.CA domain helps move your business from bricks and mortar to bricks and clicks<\/p>\n
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Like anyone who ever dreamed about a future in retail, Sally Glover had a clear image in her head of the perfect store she’d run one day: the d\u00e9cor, the signage, the neighbourhood. \u201cI love the human interaction, the face-to-face with the customers,\u201d she says. \u201cIt’s the thing I miss about the bricks-and-mortar experience.\u201d But here’s the thing about bricks and mortar: they cost.<\/p>\n
Glover is the founder, chief executive officer and (so far) sole employee of\u00a0Fresh Faced<\/a>, a Toronto-based online-only operation selling natural and organic cosmetics and skin care products. Like a great\u00a0Canadian business,\u00a0she relies on the trust dividend that comes from flying the flag on a .CA site.<\/p>\n \u201cI went with a .CA website because I’m targeting a Canadian audience,\u201d she says. \u201cI have a different focus from mass-market online retailers. I still get sales from the States but that’s not the basis of my business.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s definitely a benefit to having a Canadian address when you’re doing business with Canadians,\u201d says David Fowler, director of marketing and communications with the Canadian Internet Registration Authority\u00a0(CIRA). \u201cCanadians \u00a0like to do business with other Canadians and .CA\u00a0 tells them they are visiting a Canadian website. In an environment where people are aware of the origin of retail websites they visit, showing them that you are Canadian is an advantage.\u201d<\/p>\n Glover launched on Earth Day 2012 and she says business is good. \u201cIt’s challenging because I have no staff, let alone a budget for marketing or PR \u2014 it’s just me, working out of my home. So I do my marketing via social media. The feedback I’ve been getting has been overwhelmingly positive \u2014 people are really glad I’m doing what I’m doing.\u201d<\/p>\n In the early days of online sales, retail portals were almost always offshoots of \u2018real world’ operations. That business model has since been turned on its ear. Web sales are booming and powerful new site design tools are making it cheaper and faster to start a business online before migrating offline \u2014 rather than the other way around. Shopify<\/a>\u00a0exemplifies that trend; in a sense, it helped start it.\u00a0<\/p>\n The folks behind this Ottawa-based business started with an online store selling snowboards back in 2005 \u2014 but frustration with available web design tools led them into a profitable detour.<\/p>\n \u201cYou basically had a choice between setting up a very generic, very boring online store or spending $100,000 to $1-million putting together something attractive and interesting,\u201d says Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s chief platform officer. He and his colleagues put their own site model together. Then the penny dropped. \u201cSelling snowboards online was a good idea, but selling the software that lets you sell snowboards online \u2014 or anything else \u2014 is a much, much better idea.\u201d<\/p>\n The genius of Shopify is that its site design tool is simple (\u201cIf you can use email, you can be up and running in an hour,\u201d says Finkelstein). It’s adaptable \u2014 you can make your store look like nothing else on the Net. It’s also cheap \u2014 the service starts at $14 a month \u2014 which makes it very attractive to small Canadian businesses. More than 5,000 of Shopify’s clients are Canadian, using a .CA domain to help them establish a strong, trustworthy brand presence in the market that matters most to them.<\/p>\n \u201cCanadians feel safer buying from Canadian sites, so the .ca confers a competitive advantage,\u201d says Finkelstein. \u201cMany of the more successful Canadian online enterprises emphasize it.\u201d<\/p>\n A joint venture with Postmedia (Financial Post<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n