Today we’re thrilled to announce the five winners of our Build-A-Business competition.

During the 8 months of the competition period, over 10,000 entrepreneurs created new online businesses that sold more than $55 million in products. The five new businesses that sold the most over any two months of the competition each win a $50,000 US investment.

We sent each of the winners on a VIP trip to New York City to meet with the industry experts who served as mentors to the participants throughout the competition (Timothy Ferriss, Daymond John, Tina Roth Eisenberg and Eric Ries). Here's a glimpse of their trip to NYC:

In addition to the grand prize investment and NYC trip, each winner gets a special one-hour media strategy training session with editors at Fast Company Magazine, and $20,000 toward digital advertising for their business.

Here’s a visual overview of the competition, including our five amazing winners. You can click on the image to view in full-screen.

We’re excited to see so many great ideas grow into successful businesses through this competition. Our winners really took it to the next level, combining brilliant products with savvy marketing to sell an amazing amount of products.

Here’s a look at our five winning stores, their cool products, and the entrepreneurs behind it all:

GameKlip (Electronics & Gadgets)

GameKlip is the brainchild of gamer-turned-inventor Ryan French, an Applied Computational Math Science student at the University of Washington. Frustrated by the inefficient game controllers on his phone, Ryan crafted a precision-moulded clip to connect a PlayStation controller to his smart phone, allowing for mobile game play with a full-sized controller.

Ryan's product was originally created from simple resources. He bought a few sheets of plastic and used an industrial-strength hairdryer to shape the clip that attached the game controller to his phone. He was amazed at how well his creation turned out. “The simple piece of plastic transformed my phone into a real gaming machine,” said Ryan. “It worked so well, I had to share my creation with the world.”

Ryan decided to share his invention the way any true gamer would - he created a short video with his phone camera. When other gamers saw the video, they wanted clips of their own. Ryan started taking pre-orders and was blown away by the response.

“The first wave of orders was very exciting, but overwhelming. In the beginning, GameKlip was all handmade and built to order, which meant I had to spend most of my time bending plastic into the correct shape and processing orders. I had no ecommerce or order processing software at that time, so everything was done with a spreadsheet. I was working 18-20 hours a day, seven days a week, to build, process, pack, and ship my orders. Something had to change!"

"Discovering Shopify was one of the big turning points for my business. It was easy to set up and drastically cut down my workload. To further my productivity I setup ShipStation to automate the process of taking an order, generating a shipping label, and keeping records. The massive increase in workflow productivity allowed me to focus more on my product, and less on the busy-work.”

Ryan used his newfound “free” time to take his business to the next level. He purchased an injection mold so he could contract out the manufacturing of his product, and ensure the quality of each GameKlip was exactly the same.

Ryan French is still developing new iterations of GameKlip, and continues to grow his business online. He has shipped his product to over 80 countries, and has big plans for the future.

GoldieBlox (Design, Art & Home)

Debbie Sterling raised $285,881 on Kickstarter to fund her groundbreaking product: a construction toy that encourages young girls to get into engineering, develop spatial skills and hone problem-solving abilities.

From Bob the Builder to Star Wars Lego sets, engineering toys have traditionally been marketed to little boys. Debbie, a University of Stanford Engineering graduate, came up with the idea for GoldieBlox while discussing her career choice with a fellow female engineer.

“We were discussing why we became engineers. My colleague grew up with three older brothers and played with their hand-me-down Lego and Lincoln Logs. When it came time to pick a major, engineering seemed like a great choice, and it never occured to her that it was a weird career for girls. I started to think that I had missed out. My parents didn’t buy me construction toys because they didn’t think I would like them. They thought of them as boy’s toys. If I had played with construction toys as a kid, I probably would have developed my passion for engineering much earlier.”

