Shopify

Shopify is the most widely used e-commerce platform in the world. Founded in 2006 by Tobias Lutke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake in Ottawa, Canada, it starts from the need to sell snowboards online. Today, Shopify hosts millions of stores in over 175 countries and processes over 292 billion dollars in transactions in 2024.

Shopify offers everything for an online store: a drag-and-drop editor, product and inventory management, order processing, and automatic tax and shipping discount calculations. Every store gets free SSL, responsive themes, and SEO tools. The abandoned cart recovery feature is included on all plans.

Infrastructure runs on Google Cloud Platform with a global Cloudflare CDN (330+ locations, 120+ countries). 99.99% uptime guaranteed, PCI DSS Level 1 certified, DDoS protection, and 24/7 monitoring. Hosting is fully managed and included in the price.

The Shopify App Store ecosystem has over 13,000 apps: email marketing, SEO, accounting, dropshipping, print-on-demand, loyalty programs. Integrates with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google Shopping, and Amazon Marketplace for multichannel selling.

Shopify Payments removes extra transaction fees and supports over 130 currencies. Shopify Markets enables international selling: translations, market-based pricing, local domains, and automatic customs duty calculation.

For developers: Hydrogen (headless React framework) with Oxygen (edge Hosting on Cloudflare Workers) and the Storefront API (GraphQL). Shopify Flow adds no-code automations for orders, inventory, and marketing.

Plans: Basic ($29/month billed annually), Grow ($79/month), Advanced ($299/month), and Plus ($2,300+/month enterprise). Shopify is carbon-neutral and has invested $94M in carbon removal. Great fit from solo entrepreneurs to enterprise brands like Gymshark and Heinz.