Whether you simply ship internationally or host dedicated localized domains, if you want to court Canadian conversions, there’s a number of “big little details” to optimize for the best user experience.

Sending Canadians to the right site

If you have a Canadian specific site, best practice is to auto redirect based on geoIP address, rather than ask visitors to direct themselves through an entry gate.

It’s surprising how many sites don’t provide country selectors to escape the redirect — a beyond frustrating experience for users that need it.

In my (Canadian power-shopper) opinion, you don't need to show "you are here" pop ups to Canadians if you have an established brick and mortar presence in Canada. The redirect is enough.

But if you use entry pop ups (or "gates") -- make sure you pay attention to the big little details.

Entry gate design tips

If you auto redirect…

Make it obvious they’ve been redirected

Love or hate popups, they do provide can’t miss, in-your-face assurance that you ship to Canada (and allow room for additional value prop copy).

But copywriting really matters - make sure your headline confirms they are already on the Canadian site versus simply announcing “we ship to Canada.”

And make sure to include a 🇨🇦 flag for a visual cue and “Change shipping country” link for usability.

Keep copy crisp

I love this one from MOTHER Denim. The copy’s short, scannable and provides an exit to change shipping country (but could use a flag).

Use a flag

No seriously, it’s the strongest visual cue and gets the point across so clearly.

Pair Eyewear’s styling forces you to read the fine print to get the message. And although on desktop you can see the flag as a fallback, this is usually not visible in mobile headers.

Avoid FUD

Reminding Canadian shoppers about duties and taxes upon entry can increase bounce rates — most web users scan quickly and this can trigger anxiety around landed cost.

“Pay duties and taxes at a guaranteed fixed price” translates to “expect to pay duties and tax here.”

Collecting duties and taxes is NOT a value prop! Canadians know they have an ~80% chance that they won’t incur additional fees, so a 100% chance of payment up front can be a dealbreaker.

Either leave duties out, or note “duty included” (like in the MOTHER example above) which sounds more like “duty’s free, don’t worry about it.”

Make exit easy

Relying on an ‘X’ alone to close the modal adds friction. Include a juicy jelly-bean like “Continue shopping” button and close the widget if the visitor clicks background content.

If your redirect is opt-in…

Bake your message into the CTA

Manscaped’s modal is perfect — the CTA makes it clear what’s happening without having to read surrounding copy.

Chewy adds a flag for extra clarity. Good boy!

Emphasize clickable CTAs

Some merchants — especially in the B2B space — need to give US and Canada options equal weight.

In this case, you want to steer Canadians to their best experience, but they need to take action. This is the most important CTA in the entire purchase journey, without a click there’s no chance to convert.

It’s a good idea to leverage flags 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 to visually communicate options and make the entire hit area for each option clickable:

Flags alone may not read as “clickable” so it’s best to combine flags with CTA buttons. Otherwise, dismissing the pop up keeps them on the US (or home) site.

Would you know what to click here?

What are you supposed to click here? And hello, contrast ratio!

Either way, if you use popups…

It’s uber-important to QA your experiences outside of your home country. So many brands are unaware that other pop ups and splash pages cover up entry gates before you have a chance to read them or set preferences, and often closing an email pop-up auto-closes the country gate in tandem.

On the flipside, closing a country gate that overlays an email offer kills the box. We like welcome discounts too!

Make sure you apply the settings your popup tool provides to prevent double (or triple!) pop up firing. For example, this is called ‘Collision Prevention’ in Klaviyo and ‘Silent Interval’ in Claspo. If your tool doesn’t support this setting - it’s time to switch vendors!

Country selector gates

This is the least user friendly option and can negatively impact SEO if not implemented well.

If using a 3rd party app to serve a country selector, it can take up to 9x longer for links to be found and crawled through their client-side rendering versus links in HTML.

It’s worth the development investment to move links into your country selector’s HTML so they can be discovered server-side, or use static JSON country variables (as recommended by Shopify).

Again, it’s best to avoid asking users to make selections and use geolocation and browser settings to auto redirect to the right country and language.

A note about internal linking

In addition to the above, i’s also important to ensure relative internal linking works across catalogs. Canadians browsing your home country site may not switch to the Canadian experience until they’ve found a product they want to add to cart — they want to remain on the product page after the switch or you’ve lost ‘em.

As with country selectors, your interlinking should leverage HTML / server side solution vs relying on client-side plugin.

Amazingly, some of the biggest brands that do have separate .ca domains fail to mention this to Canadian visitors browsing the US site anywhere — this includes Walmart, Home Depot, GAP and Staples. This means you can get all the way to checkout before realizing you can’t check out, and cart contents do not carry over to the .ca site.

Seriously! Geolocation tools are widely available. There’s no excuse for this!

The ‘do nothing’ approach

Because that’s always an option. You can ship internationally through your home country’s site just fine and handle country selection in the Shipping step of checkout.

This is A-OK when you don’t do enough cross-border volume to cater to Canadians specifically, and it’s far better than the “we have a Canadian site but don’t bother to tell you” experience noted above.

In this case, you may opt to use a service like Zonos or Global-e (which powers Shopify’s Managed Markets option) to serve as your Merchant of Record and handle the hassle of tax compliance and remittance if you don’t want to build this into your operations.

If you take this approach, you should still localize content through geolocation and targeted messaging. Consider serving localized banners, promo strip messaging, PDP details and cart messages accordingly.

Shipping & returns info

Whether you offer reasonable shipping costs is the next big piece of FUD in our minds, after “can we even get stuff.”

Promo strip messages

If you offer free shipping over $X, we love to see that in a sitewide promo strip.

The copy recipe “Free Shipping to Canada on all orders above CA$XX” is PERFECT:

For an extra spicy solution, geolocate the visitor’s city:

If you DON’T offer free shipping to Canada, all good. A clear “on US orders” is enough to give us the heads up. We may not check out, but it saves us hunting for info in your Customer Service footer links.

Product detail pages

We love to see info close to cart buttons — most of us land directly on your PDPs and ignore your header strips ;)

Use microcopy if duties & taxes are included

And place it near the price line:

In the cart

Make sure to add CA, CAD, $C or similar annotation to your free shipping counter:

And include the C$ annotation across cart summary line items:

Notice the POAA (point of action assurance) above — an extra confirmation that your order qualifies for free shipping to Canada is golden.

Payments and checkout

Checkout restrictions (Shopify)

Arguably, the worst part of cross-border shopping is currency conversion. We know our humble Canadian dollar is worth a mere 70 cents US on a good day, and many of us are painfully aware of the additional conversion fees our credit cards apply (3-12%!) when we must pay you in USD.

Letting us pay in Canadian dollars is awesome, but it’s even better to help us dodge that credit card fee if we unwittingly end up building a cart in $USD.

If you sell in local currencies, use Shopify Payments or Adyen, and have one-page checkout enabled, you can use checkout restrictions to protect Canadians from dynamic currency conversion fees charged by credit card companies.

This ensures that even if they shopped your US store, once they hit checkout, their order will automatically convert to CAD.

Global-e

If you choose not to bake internationalization into your internal operations, you can partner with services like Zonos and Global-e (which powers Shopify Managed Markets) to serve as your Merchant of Record (MOR) and handle tax registration and compliance, and the collection and remittance of duties and import tax.

Just keep in mind your business name will not appear on the customer’s credit card statements as MOR, so ensure your customer service info and reps are prepped for the issues this can cause post-purchase.

💡 More ideas

If you sell globally, check out Ecom Ideas’ Internationalization section for more ideas beyond just Canada!