All they wanted to do was sell some snowboards on the Internet, but Scott lake and Tobias Lutke kept wiping out.

It should have been easy for two Ottawa-based guys who both have backgrounds working in information technology. Mr. Lake had been a vice-president of Tomoye Corp., which sells software to help people collaborate, while Mr. Lutke had helped create Typo, a product for setting up blogs. But when they tried to start their own on-line business, Snowdevil, they hit the same obstacles most budding e-commerce entrepreneurs do: All the tools they needed seemed to be designed for Fortune 500 companies.

"We went out and looked at every hosted e-commerce shopping cart, and got frustrated in that they were so complicated," Mr. Lake says. "And we're both technical guys."

Their solution was to create the technology they needed from scratch, and the result is a service called Shopify. It's one of a small but growing number of indicators that show the IT industry is finally beginning to tailor e-commerce to the needs of smaller businesses.

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