Debbie set out to find examples of construction toys in the “girls” sections of toy stores, and was disappointed to discover very few options. “I started thinking about all the little girls out there who could be great engineers but would never even consider it. When I walked down the pink isle in the toy store, I felt like I was back in the 1950s," said Debbie. "This was an amazing opportunity to open little girls’ eyes to the possibilities of engineering. I became obsessed and it was all I could think about, all I wanted to do.”

Debbie created the character of Goldie, a spirited female engineer, to be her toy line’s mascot. The line’s debut toy, “GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine,” turns construction into a game, where little girls must build a belt drive to help Goldie’s dog chase his tail.

Fresh-Tops (Fashion & Apparel)

Fresh-Tops is a “bubble-gum, hipster-chic” fashion brand spawned by an orgy of glitter, ice cream and electro-pop. Creator Nella Chunky produces limited edition women’s clothing and accessories.

Nella’s success wasn’t an accident – she experimented with several different brands and clothing lines before she decided on the Fresh-Tops line. “We started up with a couple of designs and just went from there. We really listened to what our fans wanted. We listened to their suggestions and just kept experimenting,” said Nella.

Nella chooses new pieces for the Fresh-Tops clothing line based on suggestions and requests made by her fans on Facebook and Twitter. This novel and progressive use of social media meant that Nella was able to produce the exact product her fans wanted. She attributes her success to the relationship between her fans and her business: “You really have to listen to what people want, and then give it to them. You have to be flexible and keep adapting to their needs.”

SkinnyMe Tea ("Everything Else") 

Gretta van Riel created this successful brand of tea in order to help people detoxify and lose weight. The teas, made from natural ingredients, are said to increase metabolism and even improve digestion, complexion, and sleep.

Gretta was working as the digital marketing manager at a large media agency in Melbourne, Australia, when she came up with her great idea. “I actually had a dream about the teatox,” said Gretta. “I woke up with a name, an idea and a vision, and made the website using Shopify the very next day. It was so great to be able to have an idea and go from conception to inception so quickly with the help of Shopify.”

Gretta developed her line of teas using all natural ingredients that help people shed unwanted weight by increasing metabolism and removing harmful toxins from the body.

It wasn’t long before the sales started flooding in, and Gretta had a difficult decision to make. “I had to choose between a steady job that I liked, or following SkinnyMe, which was really my passion. Luckily the sales started coming in quickly, and that helped me make up my mind.”

“There aren't many other detox products on the market that utilise only tea and that are completely natural. So the concept has caught on quite nicely. It helps that the product works really well, with many of our customers experiencing some truly incredible results. This has meant that our vision was able to spread very quickly via social media and word of mouth.”

Now SkinnyMe Teas are popular all over the world, with their most popular product being the Teatox pack, an all-natural detox program.

Canadian Icons (Canadian Winner)

 

When Aron Slipacoff decided to create a store that sold Canadiana, he didn’t want it to be just another consumer website. Instead, he created a unique shopping experience where visitors can buy iconic Canadian items, and also get a taste of Canadian history and culture. The shop sells everything from mukluks to unique paintings by Group of Seven artist, Emily Carr. Even the service, which is prompt, friendly and trustworthy, is a truly Canadian experience.

The idea for the shop came out of Aron's deep love of Canadiana and his desire to share iconic Canadian products with the world. “I wanted to present Canada’s past in a new, contemporary way,” said Aron. “As someone who lived in the Canadian Arctic, I am really passionate about what Canada’s north offers the world geographically and culturally. I wanted people to experience the stories and products that are inspired by the north.”

Aron wanted his customers to understand why the Canadian products he sells are so special. “To fully appreciate a Canada Goose parka for example, you need to see its connection to Canada’s Arctic peoples, how Canada Goose works with Inuit elders on design, how the company gives back to these communities. You need a more complete picture of the uniquely Canadian connection to the product to really get the feel for what makes it iconic.”

So instead of launching a store that simply sold products, Aron built his shop to be a bit like a Canadian museum, with the history and stories of the product built into the shopping experience. 

