Behind the Scenes

At Shopify we’re all pretty competitive, and are serious about settling differences in a professional way. This is why we decided to start out first (annual?) Shopify Street Fighter 4 Tournament.

We’re playing a double elimination-style tournament using Challonge!, and you can see the live bracket by clicking on the image below. So far the battles have been intense, with some really close fights and some trash talking. We’ll be posting the results sometime next week.

If you think you’re good enough to join future Shopify tournaments, click here.

Here at Shopify we’re always looking for ways to improve the Shopify experience. One of the biggest challenges any business can face is providing fast, effective support for its customers.

Our support tracking system, Tender App, helps us track all of our support tickets and gives us statistics on the average support response time per ticket. We’ve recently passed a new milestone. We were able to reduce the average response time per ticket from approximately 1 day down to just over 5 hours! Here is some background on how support at Shopify works:

Up until this year the majority of support for Shopify was performed by one official Shopify staff (Mike), along with unofficial help from our great community of developers and designers (Thanks Caroline, Jamie, and all the others!). This method of “crowd sourcing” support worked well, but over time demand for support grew to the point where this model started to show its flaws. We’ve recently implemented support changes that we feel work to correct these flaws. We hope you’ll feel that way, too!

Just what has been done at Shopify to beef up support?

1. Support Team grows

We added another dedicated support staff a while back, Peter, to help answer your questions and give direction to your requests. He’s also been busy beefing up the support Knowledge Database as new topics come to light. You can access the knowledge base by using the links at the top of the Shopify support area.

2. Level 2, the next step

We’ve also more recently implemented a rotating Level 2 Support system by which the Shopify developers each take turns addressing problems that require escalation. This is probably the biggest change we’ve made to our support model, and it’s what has allowed us to really speed up support response times. With the old method, questions would be submitted to the developers in a free-for-all type setting, often there would be confusion as to whom the task would go to, leading to slow-downs and dropped-tickets. Now, by working on a weekly cycle with a dedicated developer, it allows our other developers to continue to work on improving Shopify, while still giving you the benefit of dedicated developer support for your tougher problems.

3. Whats next?

As we continue to grow, Shopify support will grow, too. We will be adding new sections to the support system (check out the new API section we’ve just added, and look for more coming soon). We will also be hiring more support staff in the near future to help with these new sections. Also, we will be taking suggestions from you, and others, as to how you feel we can better improve your Shopify experience. Feel free to comment on this article and let us know what you think! With your help, we can make Shopify the friendliest eCommerce solution going.

Happy Selling :-)

- Dev team, writing story cards for next Shopify iteration.

One of the perks of being in the great white north are the unique means of transportation:

Our employee Jesse talks about how he enjoys skating to work every day.

eBoy was so happy with our Mike, our valiant white knight of customer service, that they sent us some of their brilliant pixel art posters.

We got them laminated and the FooBar one is now the center piece in our board room.

Thank you so much eBoy, you guys rock.

Good news: Shopify has a new PixelPlex!

Today seems very far from the days when the Shopify team used the local Bridgehead coffee shop as their virtual office. After several months of bribing the baristas to look the other way as they took up tables for hours on end, Scott, Tobi and Daniel moved into a charming office space in late 2005. The office was conveniently located on Elgin street in Ottawa, the right price, and perfect for three people – you can see the original “moving in” pictures here. And when jaded Pixel grew, the space was even perfect for four. Then five. But when we hit nine, well, things got a little tight:


_{Tobi and Cody at close quarters}

A day wasn’t complete without blowing a fuse from using too much power, without pushing your chair back and knocking the person behind you over, or without having to make your phone calls in the hallway (much to our neighbours’ dismay!) We were bursting at the seams and definitely ready for a change. We’ve been searching for new office space for several months now and finally, as of yesterday, we’ve moved in! Our new digs are at 185 Rideau Street in Ottawa – right in the heart of the ByWard Market. Our new space is about four times the size of the old one, with lovely exposed stone walls, shiny polished concrete floors and best of all, plenty of room for everyone without having to trip over each other.



<sub>Chairs to distribute and desks to assemble


Working around the ladders


First things first – set up the TV


Wide open spaces til we get the new walls in</sub>

We’re still putting on the finishing touches – such as installing cool, funky Starwalls to create a boardroom and meeting room, finishing the light fixtures, getting some new furniture in and getting everyone settled into their new roomy spots. We’ll be uploading more photos to the Flickr stream as work progresses, so keep checking. Once we’re finished, we’ll definitely be celebrating and inviting everyone – so stay tuned for the details!

Tobi is a programmer through and through and has the artistic ineptitude to prove it. Born and raised in Germany, he dropped out of high school because they weren’t teaching anything related to computers. After immigrating to Canada, he founded jadedPixel with Scott to start a Snowboarding retail store which lead to the experience needed to create Shopify. While working on Shopify, Tobi released lots of open source projects and was recruited to the core team for the web 2.0 poster child programming environment: Ruby on Rails.

In his past lives, Scott has been a bike messenger, a university lecturer and a professional driver at NATO. Since getting into high tech, he has worked at three start-ups and has sold and supported software to some of the largest organizations in the world.

Scott is a big fan of snowboarding, iyengar yoga and ultimate frisbee. He is also a published writer, an exhibited artist and holds a PhD in Political Science. At jaded Pixel, Scott moves all the paperwork from the inbox to the outbox and once in a while has a good idea.

Born and raised in Germany, Daniel decided to study computer science and music at the University of Dortmund. He discovered a new joy in programming after encountering Ruby. He is also extremely excited about anything artsy fartsy, may it be advertising, photography or interface design.

He likes snowboarding, climbing, boardgames, coffee, sushi and weird music.

Besides working on Shopify he has a foot in the open source community.

After finishing his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, Cody found himself hooked on Ruby on Rails and living in Ottawa. Realizing that Tobi was also in Ottawa, Cody emailed him out of the blue to chat about Rails. The rest, they say, is history.

When not soliciting strangers to talk about programming, Cody also enjoys snowboarding, climbing, biking, and traveling to new places.

Cody is the author of RJS Templates for Rails, and the open source eBay API Library for Ruby.