March 12, 2010
By the ZippyCart Ecommerce Software Content Team
Shopify is a very popular ecommerce software solution out of Ottawa, Canada, that has been gaining in popularity thanks to their innovative business competition. The “Build a Business” contest started in January and allows any new Shopify enabled ecommerce store in the United States to participate. This contest is based upon revenue, generated from the Shopify ecommerce site, from a merchant’s two best selling months during January to June 30th. Shopify will award this winner $100,000 while also giving out four $5,000 prizes to the top store in their digital goods, apparel, electronics, or miscellaneous categories. If this is a contest you’re interested in, you need to sign up by April 30th so that you can have two full months of sales for your ecommerce store, so Shopify can measure your revenue against other shops.
Shopify CEO and founder Tobias Lütke partnered with Tim Ferriss who is an angel investor and author of the Four Hour Work Week, in order to put on the “Build a Business” contest. The two partnered up in 2009 and came up with the idea after chatting about wantreprenuers who never really commit to their ecommerce ideas and only talk about them. They spent about four months working out all of the details for the contest as well as the development of the online site and tools. Ferriss and his book are all about working smart, and not hard, so he encourages things like automation, outsourcing, and drop shipping, which can be done with Shopify. These techniques may have a lower margin, but require very little work for the owner of the ecommerce site, and if executed properly could yield a great return on investment. The bottom line is that this is a business venture, and if they do not create enough new business through this contest, then they will not recoup the prize money that they put up. This is, however, a perfect opportunity for someone to start a new Shopify ecommerce store, and have an excellent shot to win the prize money, as there are only about 1,000 competitors in the contest thus far.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
