Shopify began because a coder wanted to sell snowboards, not write more software.
Every cart tool he tried in 2004 made his skin crawl, so Tobias Lütke built his own on a new framework, Ruby on Rails. Snowdevil sold boards for one season — but the store software he had to write proved the real business. Merchants sold $378.4 billion through Shopify in 2025.
Shopify on Brandseum