experience:

In our experience, headless suits a small share of brands, because it adds a second codebase your team has to maintain.

For Glowforge, we used headless components only where they earned their place in a bespoke Shopify Plus build, and the initial rebuild shipped in seven weeks.

What Is Checkout Extensibility, and Why Did It Matter in 2024?

Checkout Extensibility is Shopify's app-based way to customize checkout, and it replaced the legacy checkout.liquid file for the checkout steps in August 2024. Plus merchants who had edited checkout.liquid had to rebuild those customisations as checkout UI extensions and apps.

The new model keeps checkout upgrade-safe, so Shop Pay and Shopify's own conversion improvements reach the store automatically. The cost was a fixed deadline: custom scripts, upsells and tracking that lived in checkout.liquid had to be rebuilt, or they stopped working.

The same shift reached Shopify Scripts in 2026. Plus merchants could no longer edit or publish scripts after April 15, 2026, and every script stopped running on June 30, 2026, so discount, shipping and payment logic had to be rebuilt as Shopify Functions. In June 2026, Checkout Components reached general availability for Plus, letting merchants assemble checkout steps from blocks and show them by customer segment, cart value or market.

How Is Shopify Using AI in 2025 and 2026?

Shopify uses AI in two ways: tools such as Sidekick help merchants run their stores, and Agentic Storefronts let shoppers buy from Shopify stores inside AI assistants.

Sidekick, announced in 2023, is the AI assistant inside the Shopify admin. It analyses sales and inventory, drafts campaigns and builds reports and custom apps, and it handled nearly 34 million conversations in Q2 2026.

In 2025, Shopify added an AI Store Builder that generates editable store layouts from a short description.

The larger change for brands is on the buying side. Agentic Storefronts, released in the Winter '26 Edition in December 2025, syndicate a merchant's catalog to ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, with checkout handled by Shopify. In January 2026, Shopify and Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard for how AI agents find products, build carts and check out with any merchant.

The Summer '26 Edition in June 2026 moved more of this into the core platform. It added AI merchandising (collections sorted by predicted conversion, predictive cross-sell blocks and a merchandising insights panel) and native A/B testing and gradual rollouts for themes, checkout and customer accounts, work that previously needed third-party apps.

Shopify said in February 2026 that orders reaching its stores from AI search platforms had grown 15 times since January 2025, from a small base. For your store, that moves attention to product data and structured content, because they now decide whether an AI assistant recommends the store before a shopper ever visits it.

From our Shopify engineers: AI on a storefront earns its place when it shortens the path to the right product. In regulated categories such as supplements and health, that means a trained, constrained assistant that can support and suggest but never diagnose.

The same rule applies to conversion work: small structural changes, tested properly, move revenue more than new features.

On Enhance, our CRO team moved creator video reviews directly below the hero, and a four-week A/B test showed a 21.01% higher conversion rate and 21.63% higher revenue per visitor with no change in traffic.

Looking for the fastest conversion wins on your store? We use our own AI tool, SignalVeritas, to find them, and our CRO retainer targets at least 4x your investment in added revenue. See AI CRO for Shopify.

What Is Changing on Shopify in 2027?

Shopify's confirmed 2027 changes are technical deadlines for apps and storefront code. From January 1, 2027, every public app must use expiring access tokens to call the Admin API, and from March 1, 2027, Shopify stops loading script tags on storefronts.

The script tag change matters most for brands. Script tags were the old way for apps to add code to a store, and many review, tracking, popup and upsell apps still use them. After March 1, 2027, an app that has not moved to theme app extensions or web pixels stops working on the storefront, even though nothing in the store's own theme has changed.

In our experience, older Plus stores carry the most risk, because they have collected apps over many years and nobody owns the full list. We usually start with an app audit: which apps still load through script tags, which have an updated version, and which are better replaced with native Shopify features or one custom app. The same review often finds apps that overlap, which removes both a monthly fee and page weight.

The rest of 2027 is less certain. Shopify releases two Editions a year, and if it keeps the pattern of past Winter Editions (Winter '26 shipped on December 10, 2025), the Winter '27 Edition should arrive in December 2026 and shape the first half of 2027. Shopify reports Q3 2026 results on November 3, 2026 and full-year 2026 results in early 2027.

Not sure which of your apps still use script tags? Our Shopify maintenance and support team can audit your app stack and plan the fixes before March 1, 2027.

What Does Shopify's History Mean If You Are Choosing a Platform in 2026?

Shopify's history shows a platform that ships quickly, has moved steadily toward larger brands and adopts new sales channels early. For most mid-sized brands, that makes it a sound long-term choice, with the trade-off of less low-level control than a custom or open-source stack.

In our experience, Shopify fits best when you want your team focused on selling instead of maintaining servers, security and a checkout, and when you sell online, in stores, to wholesale buyers and in several countries from one admin.

Each milestone above has made those setups easier to run, and the brands that benefit most stay on the platform for years: we have delivered 120+ projects for Pepper since 2018, covering the rebuild, internationalisation, accessibility and private apps.

It fits less well when the business depends on unusual checkout logic or catalog rules. Shopify Plus, Shopify Functions and apps solve many of those cases, though not all of them, and we cover where the platform still needs workarounds in Shopify limitations and how to work around them.

How Did We Source and Verify the Facts in This Article?

We took every Shopify figure and date from Shopify's own filings and announcements first, used independent press only where Shopify publishes nothing, and checked all of it on October 29, 2026. craftberry results come only from case studies published on our website.

When sources disagree, we follow a fixed order. Shopify's filings and changelog outrank press coverage, and press coverage outranks other agencies' timelines. Where a difference is real, we show both versions and explain it, as with the founding year (2004 for Snowdevil, 2006 for the Shopify platform) and the headquarters (Ottawa, with a principal executive office in Las Vegas in 2026 US filings). Where another published timeline got a date wrong, such as Shopify Plus being dated to 2017, we used the date confirmed by multiple sources (February 2014).

A few figures carry limits you should know about. Dates marked "scheduled" are Shopify's announced plans and can still change. The Summer '26 Edition details come from agency reviews of the release, because Shopify presents Editions as a product showcase rather than a dated document. craftberry case study results describe each project's own period and are not projections for other stores.

We update this article after each Shopify quarterly earnings report and after each Shopify Edition, which means roughly six reviews a year, and change the "Updated" date each time. We are a Shopify Premier Partner, so we have a commercial relationship with Shopify, but Shopify did not commission or review this article, and no company paid to be mentioned in it.

Weighing Shopify for Your Next Stage of Growth?

We are a Shopify Premier Partner agency working with brands in Europe and the US: more than 800 Shopify projects since 2015, over 30 in-house specialists, more than $450 million in revenue generated by the stores we supported in 2024, and a 4.8 rating across 28 Clutch reviews.

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