“Items like Canada Goose coats and Manitobah Mukluks are being sold and admired all over the world, but the Canadian stories behind the brands were left untold. There is a trend now where people want to become more knowledgeable about what they consume and spend money on. The marriage of these ideas was how CanadianIcons.ca was born.”

Aron also wanted his customers to experience what Canadian culture is so well-known for: its friendliness and warmth. So he decided to ship orders for free. “We thought about it and decided to offer 90-minute delivery in the nation’s capital, and we offered next-day delivery everywhere else in the country. Living up to that promise was a challenge. Through all of the Canadian weather and the holiday rush, we realized pretty fast that fulfillment required daily attention and diligence." Aron's focus on service is what sets Canadian Icons apart, and has helped contribute to the business’ quick success.

At Shopify, we’re always working to take our products to the next level. Today we’re excited to announce Shopify for iPhone version 3.4 – with more added features and functionality than ever. We’ve updated the dashboard design, added new product management features, and made it easier to run multiple stores on your phone.

As always, the app let’s you:

• Get push notifications to your phone every time a new order comes in.
• Send shipping notifications to customers right from the post office.
• Fulfill an order from your car, a coffee shop, or the airport.
• Call or email a customer in one easy step.

But now we’ve made Shopify for iPhone even better. Keep reading for all the details.

Update 1: New Dashboard

Tracking trends in your sales is a great way to see what’s working and what isn’t, so that you can tweak your business strategies accordingly. Shopify for iPhone now lets you track your shop’s progress by the week or month, giving you a bigger-picture look at how your store is doing.

We’ve also updated the dashboard to reflect Shopify 2 – the brand new Shopify admin that’s in beta now. This faster, more intuitive mobile dashboard lets you monitor the status of your store on the go, while being remarkably similar to your new desktop admin.

Update 2: Edit Products

Shopify for iPhone v3.4 makes it possible to edit products from your iPhone. You can add new products on the go by heading to the product list from the main menu and tapping the add button. You can also update inventory numbers for all your product variants directly from the detail screen.

Additionally, it’s now possible to take and upload product photos right from your phone. Add photos to new or existing products, and easily change their order by dragging to rearrange.

Update 3: Multiple Accounts

The iPhone app now supports numerous accounts: you can run more than one shop on your iPhone. For example, if you have 3 Shopify stores, you can manage all 3 from the same iPhone app. It’s easy to add a new account right from the settings screen.

Additionally, your shop can be managed from multiple phones. Your employees can download the app and use their iOS devices to run your store the same way they would with staff accounts on the desktop admin.

 

Shopify for iPhone makes it easier than ever to run your store on the go. And as always, the Shopify for iPhone App is completely free.

 

To download the app, click on the button below:

Download

We have 10 new apps that cover a huge range of functionality to announce. Many of these apps are free (or at least include a free trial), so don't hesitate to give them a try.

If you don't know already, the Shopify App Store is a collection of plugins (apps) that extend the functionality of your ecommerce store. We've got more than 200 apps for online store owners to choose from and we're adding new ones every week.

Here are 10 brand new apps to check out, along with a special featured app at the bottom: 

Updater is a free app that allows you to quickly and easily edit products in bulk on your Shopify store. Save time by editing all variants and products at the same time.

Klaviyo Email Template Creator let's you generate custom email templates for your shop. Never send a boring automated email again.

Do you have multiple vendors selling products through your Shopify store? With Transparent Kitty, you can give each vendor an account to view how their products are selling through your store.

Looking for a super-powerful digital delivery app for your digital goods? Downtown handles everything from serial number provisioning to PDF and ePub stamping.

Are you getting enough return on your store's social power? Justuno allows you to bribe your customers with incentives for sharing your products on their favorite social networks. 

Xporter lets you create custom reports for your Shopify store. Instantly generate spreadsheets of your shop's data and have them stored on a server or emailed to you at an interval of your choice. 

