Shopify, which provides a turnkey e-commerce technology that lets anyone create a storefront online, has acquired mobile app and game studio Select Start Studios.

The acquisition will be used to further Shopify’s mobile commerce initiatives. While all Shopify stores already include mobile optimized storefronts and checkouts, the acquisition of S3 will bring over 20 new mobile-focused engineers to the Shopify team to continue developing mobile offerings for merchants.

Shopify’s web-based platform allows anyone to set up a store in moments, add items to sell, upload images, add tags and group items, and integrate PayPal or other credit card processor for payments. Storefronts and shopping carts can be customized and the platform assures security for all transactions. Today, the ecommerce platform has over 20,000 active online stores in 80 different countries.

for example, Angry Birds uses Shopify’s platform for e-commerce sales (and a sizable portion of Angry Birds online store’s sales are made through a mobile device, says the company). Shopify recently raised $15 million in new funding.

Initially soft launching in London’s trendy Brick Lane and Portobello road areas, Khojan is described as an online shopping community that allows shoppers to buy products, view profiles and interact with individual shops all within one platform. Users can either browse by products, essentially rolling up all that is on offer, or by independent store, which works quite well to give a flavour of the diversity and characteristic of these iconic areas of London. Additionally, the site offers a search feature.

So, for example, Brick Lane reveals “Eastside Books”, a thirty year old independent book store, alongside “Mendoza Menswear”, which does a line in vintage menswear. Obviously, for stores like these perhaps getting online isn’t highest on the priority list, relying instead on tourist and local visitor footfall.

Nonetheless, the web offers the potential for repeat and extended trading as well as a marketing boost and would seem a no brainer if the costs can be kept down and the barriers low. Which is exactly the problem that Khojan is trying to solve.

On Khojan’s platform, the shops themselves get a profile with a fully functioning online store from which they can add and manage products, transactions (via PayPal) and view reports. There is also the option for buyers to pay and collect in store, which would seem a very good fit.

Having only soft launched, the priority for Khojan at the moment is to work with shops, getting their products and profiles uploaded and ready for customers. So far they’ve signed up 33 shops and say they have more shops and products coming online this week, which would certainly suggest that there is demand for this kind of boutique store aggregator and platform. On that note, one obvious competitor is Canada-based Shopify, amongst a host of services designed to help merchants set up shop online.

For example, with this new Olark tool, dubbed Shopping Cart Saver, a site owner can get an IM every time someone hits the site. And you can see the referrer indicating how they got there. While they’re there, you can see what pages they’re visiting and most importantly, what items they’re putting in their shopping cart. If a user has a question, this same IM window serves as your way to interact with them.

You could get some of this information before with Olark, but now the service is designed to ping you depending on how you set it up. For example, if the value of the items in a user’s cart goes over a certain number, you can get an IM letting you know that.

Most importantly, this gives owners a way to stop what Olark calls “shopping cart abandonment” — yes, users putting things in their cart and then leaving. Now, you can see exactly what’s in their cart and ask if they need any help to make sure they completely the purchase.

Sure, that may sound a little creepy — kind of like a shop owner who follows a customer around the store to make sure they buy something — but it’s also extremely useful. And this type of tracking is actually not any different than the data most sites can already see — it’s just that with this IM integration, you get to see it in real time. Well, and annoy people.

Olark co-founder Ben Congleton is clear with who they’re targeting with this product: small to medium size business owners. Obviously, if you installed this on Amazon.com, your computer might explode with IMs.

Olark has partnered with the online store creation tool Shopify to offer this product with the click of a button. This IM tool will work with all the major IM services, iChat, AIM, Gtalk, Adium, etc.

The business model for all of this is a freemium one. Basically, you can try out the features up until a certain point, then you have to buy one of their plans, which start at $15 a month and go all the way up to $149 a month. This model has helped Olark reach cash-flow positive status almost from the get go, Congleton says.

