Planning an e-commerce website in Canada: what to decide before you build

Before anyone designs a page of your store, settle a handful of decisions: what you sell and how it varies, which platform runs the shop, how customers pay, how sales tax is charged, what your checkout has to show, and how products will be found in search. Those choices drive most of the design, the build and the running costs. Get them on paper first and every quote you collect will be for the same job.

What you sell, and how it varies

The catalogue shapes the whole site, so start there.

• How many products, and how many variations. Ten products with no options is a different build from 300 products in four sizes and six colours. Variants affect the product page layout, inventory tracking and how pages appear in search.
• What a customer needs to see before buying. Size charts, materials, ingredients, compatibility, lead times. If shoppers regularly email to ask, the answer belongs on the product page.
• Who maintains product data. Someone has to add products, update prices and mark items out of stock. If that’s your team, the editing tools matter as much as the storefront.
• Where the data lives today. A point-of-sale system, a spreadsheet or a supplier feed. Moving or syncing it is often a large part of the work.
• How orders reach the customer. Shipping, local delivery, pickup, or digital downloads. Each adds its own rules at checkout.

Choosing a platform: hosted, self-hosted or custom

There are three broad ways to run an online store. None is right for everyone, and the deciding factor is usually who will run the store day to day and how unusual your selling process is.

Check the running costs as well as the build. Shopify says its plans include hosting, but third-party transaction fees may apply if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments. WooCommerce describes its core plugin as free with no monthly subscription, and you pay for hosting, any paid extensions and your payment processor’s fees.

A custom build makes sense when the way people buy is the product. CanCater, a catering platform we designed and developed, needed group ordering: an organiser sets a budget and shares a link, everyone picks their own meal, and the choices roll up into a single order and a single payment. A standard cart doesn’t do that, so the ordering flow, cart and card checkout were built on Next.js.

Payments and card security

Almost every small store takes cards through a payment processor rather than handling card numbers itself, and that’s the sensible default. It doesn’t remove your responsibility entirely. The PCI Security Standards Council says its card security standard (PCI DSS) applies to all merchants regardless of size or transaction volume, though smaller merchants with simpler setups have less to do. Whether you need to formally validate compliance is set by the card brands, so ask your processor or merchant bank what applies to you.

Questions worth settling early:

• Which processor, and is it supported natively by your platform?
• Which payment methods your customers expect, such as cards, Interac, digital wallets or invoices for business buyers.
• Who handles refunds and disputes, and how they show up in your accounting.

Sales tax: when to register and what to charge

If you sell to customers across Canada, plan for tax before launch. Two points from the Canada Revenue Agency shape the setup.

When you have to register. You must register for a GST/HST account once you are no longer a small supplier, which for most businesses means more than $30,000 in taxable sales over four consecutive calendar quarters, or more than $30,000 in a single quarter. The CRA page sets out when registration takes effect and the deadline to register.

Which rate to charge. The CRA says the rate depends on the place of supply, which for goods is generally where they’re delivered. Its own example: a Vancouver store delivering a mattress to Toronto charges Ontario’s 13% HST. So an Oakville store shipping to British Columbia or Nova Scotia charges a different rate than it does locally, and provincial sales tax rules may also apply in some provinces.

Your platform’s tax settings need to reflect this, and your accountant should confirm the setup before the first sale.

What the checkout has to show

Ontario’s consumer protection rules set expectations for online sales. The province’s guide to safe online shopping says a business must disclose certain information before the customer completes the purchase, including the total amount to pay and an itemized price list with taxes and shipping. The customer must also get an opportunity to accept or decline the agreement, or correct any errors, before ordering. Afterwards, the business must provide a written copy of the agreement within 15 days, in a form the customer can keep and print.

In design terms, that means:

• A review step before payment showing every item, tax and shipping charge, and the total.
• A clear way to edit the order or back out at that step.
• An order confirmation email that works as the customer’s copy.
• Shipping, returns and cancellation terms that are easy to find before checkout.

If you sell into other provinces, their rules may differ. Ask a lawyer to review your terms if you’re unsure.

Customer data and email

Running a store means collecting names, addresses and order histories. In most provinces, private businesses handling personal information in the course of commercial activity are covered by PIPEDA, Canada’s federal private-sector privacy law. Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec have their own substantially similar laws for activity within those provinces. Decide which customer data you actually need, where it’s stored and who can see it.

Marketing email is a separate decision. Under Canada’s anti-spam law (CASL), a purchase gives you implied consent to send commercial email only for two years after it, while express consent doesn’t expire on that clock. That’s why many stores add a separate, optional newsletter signup at checkout. Our email marketing service covers signup forms, consent and automated flows such as welcome emails.

Product pages that search engines can understand

Google publishes specific guidance for e-commerce sites. A few points have direct design consequences:

• Give each variant its own URL. Google recommends that each product variant can be identified by a separate URL, such as a path or a query parameter, and notes it doesn’t use the part of a URL after # for indexing. A colour picker that only changes the # fragment can leave variants invisible to search.
• Link to every product you want found. Google says it’s strongly recommended to link to all products you wish indexed from category pages, using normal links rather than JavaScript-only navigation, because its crawler generally won’t use your site search.
• Add product structured data. Google supports merchant listing markup for pages where people can buy, including shipping and returns details. It also says search enhancements are shown at its discretion, so markup helps Google understand the page but doesn’t guarantee how it appears.
• Plan the launch. Google’s launch guide suggests verifying the site in Search Console, submitting a sitemap and signing up for Google Merchant Center, which is required for experiences such as the Shopping tab. It also describes options for launching in stages, for example publishing the site before purchasing is switched on.

If you’re replacing an existing store, keep the old product and category URLs working with redirects. Our guide to choosing a web design agency covers redirects, accessibility and account ownership in more detail, and all three apply to stores.

A one-page brief to take to quotes

Write down your answers to these before you contact anyone:

1. What you sell, how many products and variants, and where the product data lives now.
2. How orders are fulfilled: shipping, local delivery, pickup or digital.
3. Who will add products, update stock and process refunds.
4. The platform you lean towards, or the reasons you’re unsure.
5. Your payment processor and the payment methods you need.
6. The provinces and countries you’ll sell to.
7. What the store must connect to: accounting, inventory, shipping, email marketing.
8. Whether there’s an existing store, and which URLs and customer accounts must carry over.

A brief like this lets a designer or developer quote the actual job rather than a guess, and it makes quotes from different providers comparable. Our web development page lists what we agree with clients before any build, including integrations, migration and who owns each account.