This app lets you offer tons of options for each on of your products, including image uploads for printed products and more.

Do you offer local delivery to customers in your hometown? Easily offer and coordinate local delivery with your customers.

Simple Sale allows you to put your whole store or individual collections on sale for a limited time, then automatically change the prices back after the sale is over.

Personal Bar is a free app that puts a customizable bar at the bottom of your store through which you can add social sharing options, discounts, and more.

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Get your Shopify data almost anywhere with Zapier's hundreds of supported services. Easily sync up with Xero, Mailchimp, Wordpress, Campfire, and tons more.

We’re always working to make Shopify faster, more powerful, and easier to use. 

Several months ago we announced the private beta of Shopify 2.

Shopify 2 is a complete rewrite and redesign of our platform, and it will allow us to release new features at a much faster pace. This year we will be adding a considerable amount of functionality to help you run your store. 

Here are just a few of our improvements: 

Order Editing

Customers can often make mistakes when checking out. With Shopify 2, we’ve made it really easy to edit, refund, and partially refund orders.

Merchants using most major payment gateways can now easily offer partial refunds. No longer do you need to cancel an order to process a refund. This is particularly useful when shipping costs change, items go out of stock, or you want to offer a discount for whatever reason.

We also added shipping address editing, so if your customer puts in the wrong shipping address, you can easily make that change.

Product Variant Editing

A product variant is all the different versions of a product - like size, color, and material. For those of you who have products with lots of variants, we have made adding and editing products fast and easy.

In Shopify 2, when you add a product, you can quickly create variants with multiple dimensions. For example, if you sell t-shirts with different sizes, colors, SKUs, weights, and stock levels, instead of creating 20 different products, you can do it all in one motion.

Live Theme Editing

How your store looks can really impact your sales. With Shopify 2, you can customize the look of your store in a live preview window before publishing your new design. You can change your background color, link colors, page visibility, and most other theme settings.

Abandoned Checkout

On average, about 67% of all online sales are abandoned while checking out. In Shopify 2, we now list abandoned checkouts on their own page. You can easily see the name, email and shipping address for customers that started checking out but didn’t complete a transaction with your store. You can even email them a link to continue their checkout where they left it off. Handling abandoned checkouts can be a great way to increase sales. 

Filtering & Search

Larger stores often have a hard time filtering and searching through all their products, inventory and products. Shopify 2 includes an improved new search engine that gives you better product and inventory management.

Now you can fine-tune your search within each of your resources (products, orders, pages, blogs, etc) with more powerful search capabilities. For example, you can easily find all open Canadian orders or all orders of a particular product and process them together quickly.

Marketing Features

Once you’ve launched your store you’re only half the way there - you need to get some customers. Shopify 2 includes more built-in SEO and marketing features. Not only can you change page titles and image alt tags, but also edit meta descriptions for products, collections and blog posts.

Shopify 2 also includes support for Retargeting with Google Analytics, editable blog dates, and more. 

Moving Forward

Shopify 2 is currently in private Beta - we will be opening Shopify 2 up to all of our existing merchants and new signups soon. 

Jonathan Snook

2. What's Your Competition?

What does the competitive landscape look like for your product? Are there no competitors, a few competitors or many?

If there are a lot of players in your niche, it can be a signal that the market has been validated. In order to break thought though, you will have to do something different to attract customer attention and build market share.

Example: Shopify store Luxy Hair wasn’t the first company to sell hair extensions online, the market was filled with competitors when they began two years ago. Right from the start they knew they had to do something different. Luxy entered the game with a different marketing strategy by offering value for free in the form of video tutorials on YouTube.

2 years and over 700,000 YouTube subscribers later, they are now one of the biggest online hair extension retailers in the world. 

To celebrate 2012 we put together an infographic to highlight memorable moments, groundbreaking milestones, statistics and events from within the Shopify ecosystem.  

