The founders were originally trying to run an online snowboard store and found the available software in 2004, like Yahoo Stores, inadequate. They built their own platform out of necessity, which later became Shopify.

Despite knowing customers would pay far more, Shopify intentionally underpriced its product. This lowered the barrier to entry for entrepreneurs, focusing on massive user acquisition and solving merchant problems first.

When a customer's flash sales repeatedly crashed the platform, Shopify treated the problem as a "gem"—a real-world stress test that forced them to build the high-scale infrastructure that became a core competitive advantage.

While third-party Shopify themes seem convenient, they risk becoming unsupported or outdated. For custom builds, the best practice is to use Shopify's native "Dawn" theme as a foundation. It's the most up-to-date and developer-friendly option, ensuring long-term compatibility and easier customization.

Shopify's VP of Engineering reveals a striking metric for their growth: the peak traffic and sales volume they handle on Black Friday becomes their normal, everyday traffic level just six months later. This relentless scaling requirement means they are perpetually engineering for a future that is multiples larger than their current peak.

In a candid admission of an aggressive competitive tactic, Shopify's President Harley Finkelstein said he used to post "should have been on Shopify" on X whenever a large retailer's website went down during Black Friday, turning their biggest vulnerability into a real-time public sales pitch.

Deliver's founder admits their logistics model (distributed inventory) wasn't a unique insight; Amazon had already mastered it. The true innovation was recognizing that the rise of Shopify created a new, underserved market of small merchants. By aggregating their inventory, Deliver could offer them Amazon-level fulfillment infrastructure.

Even as AI agents shift product discovery away from traditional websites, Shopify remains essential. Its core value lies in managing the complex post-purchase lifecycle—returns, shipping, order tracking, and customer data—making it a centralized operational hub that new discovery channels still rely on.

The true advantage for new AI-native companies lies not in simply using AI tools, but in building entirely new business models around them. This mirrors how Direct-to-Consumer brands leveraged Shopify not just to sell online, but to fundamentally change distribution, marketing, and customer relationships, thereby outmaneuvering incumbents.