It was the summer of 2006. Harley Finkelstein was a law student at the University of Ottawa. He went to law school on the advice of a mentor who said he should treat law school like a finishing school for business and entrepreneurship. And he did. During one of his tax law classes, Finkelstein hit the launch button on his Shopify store.

About 20 years later, Finkelstein is now president at Shopify, but was one of the first merchants to start selling on this very platform. He recalls it was an “aha moment” that pretty much changed his life. “That was the magic of Shopify,” he said. “When you take someone with ambition and you mix it with this magical software, you end up with a life-changing opportunity,” Finkelstein said in an interview with Retail Brew.

Shopify launched in 2006 with its first ever store called Snowdevil. But it wasn’t until 2009 that the Canadian software giant found its groove. The launch of its app store essentially opened up Shopify’s ecosystem to third-party developers. Today, that same app store is a sheet of 16,000 apps. This marked the beginning of Shopify’s evolution from a basic tech company to a major e-commerce platform. Other key milestones include the 2014 launch of Shopify Plus, an advanced e-commerce platform for larger merchants, and the 2017 introduction of its checkout feature Shopify Pay.

Overall, Shopify has hit several others—it went public, moved into physical retail, payments, merchant solutions, and more. Today, the platform accounts for 12% of all e-commerce in the US. It provides merchants with multiple services to operate an online store, from e-commerce website hosting and inventory management to payment processing. But it was the Covid-19 pandemic that turbocharged Shopify’s growth and made it a true story of the 21st century.

Keep reading here.—VC

Walmart is taking a cue from honey bees with a new data science model that carves the US into hexagonal grids designed to help make home deliveries speedier and more efficient, while also extending the offering to 12 million more households.

“What was once just out of reach is now within range, ensuring even more households have access to the essentials they rely on—delivered fast and reliably right to their doorstep,” the company wrote in a blog post.

This new geospatial platform does away with traditional boundaries such as zip codes and instead creates a series of grids or “tiles,” as Walmart described them, each of which has its own set of data points such as drive times, store capacity, and customer demand.

Walmart praised the six-sided geometric structure as uniquely efficient, saying that “unlike square or circular grids, which can create inefficiencies and leave out small areas at the edges, this system ensures that every point within a delivery zone is included.”

In addition, under the new system, customers can order deliveries from multiple Walmart stores within their grid, increasing the odds that a given product will be available.

Keep reading here.—AV

In honor of Earth Day on Tuesday, a number of retailers are offering discounts and promotions, and some are even keeping in the spirit of the holiday. Now through May 16, Apple is offering 10% off eligible accessories for customers who bring in an old device for recycling.

Here’s what else is going on in retail this week:

In conferences: Starting this Sunday, the Retail Industry Leaders Association is hosting its annual Retail Asset Protection Conference in Washington, DC. The event brings together industry professionals for a series of panels and workshops focused on sharing best practices around asset protection, security, and operations. Topics on the agenda include how to handle theft and violence in stores; breakthroughs in occupational safety; new technology designed to help asset protection; and innovations in inventory management. At last year’s conference, Amazon, Gap Inc., Nordstrom, and Family Dollar, to name a few, sent representatives.

Keep reading here.—AV