Too-biased

Today marks two events.

First, Shopify was launched exactly 3 years ago. I started hacking on it more than 5 years ago, originally just for myself so that I could sell snowboards online, free from the tyranny of horrible online store software such as Yahoo Stores, but it quickly grew into something much larger. Now we are a profitable multi-million dollar company with one of the best teams in the industry. It’s been an amazing ride, at times a bumpy road but never less than exhilarating.

The other event is the launch of something I’m infinitely excited about: the Shopify Platform. Let me explain. E-commerce is one of those software areas where individualization matters. This has been clear from day one of running Snowdevil and selling our first snowboard. If you build a store on the Internet you are providing a customer experience that is not unlike walking into any physical store in the downtown area of the town you live in. If the floorboards squeak, the wall colors don’t match, if the service is slow or the lighting is off, you will not like the experience. You won’t be back. There will probably be no sale. This goes for online stores as well. An online store must look good because you are building a brand of trust with your client. Poor design begets poor customers and poor customers lead to unsustainable margins. This is the reason I wrote liquid, which allows you to build awesome looking stores on Shopify.

However, there are a lot of common elements to every e-commerce store. There is this small nucleus of core functionality that all software has to provide (and most do). These are things like inventory management, order processing, payment processing, shipping support and so on. Shopify excels at all these things—our customer satisfaction rate is north of 90%. However after you are done with all those features something funny happens. The next feature everyone wants is different for each store. Some people want live auctions, some people want a wholesale area, some people want community forums, license key generation, digital delivery, integrations with MS Commerce Server, Oracle Inventory, international tax form printers, etc.

None of these features is particularly hard to implement. The problem is that they fail our basic test which we use to determine whether we should implement a feature or not: Implement what most people need most of the time.

There is no cheating. Digital delivery is only needed by some people most of the time and international tax form printing is only needed by some people some of the time.

The trouble is, if we were to add all these features to Shopify, we would simply end up with software like the others on the market; filled to the brim with features that only some people need some of the time. I’m a firm believer that every time you add a feature to you are diminishing all other features. Adding features and especially adding elements to a user interface is not something to take lightly.

So that is the solution. Facebook and Salesforce showed us the way and this is what we are bringing to e-commerce: We are turning Shopify into a development platform and our merchants can supplement the pristine Shopify core with only the additional features they need. E-commerce à la carte.

The Shopify platform allows any programmer to create applications that integrate natively with the administration interface or storefront. These applications can be written in any language and communicate with Shopify using our handcrafted REST API. We even provide some amazing rails generators to get started quickly.

Obviously we need developers to make this happen. Reasons why you should develop for the Shopify Platform:

• Super fast start with the Shopify App rails generator
• Automatic marketing through the Shopify Application Store
• Soon we will launch the monetization system that allows you to bill merchants for using your applications directly through Shopify’s monthly billing system. We will deposit the money to you via Paypal.

The sum total is that Shopify is now as extensible as any self hosted Wordpress system but still hosted on a world-class server farm. It’s the best of both worlds and surely will be the way a lot of hosted apps will develop in the coming years.

Exciting times.