Beyond the Y Combinator seed round, Congleton says Olark raised a small angel round a few months back. Since they are cash-flow positive, he’s not too concerned just yet about a larger round, but envisions it happening soon.

E-commerce has become a vast ecosystem that pumps billions upon billions of dollars through the web and easily connects consumers what their objects of desire at a single click. On the backend of e-commerce sites, there is plenty of opportunity for tech giants and startups to help power retailers’ online storefronts. Google, IBM, Microsoft and many others offer various technologies to help online retailers seamlessly sell their products on the web. One notable startup in the space, Shopify, which provides a turnkey e-commerce technology that lets anyone create a storefront online, has acquired MNDCreative, the developers of StoreSync, a mobile e-commerce management platform. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Unsurprisingly, Shopify’s acquisition of StoreSync aims to help expand its existing offerings onto mobile devices. StoreSync will be available exclusively to Shopfiy customers, and will be integrated tightly with its web platform.

StoreSync mobile application lets users tap into online store sales statistics, order processing, shipment status and product and customer information from an iPhone. Shopify’s web-based platform allows anyone to set up a store in moments, add items to sell, upload images, add tags and group items, and integrate PayPal or other credit card processor for payments. Storefronts and shopping carts can be customized and the platform assures security for all transactions. The startup has a staggered price range for various offerings starting at $24 per month.

The acquisition makes sense for Shopify; retailers will need to have mobile access to their e-commerce information and StoreSync provides this technology in a simple and efficient way. However, it will be interesting if the company will soon roll out functionality for the Android.

There’s a lot of options in this space, everything from CMS packages through to commercial high end hosted options. GoodBusiness is aimed at small businesses who either cant afford the high end packages, or don’t have the skills available to do it themselves. The package includes website creation, lead management, email marketing, online shopping, blogging, and business analytics in the one system. GoodBusiness offers a “customer centric vision” of a website, with every feature integrated into a central customer database allowing businesses to automatically build customer profiles and track behavior across their online business.

GoodBusiness competes directly with Shopify, a product we reviewed in April 2006. GoodBarry argues that GoodBusiness offers a more customer-centric ecommerce package that provides a complete picture of customer behavior, allowing for better informed decisions; however both packages do provide a similar outcome: a simplified software-as-a-service ecommerce package.

GoodBusiness pricing starts at $39/month for the most basic plan and includes all features. Higher plans are available with more bandwidth, disk space and admin user accounts.

Shopify is a hosted ecommerce solution with integrated payments. People who sell stuff online, or want to, are going to like it. You can set up a store in moments, add items to sell, upload images, add tags and group items, and integrate paypal or a credit card processor for payments. Reporting is excellent, and they’ve even thought to include a RSS feed of recent orders to keep track of sales.

See here for more details on features. In general, sellers will be able to create a very professional multi-page website with little or no programming skills in just a few minutes.

There are a number of pre-made themes for the shop, and themes can be modified by directly manipulating the CSS. Shopify has also released a product called Vision, which is a downloadable client application for designers to build and modify their own shopify shop themes.

Creating a store is free. Shopify takes a 3.75% commission on all sales.

So Shopify will help you set up a very nice store at a reasonable price. But they should quickly build tools to help people promote these stores as well (Vendio, for example, has some basic promotional tools, and they also assist with ebay listings). If shopify can help store owners with marketing, too, it’ll become a more useful service.

For more on shopify, see their blog and this interview with development lead Tobi Lutke. If anyone knows about good sample shops, please let me know about them.

In fall 2005, Jaded Pixel will be releasing Shopify 1.0! Shopify is a hosted e-commerce solution that removes the traditional barriers that have kept many individuals and small business from selling online. It is a Web 2.0 product that focuses on providing buyers and sellers with the features essential to completing e-commerce transactions. It is simple, elegant and desperately needed.

Whenever it launches, I’ll be looking forward to checking it out. The Shopify blog is here. Sign up for launch notification here