Amazon vs Shopify: Founders, CEOs and History

Company facts

Founders

CEOs and their tenures

Timeline: Amazon and Shopify side by side

1. 1994Amazon

   Amazon Founded

   Jeff Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra, Inc. in Washington state on July 5, 1994, after leaving D. E. Shaw. He and MacKenzie Scott drove from New York to Seattle, and Bezos began building the website in the garage of a rented house in Bellevue.

2. 1995Amazon

   Amazon.com Launches

   Amazon.com went live on July 16, 1995, selling books. In the first month the site shipped orders to all fifty US states and forty-five other countries.

3. 1997Amazon

   IPO on NASDAQ

   Amazon went public on May 14, 1997, selling 3,000,000 shares at $18 each on NASDAQ under the ticker AMZN, raising $54 million. Net sales that year grew 838% to $147.8 million.

4. 2000Amazon

   Third-Party Marketplace Launch

   Amazon Marketplace launched in November 2000, letting third parties sell on the same product pages as Amazon. Third-party sellers accounted for 61% of paid units by the fourth quarter of 2025.

5. 2004Shopify

   Snowdevil Snowboard Store Engineered

   Tobias Lütke builds a custom Ruby on Rails shopping platform to sell snowboards online after rejecting clunky legacy e-commerce tools.

6. 2005Amazon

   Amazon Prime Introduced

   Amazon announced Prime on February 2, 2005, a $79-per-year membership with unlimited two-day delivery on about one million items. The US price is now $139 a year.

7. 2006Amazon

   AWS Launches Cloud Services

   Amazon Web Services announced Amazon S3 on March 14, 2006, followed by EC2 later that year. AWS reported $128.7 billion of net sales and $45.6 billion of operating income in FY2025.

8. 2006Shopify

   Commercial Launch of Shopify

   Lütke, Lake, and Weinand officially launch Shopify in Ottawa, offering subscription-based storefronts to small business entrepreneurs.

9. 2007Amazon

   Kindle E-Reader Launch

   Amazon released the first Kindle in November 2007 at $399, with free cellular downloads over Whispernet and the Kindle self-publishing service launched the same day.

10. 2009Shopify

    Shopify API & App Store Ecosystem

    Shopify introduces its developer API and App Store, sparking a large global developer ecosystem that builds thousands of custom merchant extensions.

11. 2012Amazon

    Kiva Systems Acquisition

    Amazon agreed in March 2012 to buy Kiva Systems for approximately $775 million in cash, bringing warehouse robotics in house. Kiva became Amazon Robotics.

12. 2013Shopify

    Launch of Shopify Payments

    Shopify launches integrated payment processing, capturing a lucrative percentage fee on global Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV).

13. 2014Amazon

    Twitch Acquisition

    Amazon agreed in August 2014 to acquire Twitch Interactive for approximately $970 million in cash, adding live game streaming and a creator community to its media assets.

14. 2015Amazon

    Echo and Alexa Reach Everyone

    Amazon introduced the Echo speaker and the Alexa assistant in November 2014 for Prime members by invitation, then made Echo generally available in the US in June 2015.

15. 2015Shopify

    Dual TSX and NYSE Initial Public Offering

    Shopify completes its dual IPO in Toronto and New York under ticker SHOP, raising $131 million to fuel international merchant expansion.

16. 2017Amazon

    Whole Foods Acquisition

    Amazon agreed in June 2017 to buy Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion including debt, adding roughly 460 stores and a physical grocery base for delivery and pickup.

17. 2017Shopify

    Shop Pay Accelerated Checkout Introduced

    Shopify releases Shop Pay, providing accelerated one-click checkout conversion across millions of storefronts and merchant apps.

18. 2021Amazon

    Andy Jassy Becomes CEO

    Amazon announced on February 2, 2021 that Jeff Bezos would move to executive chair and Andy Jassy would become CEO. The handover took place on July 5, 2021.

19. 2022Amazon

    MGM Acquisition Completed

    Amazon completed its acquisition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in March 2022 at a purchase price of $8.45 billion, adding a library of more than 4,000 films and 17,000 television episodes to Prime Video.

20. 2023Amazon

    One Medical Deal Closes and the FTC Sues

    Amazon completed its $3.9 billion acquisition of One Medical in February 2023. In September 2023 the FTC and 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon over marketplace practices, and that case is still unresolved.

21. 2023Shopify

    Divestiture of Logistics Arm Deliverr

    Shopify divests its capital-intensive fulfillment network to Flexport, shedding heavy logistics overhead and refocusing on high-margin software and enterprise retail.

22. 2025Amazon

    One Millionth Robot and Project Rainier

    Amazon deployed its one millionth robot in mid-2025 across more than 300 facilities and released the DeepFleet AI model to route them. In October 2025 AWS brought Project Rainier, a cluster of roughly 500,000 Trainium2 chips built with Anthropic, fully online.

23. 2025Amazon

    FTC Prime Settlement and the Amazon Leo Rebrand

    Amazon agreed in September 2025 to pay $2.5 billion to settle the FTC's Prime enrollment case, $1 billion in civil penalties plus $1.5 billion in customer refunds.

24. 2025Shopify

    Surpassing $11.55 Billion in Annual Revenue

    Shopify reports $11.556 billion in revenues, $1.231 billion in net income, and transfers its primary US stock listing to Nasdaq under ticker SHOP.

25. 2026Amazon

    Record FY2025 Results and 30,000 Corporate Cuts

    Amazon reported FY2025 net sales of $716.9 billion, operating income of $80.0 billion, and net income of $77.7 billion. In January 2026 it cut about 16,000 corporate roles, following 14,000 in October 2025.

26. 2026Shopify

    Q2 2026 Growth Accelerates

    Shopify reports 34% revenue growth and $115.6 billion of GMV for Q2 2026, after authorizing a $2 billion share buyback in February.

Acquisitions

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