Evolving from tool to platform to ecosystem

Like many startups, Shopify started as a solution to a problem the founders had personally experienced.

Lütke and Lake wanted to launch an online snowboard shop, but they couldn’t find software that worked for them. Lütke described it this way:

“I set up our online store based on a variety of different systems such as Miva, OsCommerce, and Yahoo stores. Truth be told, all those systems made my skin crawl because of how bad they were. The final straw was when I got a custom design made for my snowboard store and I couldn’t get it to work in Yahoo stores. We had this great CSS-based layout done with all these new fanged ‘web standards’ and the customizability of Yahoo Stores barely allowed me to change the background color of the top frame.”