Shopify Development in Canada

About Shopify Development

We've shipped 7+ Shopify stores for D2C brands, B2B catalogs, and subscription businesses across India, USA, Canada, UK, and UAE. Whether you're launching your first store on Basic Shopify or replatforming a 10,000-SKU catalog onto Shopify Plus, our team handles the full build, strategy, theme development, app integration, payments, shipping, and post-launch growth.

What the engagement includes

• Custom Shopify theme development from scratch
• Premium theme customization (Out of the Sandbox, Switch, Archetype)
• Liquid templating, sections, and metafields
• Shopify App development (private + public apps)
• Headless Shopify with Next.js or Hydrogen
• Shopify Plus implementation and Launchpad scripts
• Store migration (WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce → Shopify)
• Performance optimization and Core Web Vitals tuning

Setting a Shopify store up for Canadian tax, French and the border

Shopify will calculate Canadian sales tax correctly, and only for the regions you have told it you are registered in, which makes the registration list a business decision that has to be made before the store settings mean anything at all. A single federal registration covers the harmonised provinces. British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba each run their own retail sales tax with their own registration rules and their own thresholds, and Quebec administers its tax through Revenu Quebec separately from the federal number, so a store that ships nationally can need several registrations and several numbers entered before one order is priced correctly. The federal small supplier threshold does not map onto the provincial ones, and that assumption is what we most often find behind a store that has been undercollecting quietly for a year. Two jobs follow in the build. Categories relieved at point of sale in particular provinces, children's clothing and footwear, books, some prepared food, need tax overrides, and Shopify applies those by collection rather than by product, so the collection structure has to be designed for the tax engine and not only for the navigation menu. And the product classification has to survive a bulk import, because a catalogue upload that drops products out of an override collection starts charging the wrong tax without an error appearing anywhere. Which registrations you actually need is your accountant's call and worth having in writing before launch.

On a Shopify store the French work divides into four piles with four different owners, and a plan that treats it as one job underestimates it badly. Theme strings and navigation are yours and come from the theme's locale files, which is the part everyone budgets for. Checkout is Shopify's: it renders from Shopify's own translations in the buyer's language once the locale is published in Markets, which is why a store can have a completely French storefront and an English checkout if that step was skipped. Product content is where the cost actually sits, because titles, descriptions, option and variant names, metafields and image alt text are per record, so eight hundred products is eight hundred pieces of translation that no theme setting produces and no bulk action approximates well. Apps are the pile that breaks late: a reviews app, a subscriptions app or a size chart renders its own strings from its own admin, plenty of them support one language, and finding that out after the app is embedded in the theme is expensive, so the app list gets chosen with the French store in mind rather than assembled first and translated afterwards. The requirement that the French version be available on terms at least as favourable also rules out the pattern this platform makes tempting, which is a small flag in the footer leading into a partial tree that stops at the marketing pages.

For a Canadian store selling south, the largest source of angry email is not shipping time but the courier invoice that arrives after the parcel. The United States suspended its low value de minimis exemption for commercial shipments during 2025 and the position has moved more than once since, so a parcel crossing the border can be assessable from the first dollar, and the store has to decide whether duties and import taxes are collected at checkout or left for the carrier to bill the customer afterwards. Shopify can collect them at checkout, and doing it properly requires a harmonised system code and a country of origin on every product, which is a data entry project across the catalogue rather than a setting to switch on. Goods may enter duty free under CUSMA, but qualification turns on where the goods were made rather than where they ship from, so a Canadian store reselling imported stock does not get it by default and should not imply at checkout that it does. The reason to settle this before launch is that getting it wrong is invisible in your own numbers: the order completes, the customer is billed weeks later by a courier, and the refund request and the one star review both land in a month you have already reported on. Rates, thresholds and origin rules are moving, so a customs broker confirms where your catalogue stands rather than us.

Canadian law reaches into how the price is displayed, which on this platform is a theme and app decision rather than a legal one until it is too late. The Competition Act's drip pricing provisions make it a deceptive practice to advertise a price that is not attainable because mandatory fees are added later, with an exception for taxes imposed on the purchaser, so handling fees, environmental or recycling levies and mandatory service charges belong in the advertised figure rather than appearing as a line the customer meets at checkout. The same part of the Act governs ordinary price claims, which is the compare at field on every Shopify product: a was and now comparison has to be supportable, either by a substantial volume of sales at the higher price or by the higher price having been offered in good faith for a substantial period, and a store that sets compare at prices from a spreadsheet at the start of every campaign has no record that would support either. So the sale mechanics get built with a price history behind them, which has the side effect of making the merchandising reporting honest. Quebec adds its own layer through the Consumer Protection Act, with its own rules on what has to be disclosed before a distance contract is formed and on the cancellation rights that follow, which is a reason to set the policy pages and the checkout disclosures once for the whole store rather than per campaign. Whether a specific fee in your catalogue falls inside these provisions is your counsel's judgement.

How we work with Canadian clients

Two things shape Canadian projects more than anything technical. The first is language: if you serve Quebec, French is a legal requirement rather than a nice addition, and the rules tightened considerably under Bill 96. The French version has to be available on equal terms with the English one, which is a design constraint from the first wireframe rather than a translation task at the end.

The second is anti-spam law. CASL is stricter than most teams expect, and the penalties are real. Consent has to be express or clearly implied, records of it have to be kept, and every commercial message needs a working unsubscribe and accurate sender identification. We build those into the product rather than leaving them to whoever configures the mailing tool later, because that is where the exposure usually sits.

Indicative pricing in CAD

Converted from our published Indian rates and rounded. Exchange rates move, so the figure on your quote is calculated on the day it is issued.

Questions Canadian clients ask

Shopify Development: common questions

Other markets we work in