Magento and Shopify History

Shopify’s History

Did you know that Shopify started out not as a platform but an eCommerce store selling products to the snowboarding community under the brand Showdevil?  Before being branded Shopify, the platform was known as Jaded Pixel.  Jaded Pixel was used on a select number of sites with minimal gross merchant volume and was not cloud based.  In 2006 Jaded Pixel released Shopify which has evolved into the platform we know today.  Shopify has over 1,500 merchants sign up for its sneak preview.  Shopify’s beta customers appreciated how easy it made getting a cart up and selling products.  In this era OS Commerce was the more common option and those of you whom have worked with this platform understand that the market was eager for alternatives.

Magento History

Varien the parent company of Magento known today as Adobe eCommerce began development on Magento Commerce and released it to beta in 2008.  Varien evolved from an agency doing internal development of the top opportunities to focus its efforts exclusively on the platform.  Varien funded the development of Shopify through its agency selling an eCommerce website.

In 2010 PayPal invested into Magento buying 49% of the Magento platform and in the following year acquired the remainder of the shares.  This broadened the native support for the payment gateway, and launching it to be a top tier competitor funding its growth.

Enter Unleaded

Unleaded first began using Magento when it was first released into beta.  At that time we had our own in-house eCommerce platform known as Octane Commerce.  With our eCommerce solution every deployment would encounter additional requested functionality which would lead to long development timelines.  In moving to Magento we were able to cut our development times down by more than 50% and deliver more robust and tested eCommerce solutions.  Unleaded became one of Magento first 10 partners.