Ecommerce website development for Canadian businesses

What a custom online store includes

We build online stores from scratch, designed for your products and your customers rather than adapted from a theme. A typical store includes:

• A catalogue with categories, product pages, photos, variants and availability.
• A cart and checkout with secure card payment through Stripe.
• Sales taxes calculated according to where the customer is.
• Shipping options: delivery rates, local pickup, or both.
• An admin area to manage products, prices and orders yourself.
• Order emails to the customer and to you.
• Basic SEO on every product and category page: pre-rendering, titles, descriptions, structured data and compressed photos.

Sales taxes: GST, QST and HST

Selling online in Canada means charging the right tax to the right customer. In Quebec, sales involve 5% GST and 9.975% QST; in Ontario, a 13% HST. Other provinces have their own rules. Your store calculates tax according to the delivery address, and each order keeps the detail for your accounting.

Which taxes you must register for and collect depends on your situation: your accountant confirms it before launch. Our guide to sales tax for online stores in Canada explains the main points.

Selling in Quebec: French, privacy and trust

A store aimed at Quebec customers must be offered in French, and under Bill 96 the French version must be at least as accessible as any other. We build both languages together, product pages included, so that you manage them side by side in the admin area. See our guide to Bill 96 for websites.

A store also collects personal information: names, addresses, emails. Law 25 requires consent, a designated person in charge and a clear privacy policy. Card details never pass through your site: Stripe handles them. In Ontario, organizations with 50 or more employees must also meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA under the AODA, which matters for checkout forms in particular.

A customer who does not trust the checkout page leaves at the last step.

Preparing your catalogue

The launch date of a store depends more on the catalogue than on the code. Before development starts, it helps to gather:

• a list of products with their names, prices and variants (size, colour, format), ideally in a spreadsheet;
• photos on a plain background, taken in the same conditions for consistency;
• a short description per product, in French and English if you sell in Quebec;
• your shipping rules: zones, rates, free delivery threshold, local pickup;
• your return and exchange policy, written in clear terms.

We import the catalogue for you from your spreadsheet, and the admin area lets you add new products afterwards. Good product photos and clear descriptions do more for sales than any feature: they are also what Google reads on each product page.

Payments and subscriptions with Stripe

Stripe handles card payments, refunds and, if you sell on a recurring basis, subscriptions. Payments arrive in your own Stripe account, and each order in your admin area shows its payment status, so you know what to prepare and ship. We already run Stripe subscriptions in production on platforms we built, such as Fidelivet for veterinary clinics and Gwadadrop for delivery management. If your project is closer to a subscription service than a store, see SaaS development.

Price, timeline and method

An online store is quoted according to your catalogue and features: the number of products, variants, languages, shipping rules and any connection to existing software. The quote is free, Canadian clients can be invoiced in Canadian dollars, and payment can be split between a deposit and the balance. For comparison, a business website starts at CA$4,300.

1. 01
   Brief

   We review your products, your customers, your shipping and your taxes with you.

2. 02
   Mock-up

   You approve the design of the home page, a category, a product page and the checkout.

3. 03
   Development

   We build the store, import your catalogue and test orders and payments with you.

4. 04
   Launch

   We put the store online, host it on Google Cloud and follow the first orders.

Our live projects, including E Trucks, an online catalogue for heavy-truck equipment in Guadeloupe, are on our portfolio page (in French). If you sell in Ontario, see also our page on web design in Toronto.