If you sell from Canada on Shopify, the ten-minute version is this: go to Settings → Taxes and duties → Canada, enter your GST/HST number, and let Shopify apply destination-based rates. That single step handles Ontario's 13% HST, the 5% GST going to Alberta, and the federal portion everywhere else. What it does not handle is whether you should be registered in British Columbia, Saskatchewan or Manitoba for their separate provincial taxes, whether Revenu Québec wants a QST number from you, or what your customer in Buffalo pays at the border. Those three gaps are where most of the money and most of the risk sits, and no amount of Shopify GST/HST setup in Canada will close them for you.
The rate table, because you will look it up anyway
Five provinces run a single harmonised tax. Four run GST plus something provincial. Three territories and Alberta run GST only.
- HST provinces: Ontario 13%. New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Prince Edward Island 15%. Nova Scotia dropped to 14% on 1 April 2025.
- GST + PST: British Columbia 5% + 7%. Saskatchewan 5% + 6%. Manitoba 5% + 7% RST.
- GST + QST: Quebec 5% + 9.975%.
- GST only (5%): Alberta, Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut.
The Quebec arithmetic catches people out because QST used to compound on top of GST and no longer does. A $200 order to Montreal: GST is $10.00, QST is 9.975% of $200 = $19.95, total $229.95. The same order to Vancouver is $10.00 GST plus $14.00 PST = $224.00. To Toronto it is a flat $26.00 of HST, so $226.00. Three provinces, three different totals on the same cart, and your margin model should know that before your accountant does.
Rates change, and they change on dates that do not care about your calendar. Nova Scotia's cut landed on 1 April. The temporary federal relief on children's clothing, restaurant meals, books and toys ran from mid-December 2024 to mid-February 2025 and expired quietly. If anyone on your team ever hardcoded a rate into a theme snippet or a shipping app, that is the kind of change that goes unnoticed for two quarters.
How to set up taxes on Shopify in Canada, in the order that actually works
Do it in this sequence. Skipping step one causes the most rework.
- Set your store's tax treatment before you touch rates. In Canada, prices are quoted before tax. If your theme or your previous platform had "all prices include tax" switched on, every product price in your catalogue is now wrong by 5-15%. We see this constantly on stores that came over from a UK or Australian setup, and it is a common cleanup item on any Shopify migration.
- Add your GST/HST registration. Settings → Taxes and duties → Canada → Collect sales tax. Enter the nine-digit business number plus the RT extension. Shopify then applies the destination province's rate automatically.
- Add provincial registrations separately. BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec each need their own registration entered before Shopify collects that tax. There is no auto-detect. If you are registered in BC and never added it, you have been eating 7% on every BC order.
- Turn on tax for shipping. Freight is a taxable supply in Canada. It is a checkbox and it is easy to miss.
- Fix the exceptions last — zero-rated groceries, children's clothing, books, and anything else that needs a product-level override.
Then place a real test order to each of Ontario, Alberta, BC and Quebec and read the tax line. Four orders, six minutes, and it has caught more misconfigurations for us than any settings audit.
The $30,000 small supplier threshold, and why waiting is usually the wrong call
You are a small supplier while your worldwide taxable revenue stays under $30,000 CAD across four consecutive calendar quarters. Under that, you do not have to register for GST/HST and you do not charge it.
Two things people get wrong. First, it is a rolling four-quarter test, not a calendar year. Quarters of $8,000, $7,000, $9,000 and $7,000 total $31,000, so you have crossed it even though no single year on your books looks like $30,000. Second, if you blow past $30,000 inside a single quarter, you are on the hook immediately for the sale that took you over, not a month later. A good Black Friday can do that to a store that did $19,000 in the preceding nine months.
The unwelcome advice: register early, voluntarily, unless your margins are razor-thin and you sell only to consumers. Registration lets you claim input tax credits on the GST/HST you pay on inventory, Shopify subscription fees, agency invoices, ad spend and packaging. A store spending $4,000 a month on landed inventory and services is paying roughly $200 a month in GST it cannot recover as a non-registrant. That is $2,400 a year to avoid a quarterly filing. If you sell mostly B2B, the argument is even stronger, because your buyers claim the tax back and do not care.
BC and Saskatchewan PST: the part automation will not do for you
The question we get most often from Canadian merchants is whether they need to register for PST in BC when they ship there from another province. The short answer is a threshold, not a yes or no.
If your business is located in British Columbia and you sell taxable goods, you register. If you are a Canadian seller located outside BC shipping goods into the province, registration kicks in once your BC-sourced revenue passes $10,000. That is a small number. An Ontario apparel brand doing $1,200 a month into Vancouver crosses it inside a year without ever thinking about it. Shopify's reports will give you the provincial breakdown if you ask for it, and checking it once a quarter takes five minutes.
Saskatchewan is the strict one. There is no de minimis. An out-of-province vendor making retail sales of taxable goods into Saskatchewan is expected to register and collect the 6% PST from the first order. Manitoba's RST rules for out-of-province sellers are narrower than Saskatchewan's, and the answer depends on whether you are considered to be soliciting business in the province, which is exactly the kind of question you pay an accountant for rather than reading a forum thread.
