We released Shopify to the public on June 2. 2006. Wow. Has it already been a year?

Shopify’s success has been nothing short of amazing. Millions of dollars worth of products have been sold courtesy of our software and we managed to attract some of the best designers in the industry to create Shopify stores and themes. Tens of thousands of stores have opened shop and hundreds more join them every week.

The quality of the design work we see daily is the most gratifying aspect of Shopify’s success. Jaded Pixel has always been a very visual company and it’s great to see that good design attracts good design.

But not only did we revolutionize the tired e-commerce industry on the visual design front; the code of Shopify is also much talked about in web development circles. In fact, you could hear people discussing Shopify in the presentations and in the corridors during the recent RailsConf in Portland. We love open source and we contributed a lot of projects back to the community. Without open source Shopify could never have been made. Amongst the contributions were endless enhancements to the Ruby on Rails project, the release of our template language Liquid and our payment processor library ActiveMerchant.

To celebrate our birthday we commissioned Jared Burns of Scrapbook your memories and Vorsat fame to create a new theme for us: Vogue. It’s now available in the Look & Feel section ready to be applied.

Vogue is our most flexible theme so far. There are some tutorials for customizations on the demo page such as Adding a logo and Switching Color Palettes.

What’s to come? Jaded Pixel is 100% committed to Shopify and this will remain our focus. Our goal this year will be to make Shopify work better for bigger merchants and help with the promotion of our customers’ products. Things you will see in Shopify in the future:

• API support to make it dead easy for third party applications to extend Shopify
• Digital goods
• Bulk import / export
• Integration with shipping services such as USPS
• The Shopify Marketplace

Here are just a few of the things we integrated in the first year of Shopify:

• Bring your own domain feature
• Internationalization support of the checkout process. 34 complete translations done by the community!
• Robust search system
• OpenID support for login and signup
• Discount codes
• Marketing tab to help drive traffic to your store
• Dashboard tab with realtime visitor statistics
• Admin-wide quick search feature
• Fulfillment services support
• Taxation options for European countries (VAT)
• Support for sitemap.xml
• Microformats
• COD, Money order, Direct debit
• 5 new themes
• 19 new payment gateways
• Google Checkout integration
• Paypal Payments Pro integration