Not to be confused with Spotify.
Shopify Inc., stylized as shopify is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario.
Criticism
In 2017, the #DeleteShopify hashtag campaign called for a boycott of Shopify for allowing Breitbart News to host a shop on its platform. Shopify's CEO, Tobias Lütke, responded to the criticism,[109] saying "refusing to do business with the site would constitute a violation of free speech".
In October 2017, Citron Research founder, short-seller Andrew Left released a report which claimed Shopify was overstating the number of merchants using the e-commerce platform and described it as a "get-rich-quick" scheme in contravention of Federal Trade Commission regulations. The day the report was released, the stock plunged more than 11%. Left wrote another report about Shopify in April 2019, stating he believed Shopify's stock price would come down 50% in the next 12 months. In January 2020, Left announced in his annual letter to investors that Citron Research had exited the short position. The reports did not lead to an investigation into Shopify by the FTC.
In July 2022, Shopify was criticized by left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters for hosting the online store of far-right, anti-LGBT influencer Libs of TikTok. In response to Media Matters, a Shopify spokesperson stated that Libs of TikTok was not in violation of the company's Acceptable Use Policy, which "clearly outlines the activities that are not permitted on [the] platform." In November 2022, this criticism was renewed when an article published by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) article highlighted Ottawa City Council member Ariel Troster's criticism of the company in light of a recent shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub. Sharing the CBC article, Nandini Jammi of Check My Ads criticized Shopify on Twitter. In response to Jammi, CEO Tobias Lütke tweeted, "Shopify has a published acceptable use policy and a principled process to apply it. Pressure groups on all sides try to influence it sometimes and CBC needs to see through that not amplify bad faith narrative."
Lawsuits
In December 2021, a group of publishers including Pearson Education, Inc., Macmillan Learning, Cengage Learning, Inc., Elsevier Inc., and McGraw Hill sued Shopify claiming that it had failed to remove listings and stores selling pirated copies of their books and learning materials. The lawsuit was settled "amicably" out of court; the details were not disclosed.
A class-action lawsuit for $130 million was filed in May 2023 by employees who had been laid off.
In June 2023 Shopify announced a fight against "patent trolls" who "stealthily orchestrate hundreds of patent litigation cases yearly", and filed a lawsuit.
Data breach
In September 2020, Shopify confirmed a data breach in which customer data from fewer than 200 merchants was stolen. One of those merchants later said over 4,900 of their customers alone had had their information accessed. Shopify claims that the data stolen included names, addresses and order details, but not "complete payment card numbers or other sensitive personal or financial information." Shopify said that there was no evidence that the data had been misused, and identified two "rogue members" of its support team as having been responsible. They were fired, and the matter was forwarded to the FBI.
Tobias "Tobi" Lütke MSC is a German/Canadian entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify, an e-commerce company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Lütke was born in Koblenz, Germany in 1981. He received a Schneider CPC (German brand of the Amstrad Colour Personal Computer distributed by the Schneider Rundfunkwerke AG) from his parents at the age of six. By 11 or 12, he began rewriting the code of the games he played and modifying computer hardware as a hobby. Lütke dropped out of school and entered an apprenticeship program at the Koblenzer Carl-Benz-School to become a computer programmer after tenth grade. He moved from Germany to Canada in 2002.
Reasons for posting the shady history of the Canadian based German run company Shopify and its Child Protege, owner Tobias Lutke will be cleared up soon.
