Shopify

In two thousand and four, Tobias Lutke, Daniel Weinberg, and Scott Lake wanted to sell snowboards online. They built a website. Every platform was broken. So they built their own. Friends wanted to use it. They opened it up. What started as frustration became the most powerful e-commerce engine ever created. They had no idea they were starting a company. Shopify charged merchants monthly: thirty-nine dollars for Basic, one hundred five for Standard, three hundred ninety-nine for Advanced, two thousand three hundred for Plus enterprise. On top of fees, Shopify charged transaction fees of two point nine percent plus thirty cents per online transaction on its payments processor. If merchants used third-party processors, Shopify charged an additional two percent fee. Shopify also took revenue from the Shopify app store (twenty percent of developer revenue up to one million, then fifteen percent after), themes marketplace, shipping label markups, and lending operations.