
Shopify Raises $100 Million - allsop8184
http://www.shopify.com/blog/10780917-shopify-raises-100-million
======
smalter
Echoing other commentators' sentiments that Shopify is a remarkable company:

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.

~~~
richardlblair
Thanks for the shout out! I'm glad you enjoyed the great white north!

~~~
mahyarm
How has it been like running, starting and hiring a company in Canada? Did the
founders have experience in the SFBA?

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fourspace
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.)

I was struck by this comment, though:

    
    
       "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."
    

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.

~~~
bradleyjg
Just FYI cinemaguy23 & stevebenjamins you guys are both hellbanned.

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2745880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2745880)
for more info. IIRC, some people have had success emailing
info@ycombinator.com to get unbanned.

Edit: state, if you don't have showdead=yes set in your preferences then you
won't see the hellbanned posts. I don't know about the posts that got them
hellbanned in the first place, but the dead ones here are completely
unobjectionable .

~~~
state
I'm guessing you're referring to other replies that we can't see. Is that the
case? Just curious what you're talking about.

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andymoe
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.

Weebly is starting to be a real competitor in the lower end of the online
store market.

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.

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.

[1] www.weebly.com - same price as the shopify basic plan for commerce.

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alex_anglin
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!

~~~
knappador
I wish they would just re-implement the whole thing on top of a hybrid API
with reference FOSS implementations of web client servers and client apps so
that programmers can pick-and-choose how much PaaS they need. Please get the
"apps" on the backburner by letting FOSS compete head-to-head with the little
mini-ISV's and their inevitable hodge-podge. Payments and 90% of inventory
schlogg can take a hike, but when it comes to that 10% of customization,
working on one's own source is so much better that I would use a fully FOSS
solution and self host it if I ever needed to do an e-commerce site again for
anyone for any reason in any circumstances. Shopify apps and most of the
backend customization options really blur the line between software consumers
and software users while ignoring that true consumers never want to become
users in the first place and true users want total, absolute headroom. Whole
world is better off if Shopify is FOSSier.

~~~
thezoid
> working on one's own source is so much better that I would use a fully FOSS
> solution and self host it if I ever needed to do an e-commerce site again

Except now instead of focusing on the other aspects of your business you need
to focus on the infrastructure as well. What if your products get super
popular? Not you'll need to work on scaling out your store which will cost a
boatload in equipment and specialization.

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noarchy
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.

~~~
purephase
I just moved to Ottawa a few weeks. Any advice on finding out more about the
local dev meetups?

It's too bad I just missed out on that humanitarian hack-a-thon. Sounds like
it would have been fun and worthwhile.

~~~
blairbeckwith
Feel free to reach out to me (email in profile) – I have previously organized
a bunch of events and meetups in Ottawa and am fairly connected to the scene.
Can probably point you in the right direction.

------
jonny_eh
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!

------
bendtheblock
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.

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.

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.

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.

All this from a RoR developer that was dissatisfied with the existing market
offering.

If you watch Tobias speak - interview on TWIT
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBaDs0sGPw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBaDs0sGPw)
\- you'll be enamoured with his vision, which this funding will let Shopify
pursue.

This is a refined and enlarged version of a comment I posted on the OP.

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simonbarker87
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.

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visakanv
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.

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.

~~~
blairbeckwith
Thanks so much for the kind words Visakan. Always a pleasure.

------
topfunky
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!

[http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/tobias_lu...](http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/tobias_luettke)

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knappador
Oh Shopify. One of the many reasons I support FOSS business models for
anything programmers need to touch. Offline will definitely be an improvement.

------
smewp
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!

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kevando
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.

~~~
niamh
I'm surprised to see this fundraise. They have a strong customer base and I
worry when good companies get a huge investments like this and how it could
affect the future of the company, it's growth, culture etc.

~~~
kin
I was thinking the same thing. A huge round like this has me guessing they've
got a hefty plan beyond improving just their current products. Others are
mentioning that a shopping cart isn't enough, it's the apps. Maybe they plan
on going that route either hiring to build them in house or using this money
to buy those apps.

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Yaggo
Hopefully that helps them to launch the long-awaited 1.0 version of their
open-sourced client-side MVC framework, Batman.js.

