Two months ago, many small shops in Canada had a Facebook page, a phone number and a storefront. The storefronts closed in March. The same owners now want to know which online store to open, and they want it operating by next week.
This urgency is understandable. Our own dive business, on a small island in Indonesia, has no tourists, which has given us ample time to observe this shift from a distance. The questions are almost always the same: Shopify or Square? Is WordPress necessary? How many products should be listed? What about taxes?
The following is our recommended approach for a shop with three weeks to get online.
Which products should be listed first?
We recommend not listing your entire inventory at the outset.
Choose the twenty or thirty products that already sell, that you actually have in stock, and that pack easily: coffee, books, soap, candles, a few bike parts. Leave aside fragile items, heavy items, and one-of-a-kind pieces that require a detailed conversation before purchase. These can be added later, once you understand how orders fit into your week.
Every product requires a good photo, a price, a weight, a short description and a stock count. This is substantial work. A small catalogue done properly will sell more than a large one with blurry counter photos and no weights, and without weights, shipping rates will be wrong on half the orders.
Gift cards deserve priority. If you do nothing else this month, sell gift cards. Customers want to support the businesses they miss, and a gift card is the simplest way to do so. Shopify made gift cards available on all its plans at the beginning of April, and most other platforms offer them as well.
Shopify, Square Online or WooCommerce: which suits a small business?
Having built many sites on Drupal and WordPress over the years, one might expect us to recommend WooCommerce. For this situation, we do not.
Shopify
Shopify is the most straightforward recommendation at present, and it is a Canadian company based in Ottawa. Hosting, security, checkout and payments are all in one place, and the system is reliable. In early April, Shopify extended its free trial to 90 days for new stores and made local pickup and local delivery available to all users, which is precisely what a main-street shop needs this spring. The Basic plan costs 29 dollars a month, in US dollars, a detail often overlooked until the first invoice. Thousands of apps are available, which can also be a pitfall; we recommend installing three, not thirty.
Plans can be compared on Shopify's Canadian site, and the trial can be started without a credit card.
Square Online
If you already accept cards at the counter with a Square reader, Square Online deserves serious consideration. Your items and stock are already in Square, and the online store draws from the same catalogue. You can start on a free plan with a Square web address and move to a paid plan when you want your own domain. It offers fewer options than Shopify, which for many small shops is an advantage.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is free, runs on WordPress, and is entirely under your ownership. It is a sound product. However, the business is responsible for hosting, updates, plugin conflicts, backups, and checkout failures at 11 p.m. on a Saturday. If you already have a WordPress site and someone who maintains it, adding WooCommerce can be very sensible. Starting from nothing, with the shop closed and no support available, it is not the option we recommend.
Why choose a platform you can run on your own?
This test should come before any comparison of features.
Consider a Tuesday evening at the end of a long day of packing orders. A customer writes because a discount code did not work. Can you log in and resolve the issue without calling anyone? If not, the platform is not suitable for you, regardless of how impressive the demonstration was.
A store that requires a developer for every price change is a store that stops being updated. We have seen this pattern with websites for many years, well before the current situation: the owner stops making changes, the site becomes outdated, and customers notice before the owner does.
We therefore recommend starting the trial, adding five products yourself, placing a test order and refunding it. Two hours of this exercise will provide more insight than any comparison article, including this one.
Why set up payments, sales tax and shipping before the theme?
Most owners want to begin with the theme: the colours, the fonts, the large photo on the home page. This should come last. A simple store that charges the correct amount and ships on time is sufficient. An attractive store that undercharges for shipping on every order loses money throughout the spring, and the loss only becomes visible when the books are reviewed.
Payments
Set up the payment processor first and test it with a real card. Payouts take a few business days to reach your bank account, so plan your cash flow accordingly, especially if you pay suppliers in advance.
Sales tax in Quebec and the rest of Canada
If you are registered in Quebec, you collect GST at 5% and QST at 9.975%, and once you ship to other provinces, the applicable tax depends on where the customer lives. Shopify and Square can calculate all of this, but only once you have specified where you are registered. If you are below the $30,000 small supplier threshold and not registered, do not collect tax you are not authorized to collect. We strongly recommend consulting your accountant this week.
Shipping and local pickup
Weigh your products and decide between flat rates and calculated rates. Canada Post offers a free small business program with better rates than the counter price, and it is worth joining before the first order arrives. Then enable local pickup. In a small town, half your customers live ten minutes away and would rather pick up their order than pay for shipping.
One further point for Quebec businesses: the government launched Le Panier Bleu in early April to direct consumers toward Quebec businesses. It is a directory rather than a store, and listing is free.
How can customers find the store once it is live?
A store without visitors generates no sales.
Start with the people who already know you. Add the link to your Facebook page, your Google listing, a sign in the shop window, and an email to your existing customer list. Update your hours on Google at the same time. Local search matters more than advertising at present, because people are looking up the businesses they already know to see whether they are still operating and how to buy from them.
A more complete e-commerce build can follow, once you know what sells. We recommend getting the simple version working first.
No one knows how long storefronts will remain closed. We expect, however, that many shops opening an online store this month will keep it after reopening, and that those which started small and manage it themselves will still be using it a year from now.