"We want to sell online. Should we get Shopify?" It is almost always the first question we hear, and it is the wrong one. Starting an online store in Quebec begins somewhere else. In the web projects we run, the stores that go off the rails almost never do so because of the software. They fail because nobody decided who would write the product pages, how returns would be handled, or where the visitors would come from.
The platform is the most standardized, best documented and, frankly, easiest part of the whole project. Everything upstream of it is not. So this article proposes a sequence, not a list of tools: catalog, logistics, obligations, traffic. The platform comes last, and that is good news.
The short answer, for the busy
Before picking a platform, settle four things in this order. The catalog: who writes the product pages, who shoots the photos, in French first if you sell in Quebec. Logistics: packaging, shipping rates, and a written return policy that says who pays for returns. Obligations: a store selling to Quebec customers must offer its site in French (section 52 of the Charter of the French Language), and GST/QST registration becomes mandatory once taxable sales exceed $30,000 over four calendar quarters. Traffic, finally: a numbers-based plan for where visitors will come from, because a store nobody visits sells nothing. The platform comes last because it is the easiest step: Shopify, the most common choice, starts at $49 CAD per month, and its assistant now generates a storefront from a single sentence. That does not change the order. Online stores rarely fail for lack of software; they fail for lack of product pages, margin after shipping, or visitors.
The catalog: the project nobody budgets for
An online store is first and foremost a catalog. Not a mockup, not a logo: product pages. Each item needs a clear title, a description that sells without overselling, exact specifications (dimensions, materials, care) and photos showing the product from several angles in consistent light. Multiply by 40, 80 or 200 products and you are looking at the real budget of the project: dozens of hours of writing and at least a full day of product photography, usually more.
So the question to settle before anything else is: who does this work? If it is you, plan it like a construction project, at a realistic pace: writing ten good product pages a week, on top of running the business, is already demanding. If it is a freelancer or an agency, it is a cost to budget from day one. It is the same trade-off as for a brochure site, the one we walk through in building your website yourself or hiring an agency, with one aggravating factor: a catalog is never finished. New products, stockouts, price changes, seasonal photos: someone will have to keep all of it current, every week, long after launch.
Shipping: the physical side of a digital business
Selling online is a physical trade disguised as a digital one. Every order has to be packed, weighed, labelled and handed to a carrier. Before choosing anything, answer concrete questions: what boxes do your products travel in? Who prints the labels and packs the parcels, and at what point in the day? What happens when a customer in Rimouski or Vancouver returns an item?
Two decisions deserve particular care. First, free shipping. It is a margin decision, not a slogan. If you offer it, its cost comes out of your profit on every order; set a threshold (free above a certain cart size) based on your numbers, not on what the big chains do. Second, the return policy. Write it before launch, because it defines who pays for return shipping, what condition the product must come back in, and how quickly the customer gets refunded. Returns are a normal expense of online retail; discovering them by improvising costs more than planning for them.
Payments and taxes: one paragraph each, no more
Two topics need to exist in your plan without turning into a thesis. Payments first: every online transaction goes through a processor that takes its cut. On Shopify's entry plan, for instance, Shopify Payments charges from 2.8% + 30¢ per online card transaction, per the pricing published on Shopify's Canadian page as of August 2026. That is neither scandalous nor negotiable at your scale: it is one more line in your margin math, same as packaging.
Taxes next: as long as your taxable sales stay under $30,000 over four calendar quarters, you are a "small supplier" and GST/QST registration is not mandatory, per Revenu Québec. Above that, it is, and selling into other provinces brings its own rules. One hour with your accountant before launch settles 90% of this; it is probably the most profitable hour of the entire project.
Selling in Quebec happens in French
A business selling in Quebec must serve its customers in French, and that includes the website. Section 52 of the Charter of the French Language requires catalogs, brochures and other commercial publications, including what is published on a website, to be available in French. An English version is allowed, provided a French version of comparable quality exists and is accessible. The Office québécois de la langue française handles complaints and regularly publishes infraction notices about business websites; for a company, fines range from $3,000 to $30,000 and double for a repeat offence, per Éducaloi.
The right way to read this obligation is not to read it as a constraint. Writing your product pages in French first means speaking the language of your first market. English then becomes an expansion decision (the rest of Canada, the United States), not a grudging compliance exercise. What does not work is the plan to "translate after launch": after launch come the orders, the returns and the new products, and the translation never reaches the top of the pile.
The number one killer: assuming visitors will come
The implicit business plan of many stores fits in one sentence: "once the site is live, people will buy". The internet does not work that way. A brand-new store, with no history, shows up nowhere: not in Google, not in anyone's feed.
Run the numbers coldly, with explicit assumptions. Suppose about 2% of visitors place an order: a prudent working assumption for a small store, not a promise. To get 20 orders a month, you need around 1,000 visits. Where will they come from? The honest answers are few: your existing customers (a well-kept newsletter is the most underrated asset in retail), local SEO if you also have a physical storefront, paid advertising (which costs money on every click and demands margins that can absorb it), and time, because search rankings for a new store are measured in months. And once the visitor arrives, the page still has to do its job: the mistakes that hurt conversions cost more on a store than on a brochure site, because every visit has an acquisition cost.
If none of these sources produces a plausible number, you do not have a website problem. You have a signal to rework the offer or the channel before spending a dollar on development.
So, what about the online store platform?
One paragraph here, and each option's price in the next section. For the vast majority of Quebec SMBs, Shopify is the reasonable default: $49 CAD per month for the entry plan ($37 per month billed annually), a mature ecosystem, and nothing essential missing for selling straightforward products. Its direct competitors are broadly equivalent at the starting line, and custom development is only justified when a specific workflow demands it, which is rarely the case for a first store. If you have done the work in the previous sections, choosing a platform will take an hour and will probably be right. If you have not, no platform will save you.