None of these registrations appear in Shopify automatically. You obtain the number from the province, you enter it in the tax settings, and only then does the line item show up at checkout.
Quebec: QST setup and the Bill 96 problem sitting next to it
If you carry on business in Quebec, you register for QST with Revenu Québec and enter the number in Shopify alongside your GST registration. Checkout will then show GST and QST as two separate lines, which is what Quebec expects. A Canadian seller outside Quebec shipping tangible goods in, with no establishment there, generally does not have a QST collection obligation on those goods — but the rules around digital products, services and marketplaces are different, so confirm your specific case rather than assuming.
The harder Quebec issue is language. Bill 96 makes French a compliance question for anyone doing business with Quebec consumers, and that extends to your invoices, order confirmations, shipping notifications, returns policy and terms. A store with an English-only checkout and English-only transactional emails serving Quebec customers is exposed in a way that has nothing to do with tax and everything to do with the same order flow.
Practically, that means Shopify Markets with a French locale, Translate & Adapt or a translation app for the storefront, and — the bit almost everyone forgets — the notification email templates under Settings → Notifications translated too. Those templates are Liquid. They do not translate themselves when you add a locale. Budget real hours for the emails, not an afternoon. This is one of the two or three things we flag first when a Canadian brand asks us to look at their store, and it is usually cheaper to fix properly at build time than to retrofit.
Tax-exempt customers and product-level overrides
Shopify gives you two mechanisms and they solve different problems.
Customer-level exemption is for a specific buyer: a status Indian purchasing goods delivered to a reserve under section 87 of the Indian Act, a reseller with a valid PST exemption certificate, a diplomatic buyer. Edit the customer record, set the tax exemption, and their future orders come through untaxed. Keep the supporting documentation. If you are ever reviewed, the exemption you cannot evidence becomes tax you owe personally.
Product or collection overrides handle categories: basic groceries zero-rated federally, children's clothing and footwear exempt from BC PST, books and car seats attracting Ontario's point-of-sale rebate on the provincial 8%. Build a collection, apply the override to that collection in the tax settings, and new products inherit it if your collection rules are automated. Manual collections mean somebody has to remember. They will not remember in November.
Invoices that will survive a CRA review
Your customers who are themselves registered need specific information to claim their input tax credits, and the requirements scale with the value of the sale. Under $30, your name, the date and the total with tax is enough. From $30 to just under $150, you must also show your GST/HST registration number and either the tax amount or a clear statement of the rates applied. At $150 and above, add the purchaser's name, the terms of sale and a description of what was sold.
Shopify's default order confirmation email does not print your GST/HST number. That is the single most common failure. A B2B customer emails asking for "a proper invoice" and someone types one by hand. Fix it once: either add the registration numbers to the order confirmation and packing slip templates, or run an invoicing app that generates a compliant PDF. For Quebec orders, the invoice needs both the GST and QST numbers, the two taxes shown separately, and French available.
Selling into the US: duties at checkout after the de minimis change
The $800 de minimis exemption that let Canadian brands ship small parcels into the US without duty is gone. The US ended it for Chinese-origin goods in May 2025 and suspended it broadly from late August 2025. Every commercial parcel crossing south is now assessable, whatever it is worth.
What that means operationally: your products need HS codes and a country of origin on every variant, and your customs paperwork needs to be right at the label, not corrected afterwards. Goods that genuinely qualify under CUSMA rules of origin can still enter duty-free with proper certification. Goods you import from Asia and resell from a Toronto warehouse do not become Canadian by passing through it.
Shopify can collect estimated duties and import taxes at checkout so the buyer pays landed cost up front. Do it. The alternative is a courier invoicing your customer for duty plus a brokerage fee two weeks later, which produces a refund request, a chargeback, or a one-star review — sometimes all three. Fill in the HS codes and origin fields in the product admin, or the estimate Shopify shows will be a guess.
Carrier choice interacts with this more than people expect. When Canada Post service is disrupted, and it has been, brands fail over to UPS, Purolator, FedEx or a regional courier. Those carriers handle customs and brokerage differently, and a duties-paid setup tuned for one can produce surprise charges through another. Test the fallback route with a live cross-border order before you need it, not during the week you switch.
What we check before Black Friday and Boxing Day
Canadian retail has two peaks, not one, and the gap between them contains 26 December. A short list we run on client stores in early November:
- Test orders to Ontario, Alberta, BC, Saskatchewan and Quebec, reading the tax lines rather than trusting settings.
- Provincial revenue report reviewed against the BC $10,000 threshold.
- Any discount code that reduces the taxable base checked — stacked discounts and gift cards can shift what tax applies to.
- French notification emails rendering correctly, including the ones nobody reads until something goes wrong, like the refund confirmation.
- HS codes present on every variant that ships to the US.
Nova Scotia's April rate change is a reminder that a January reconciliation is not the same as a January rate check. Provinces move rates on 1 January and 1 April far more often than they move them in the middle of a quarter.
If you are not sure which of these applies to you, pull your Shopify tax report for the last four quarters and sort it by province. Everything above $10,000 that is not Ontario or Alberta needs a decision. We also run a free store audit that covers tax configuration alongside speed and checkout, and if you want someone who has set this up on Canadian stores before, our Canada team can take a look at yours.