It was a phenomenal year for Shopify and our wonderful store owners. Thanks to everyone for being awesome, and here's to making 2013 even better! Click on the image to zoom in.

Most domain names for your Shopify store now cost just $9. If you’re using the free yourstore.myshopify.com address for your online store, now is the time to register your store a professional domain name. The benefits of owning your own domain are plenty, and using Shopify to register a domain is fast and easy.

Does your online store already have a custom domain name? It’s a good idea to protect your brand name and register all other possible domain extensions for your online store.

Here are the benefits of registering a .com, .net or other domain name with Shopify:

• It’s the easiest, fastest way to register and activate a domain for your store.
• You receive 1 year of use, automatically renewed until you cancel your Shopify store or domain.
• We handle all the technical stuff like DNS settings and CNAMEs.
• Automatic setup of http://yourstore.com, http://www.yourstore.com and http://shop.yourstore.com.
• Optional access to full DNS configuration and WHOIS details, in case you need to make manual changes.

To buy a domain name for your Shopify store using "Shopify Classic" click here.

Since we released Catalog last month, its growth has been enormous. Already, over 20,000 people have installed our new iPad shopping app and it has a 4+ star rating in the Apple App Store.

Most importantly, Catalog is helping shoppers find Shopify merchants’ products. To date, there have been over 5 million product impressions! Also, over 23,000 new Shopify stores have been discovered through Catalog, and sales continue to grow.

Catalog 1.2

Today we’re launching Catalog 1.2, an update that includes some exciting functionality many of you requested.

Here are some of the improvements:
 

• We’ve added full cart functionality, so shoppers can now add multiple items to their shopping cart.
• When Catalog is downloaded from a smart-banner, your store is automatically opened and your products will be displayed within the app.
• Huge performance enhancements have increased page load speeds by 400%.
• The ‘Products I Love’ page will now let users bookmark their favorite products.
• Shopify merchants can now filter specific products and collections so they won’t be displayed in Catalog.
• Download Catalog 1.2 here. 

Introducing: Catalog Manager

In this month's edition of the App Store Showcase, we've got 12 amazing new apps that will extend the awesomeness of your Shopify store. Most of these apps have a free trial so you can take them for a test-spin without any risk. Better yet, some of the apps are entirely free. 

If you don't know already, the Shopify App Store is a collection of plugins (apps) that extend the functionality of your ecommerce store. We've got more than 200 apps for online store owners to choose from and we're adding new ones every week.

Here are 12 brand new Shopify Apps to check out, along with a special featured app at the bottom: 

This app will show your customer profiles from dozens of SaaS apps simply by hovering over their email. Many Shopify merchants are using Zenbox to for Shopify and MailChimp - so  you can instantly view and update customer information for both systems. You really do have to see this tool to understand how much it will help your business.

Easily create and run social media promotions to promote word of mouth marketing and offer great prizes to those who participate.

This is a quick, easy and free way to list your shop's products on one of the most popular shopping engines on the Internet. If you haven't tried listing your products on a shopping search engine, now is your perfect opportunity.  

Moving over to Shopify from another platform, or need to set up tons of page redirects for some other reason? This app makes it super-easy to get all of your old URLs pointing to the right place.

Dead simple order and inventory management. Take an order through any channel and process it in seconds from anywhere.

Add a shipping calculator to any shop really quick. This app will help you prevent cart abandonments due to unknown shipping costs. 

Makes it easier then ever to offer cuper customizable products to your shop – let users upload files, add text, and more for all of your customizable products.

Analyze and track shop analytics like conversion rates, cart abandonmenents, and sales in real time.

With this app you can co-sponsor a number of great prizes to offer your customers. Simply share a fraction (e.g. $10) of the prize cost with other small businesses, and offer your online store visitors a chance to win a prize. 

