Company

The search for business financing can be endlessly frustrating. The banks don't want to lend to you because they say your company is too risky. Venture capitalists say you're not fundable, and angel investors...well, they can be hard to find as the name implies.

Is crowdfunding the answer? Kickstarter and Indiegogo can work well—especially if you can offer great rewards and you are really good at online marketing. But there's another way to raise money from the crowd.

It's called equity crowdfunding.

Now you can sell shares of your business to just about anyone. And no, it's not just for tech companies.

The search for business financing can be endlessly frustrating. The banks don't want to lend to you because they say your company is too risky. Venture capitalists say you're not fundable, and angel investors...well, they can be hard to find as the name implies.

Is crowdfunding the answer? Kickstarter and Indiegogo can work well—especially if you can offer great rewards and you are really good at online marketing. But there's another way to raise money from the crowd.

It's called equity crowdfunding.

Now you can sell shares of your business to just about anyone. And no, it's not just for tech companies.

On March 21st, we kicked off Unite, our first ever Partner and Developer conference, at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. The two-day event brought together hundreds of Shopify Partners and Developers from around the world—including New Zealand, Australia, Europe, and India—to discuss the future of Shopify, commerce, and technology.

Here’s a roundup of all the big news, and what it all means for you as a merchant.

Shopify Unite is a conference that brings together Shopify Partners—app developers, theme designers and more—from all over to talk about the future of commerce and Shopify.

In this special Shopify Masters podcast, you'll get inside insight about the direction of Shopify—and commerce as a whole—and what it means for all of our merchants.

Sell wherever your customers are. That’s long been the first rule of survival for any business.

And for the past decade that meant establishing a presence on social networks—Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter—and building excellent mobile experiences.

But over the last two years, messaging apps have started to outpace social networks when it comes to where we spend our time.

The era of conversational commerce is upon us and it's transforming messaging apps into so much more.

Kickstarter is a popular way to fund your product idea, assess demand and build hype at the same time.

Kyle Hart is an entrepreneur who's launched 6 Kickstarter campaigns and plans on launching 2 more this year.

In this episode of Shopify Masters, find out what trying, succeeding and failing with several Kickstarter campaigns taught Kyle about Rhino Camera Gear, a store that sells DSLR, Cinema and GoPro camera gear.

Your passions offer the best clue as to where you'll find happiness in life.

And we live in a world of endless possibilities where there are more ways than ever to make a living doing what you love.

On this Shopify Masters podcast, we talk to Eric Rosner, a designer-turned-entrepreneur who created The Art Pillow to showcase and share his passion for making art.

Bharat Sethi built Poster Gully to help artists, designers and creators start selling online while they took care of the end-to-end technology , production, logistics, quality control and support.

He chose to create a marketplace to fill a gap that existed in India where artists had no easy way to monetize their talents and, in turn, built a business helping his customers find their customers. 

Learn how he did it in this episode of Shopify Masters.

If you’ve been waiting for the right time to start selling on WordPress, the wait is over. Now, it’s easier than ever to add ecommerce to your WordPress site, and give it all the features and security that come with Shopify.

No matter how many businesses you start, you'll inevitably face the same hurdle in the beginning: Validating your business so you know it's worth pursuing.

For Mike Chamberlain, who went from running a small company to starting a new business from scratch, Facebook ads were the key to justifying Dust & Things, a store that sells personalized gifts for any occasion. 

Running your own store can sometimes have its low points - those sobering moments when you realize that things aren’t going so great. When you’re tired of putting in all those hours without anything to show for it and you have absolutely no idea what you should do next.

While these low points can sometimes be enough to make you want to give up, you really shouldn’t. We’ve put together a surefire strategy to help lift you over any obstacle standing between your business and long-term success.

Risk is a necessary part of entrepreneurship. And sometimes that means saying no to a sure-thing in the pursuit of something better. 

In this episode of Shopify Masters, find out why Marion Smith turned down a $150K salary in the paper crafts industry, and how she created her own independent brand to now earn 6-figures a month.