Adding Warehouse in Canada

Ask Me Anything Q&A Sell Internationally
1

Hi! We have a warehouse in the US but we are adding one in Canada. We know it’s possible to set up a different warehouse, but we have a few questions along those lines.

  • Will CAD and Canadian taxes automatically to anyone in Canada visiting the site?

  • Can we do that on our current site, not a separate .ca site?

  • I know we can create a warehouse in Canada and ship from there, but will that be automatic for anyone ordering from Canada?

  • If our Canada warehouse doesn’t have our full inventory, is there a way to show “sold out” for those in Canada, but show “in stock” for the US website visitors?

2

Thanks for your questions!

  • Make sure you have a market configured for Canada with “local currencies” or “Canadian dollar” selected. Canadian buyers will automatically be shown the experience you define in that market. You might also want to make sure that your theme is configured to show currency codes on your product pages. $100 is ambiguous but $100 CAD makes it clear.

    Regarding Canadian taxes, once you’ve put your GST/HST/PST numbers in to Shopify’s tax settings for Canada, the correct amount of taxes will be automatically calculated in checkout based on a Canadian buyer’s address.

  • You can absolutely do this from your current site. You don’t need to make a new Shopify store or buy a new domain. (If you want to configure a Canada-specific domain or a subfolder like example.com/en-ca, for advertising or SEO purposes, you can do so on the Canada market page in admin. But this is not at all necessary)

  • You can configure order routing rules to control which warehouse is selected to fulfill each order. By default, Shopify will prioritize minimizing split fulfillments over shipping to Canadians from your Canada warehouse, but you can change that. If you want to ensure that your US warehouse will never be used to fulfill to Canadian buyers, you can configure different shipping zones for each warehouse and make sure there is no Canada zone at all for your US warehouse.

  • If you’ve configured order routing or shipping zones as I’ve described above, then Shopify will automatically show your products that have 0 quantity in your Canada warehouse as “sold out” to your Canadian visitors and “in stock” to your US visitors.

    If you know that there are products that will never be available for Canadian buyers, and you’d rather hide them entirely, you can do so by configuring a catalog for your Canada market and unpublishing the US-only products from it.