Before Magento, Shopify was our biggest hope for a fundamentally new e-commerce system. Those hopes haven’t materialized. Nevertheless, Shopify seems to be doing well and has recently raised $15 million growth capital:
"Shopify, a leading ecommerce platform used to create and power online stores, today announced that it closed a $15 million Series B growth investment from Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Felicis Ventures, and Georgian Partners.
This new investment adds to the $7 million of Series A funding received last year, providing a sizable balance to fund continued growth."
Shopify founder Tobias Lütke wrote in his blog:
"Within the coming weeks and months we have some really exciting announcements to make that will shed some light on how we will use the capital. New product features, new apps, themes, partnerships, and even a few surprises.
I’m especially excited about the $1M Shopify Fund that we are announcing alongside this funding event."
Shopify resisted for a long time against external funding, but nevertheless are now proceeding in a way quite ably as compared to Magento's approach (vis-à-vis X.commerce). As such, Shopify can use the capital injection to expand independently.
Shopify is based on Ruby on Rails, similar to the open source solution from Spree Commerce, who registered a seed round of $1.5 million last week.
In the summer, BigCommerce, a direct competitor to Shopify and Magento Go, also received $15 million in growth capital. All use a subscription/commissions based income model.
Shopping systems are currently attracting a lot of attention from VCs. Amongst the open source solutions, Prestashop recently completed their first financing round. Oxid also raised fresh capital.
Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.
Great to hear! Shopify is already an awesome system, now hopefully the old clunky ecommerce platforms will start to go away. http://promocodeshare.com/shopify-promos/ has user reviews on Shopify for those considering using it.
Posted by: Jason | 10/28/2011 at 02:17 AM