Shopify gifts employees with $1,000 in holiday bonus

The Ottawa-based e-commerce and tech company Shopify celebrates the Christmas season by giving its employees shopping credits of up to $1,000 to be spent with Shopify merchants.

Craig Miller, Chief Marketing Officer of Shopify told CNN that the company "had a really incredible year and we wanted to give a big thank you to our employees, but also thank our merchants."

Shopify, the Canadian e-commerce company, went public on New York Stock Exchange in May this year, and its technology has been used by over 200,000 merchants from accessory pins, toys, mattress and even Tesla Motors.

This year, the company's revenue grew by 93% based on its third quarter report and its gross merchandise volume had experienced 101% growth. The overall company's gross result increases by 77% year on year to $28.7 million, compare to last year's $16.2 million.

A successful year worthy of celebration for an 11-year old company.

The company is well known for its generosity to its employees. According to Ottawa Citizen, Shopify gave its employees $1,000 to spend on travel last year. While in 2013, the employees were given a two-days ski and snowboard holiday to Mont Tremblant.

Its 2013 holiday bonus is a tribute to its root that started in 2004 as Snowdevil, an online shop for snowboarding equipment.

The three founders, Tobias Lutke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake who were unsatisfied with existing e-commerce platform decided to give a try in developing its own e-commerce platform. Lutke built the Snowdevil using Ruby on Rails web application framework and finished the development in two months.

When the snowboarding online shop became successful, the founders then began to offer its e-commerce platform and marketed it as Shopify in 2006. Shopify is also equipped with its own integrated credit card payment processing system: Shopify Payments. Starting from August 2013, when the payment system was launched, Shopify's merchants are able to accept credit cards payment without a third party payment gateway.

In April this year, Shopify filed for IPO with Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and RBC Capital Markets as some of the underwriters. Investors that backed Shopify on its IPO are venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, OMERS Ventures II and Canadian investment and consulting company Klister Credit. The company started its market debut on May 21 in New York Stock Exchange.

According to Beta Kit, Shopify encouraged its merchants to tweet or post to Instagram to encourage Shopify employees to make a purchase.

On the other hand, the company also encourages its merchants to also make $5 purchase in other merchants' store.

Shopify has more than 1,000 employees in Ottawa, Toronto, Waterloo and California. Combining them all, there will be a total $1 million money ready to be spent in Shopify's merchant stores.