Which platform, and what "free" really means
Since everyone asks anyway, here are the four options a Quebec SMB actually runs into, with the prices shown on each vendor's Canadian page in September 2026. Shopify: $49 CAD per month for the entry plan, $37 billed annually, plus 2.8% + 30¢ per card payment. It is the default choice, with the largest ecosystem of apps and freelancers who know it. Wix: the Essential plan, the first one that takes online payments, is listed at CA$33 per month on an annual subscription paid upfront; relevant if the store is one section of a brochure site, less so if it is the core of the business. Square: the online store comes with no monthly fee, at 2.8% + $0.30 per transaction; it makes the most sense if you already take payments with Square in-store, because inventory is shared. Panierdachat: the platform built in Quebec, $39.95 CAD per month for the Départ plan, with French-language support from a local team, which matters to some owners. That leaves custom: WooCommerce on WordPress, or a store built for you. It is only justified when a specific workflow demands it (a configurator, per-customer pricing, integration with an existing system), and it needs someone to maintain it.
On the word "free", which dominates the search results: a free store exists, Square is one, but the vendor gets paid on every sale, and the monthly subscription was never the main expense. On $1,000 of sales, a $49 subscription weighs less than the $28 in card fees, less than packaging and shipping, and far less than the hours spent on the catalog. As for "selling on Facebook or Instagram", that is a traffic channel plugged into a store, not a store: you still need a catalog, a return policy and somewhere to take the money.
Building your store with AI: what it actually does
This has come up in nearly every meeting for a year now, and it deserves better than a shrug. What these tools do today is real, and you can check it yourself in ten minutes. On Shopify, the site generator produces a storefront from a plain description, and the Sidekick assistant is included in every plan at no extra cost, with usage limits that vary by plan (Canadian pricing page, checked August 2026). It writes product descriptions, retouches a phone photo into something that looks like studio work, groups your items into collections, sets up a discount code or an email campaign, and answers questions about your sales. Wix makes the same promise in stronger words: go from a prompt to a business-ready website, with a built-in agent called Aria, and its own FAQ says the generated site arrives with industry-specific logic, tailored copy and high-quality visuals already wired in.
All of that works, and the gain over the blank page is genuine. But read the list again: it covers precisely the step the previous sections describe as the easiest one. AI builds the container, quickly and rather well. The contents still come from you.
Three concrete limits. Generated visuals are generic by construction, because they have never seen your products: retouching improves the photo you took, it does not invent the item nobody has photographed, and your 80 product pages are still waiting on a shoot. Generated copy is plausible, which is not the same as accurate: dimensions, materials, care instructions and delivery times come out of your head, and one invented specification on a product page comes back as a return to process. And none of it decides for you why someone should buy from you rather than elsewhere, registers you for GST and QST the day you cross the threshold, or guarantees that your French version is "of comparable quality" in the sense of section 52. The assistant answers in your store's language; the Office québécois de la langue française reads the page.
So, good start or trap? Good start if you already have fifteen or so products photographed and you want a storefront online this week to test demand: take the hours it saves you, they are real. The trap is elsewhere, and it is psychological. A generated store looks finished. Mood photography and smooth copy look like a business that already exists, and that is exactly what makes founders postpone the catalog, the shipping and the traffic plan. The site was never the work.
Frequently asked questions
How do I open an online store in Quebec?
In this order: inventory the catalog and decide who writes and who shoots, in French first; write the shipping and return policy; spend an hour with an accountant on GST, QST and payment fees; put numbers on where the first 1,000 visitors a month will come from; and only then open an account on a platform, which takes an afternoon.
Is opening an online store profitable?
It depends on a calculation few people do before launching. Take your selling price, subtract the product cost, card fees (about 2.8% + $0.30), packaging, shipping if you offer it, your share of returns, then the cost of acquiring a customer if you rely on advertising. What is left, multiplied by a plausible number of orders, has to cover the subscription, your time and the catalog. If the result is negative at 20 orders a month, it will still be negative at 200.
What is the best site for creating an online store?
For a first store selling straightforward products, Shopify is the default answer, because everyone knows it and nothing essential is missing. Square if you already take payments with Square in-store. Panierdachat if French-language support from a Quebec company tips the balance. Wix if the store is secondary to a brochure site you already have. Custom, only when a specific workflow demands it.
Can I create an online store for free?
Yes, without a monthly subscription: Square offers its online store with no fixed fee and takes 2.8% + $0.30 per transaction. What is never free is the rest: photos, product pages, shipping and traffic. A $0-a-month store with 80 product pages still to write costs more than a $49-a-month store whose catalog is ready.
How much does an online store cost in Quebec?
The software, between $0 and $50 a month for a first store, plus roughly 3% per sale in payment fees. The real budget is elsewhere: dozens of hours of writing and at least a day of photography for the catalog, packaging and shipping on every order, and advertising if you do not already have customers. A store built by an agency adds to all of that; it does not replace it.
The sequence, in practice
Here is what an orderly start looks like: a realistic catalog inventory (how many products, who writes, who shoots, French first); a written shipping and return policy, with free shipping treated as a margin decision; an hour with an accountant for taxes and payment fees; a traffic plan with numbers, even rough ones; and only then, the platform. It is less exciting than picking a theme. It is also what separates the stores that sell from the ones that wait.
If you want to run your project through this checklist with someone who has done it several times, we offer that conversation, no strings attached.
This article offers general guidance for planning an online store, not legal or tax advice. Language and tax obligations depend on your situation: validate them with your accountant and, if needed, a legal advisor.
Written byXavier Peich