This app will let you create different price tiers for products based on the quantity a customer buys. Example: You can set it up so a customer can buy 5 of any product in a group to get 10% off. (Buy 5 or more of any hat and receive 10% off)

Easily create and generate the code for a highly customizable and beautiful contact widget to place on your site – for free!

Easily submit your products to a bunch of comparison and shopping search engines – with great support, search engine requests are just an email away.

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Cut your customer support inbox in half by offering a powerful knowledge base solution to your customers branded to match your shop's design exactly.

On Cyber Monday we processed up to 124 sales per second (2,008 / minute) - more than double that of Black Friday.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are always the busiest shopping days of the year. This Black Friday Shopify merchants sold 198,809 products (compared to 102K last year), and on Cyber Monday they sold an impressive 420,956 products (compared to 216K last year). It was a record breaking weekend for our merchants, and I’m so happy we kicked off the holiday shopping season with a bang.

One of the key groups at Shopify is the performance and operations team. Their goal is to ensure our platform is the fastest, most reliable and secure ecommerce system available. To prepare for this massive influx of traffic and sales, our team made major investments and upgrades to our core infrastructure. With these upgrades, we’re not only bulking up our internal systems, but also significantly improving our over 35,000 store's performance. For example, we have already improved the average response time of all our ecommerce stores to an industry leading 58ms.

I’m going to share with you some of the core infrastructure improvements we have made, but be warned that a lot of this information is pretty technical. The tl;dr is we're constantly working hard to ensure your store can handle any volume of transactions.

Conan, The Traffic Simulator

Payment Backgrounding

One of the issues with high volume sales days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday is that some payment gateways are slow, and their performance can slow down everything else. Payment gateways take at least 2 seconds and up to 30 seconds to process the payment request, which greatly limited Shopify's concurrency on extremely busy days.

We have moved the payment step to a background job, and now show customers a spinner page, which keeps front end resources ready to serve other fast requests. This increased our maximum throughput in raw requests per second and had a huge impact on how many checkouts we could process concurrently, allowing us to process hundreds of purchases per second.

Caching Improvements

We've also increased the size of our page caching layer by 400%, and we're working hard on putting more and more intermediate data into cache. Our cache horizon grew such that we do an average of 20% more cache hits, which means customers get a virtually instant pageload in most cases. For cache misses we go to memcache before the database for a lot of the hot data which improves page load times as well as reduces load on the databases. We now have over 500GB of cache in total.

Also of note is that our generational caching strategy (affectionately known as “Tobi Caching” - a clever caching strategy that our CEO Tobi developed) continues to work well to this day. Aggressive Tobi Caching on all storefront pages was key in reducing load - such that pages not found in the cache could be built quickly.

Database Upgrades

We have upgraded our master database servers from Dell R710 with dual quad-core CPUs and 192GB of RAM to the latest Dell R820 with quad eight-core CPUs and 256GB of RAM. MySQL’s InnoDB engine scales extremely well with additional CPU cores and the extra memory let’s us keep more data in cache.

Read/Write Database Splitting

We have implemented read write splitting of our databases, which means that we now have multiple slave databases which serve read queries and then one write database serving as the master where mutation queries are served.

This takes a significant amount of load off our master database (so far up to 1 million queries per minute), which is critical to have available for serving more writes during flash sale types of events.

About 95% of queries on Shopify are reads, so they are directed to the read slaves, while the master handles the other 5% of the traffic. These read slaves can also be scaled horizontally as more and more shops sign up on the platform.

More Application Servers

We have doubled the amount of our application servers. Application servers run the pages for all storefronts, and having more of them means that we can serve even more clients concurrently.

Going Forward

This summary only scratches the surface of what we have done, and have planned for the future. If you're interested in the nitty gritty of how we halved Shopify’s response time and more than tripled maximum throughput - we'll soon be posting deep dives into each of the major changes we’ve made, and we’ll explain why we settled on each solution as well as what other solutions were evaluated.

Want to solve interesting and challenging core infrastructure problems? We’re hiring.