Shopify raises additional $100 million in funding, enters offline payments

Canada based Ecommerce platform provider Shopify, has gained an additional $100 million in funding from existing investors OMERS Ventures and Insight Venture Partners.

The funding will not only help with enhancing their current platform, but Shopify also intends to expand to the offline payment sector, and will concentrate on physical point-of-sale transactions. This is the third round of funding for Shopify, and they have raised $22 million in seed funding throughout 2010 and 2011. The original $22 million were also invested by OMERS Ventures and Insight Venture Partners.

Shopify has grown since its conception in 2006, and plans to end the year with $1.5 billion in products sold through their platform. Last year Shopify processed over $750 million with 40,000 merchants. This year the amount of merchants has doubled to result in over 80,000 sellers who use Shopify’s Ecommerce platform.

“In terms of why we’re raising, we’ve talked about what we see as the future of retail. There’s kind of this concept that the future of retail is online vs. offline, or just online. We don’t actually believe that; what we believe is that the future of retail is all about consumer choice.” Harley Finkelstein, Chief Product Officer for Shopify.

Shopify’s new model is to provide support for all merchants, by providing their current online solutions, and adding POS and mobile card reader support. Adding physical merchant options will put Shopify on par with companies like Square, and PayPal Here.

In related news: Shopify officially supports Bitcoin transactions.