British Columbia · Canada
E-commerce website development in Vancouver
I build online stores end to end — catalogue, cart, Stripe checkout, order emails and the technical SEO that gets them found. Six of the fifteen sites I have shipped are e-commerce builds, and every one of them takes real payments. For Vancouver businesses, quoted in CAD from $150, typically live in 7 days.
What e-commerce website development includes for a Vancouver business
Fixed scope, agreed in writing before development starts. From $150, typically live in 7 days.
- Product catalogue with categories, search and filtering
- Cart and a checkout that handles tax, shipping and discount rules
- Stripe payment integration, tested against live card scenarios
- Automated order confirmation and admin notification email via PHPMailer
- Admin area for products, stock and orders
- Mobile-first responsive build — designed on a phone screen first
- Technical SEO baseline: schema, sitemap, meta, Core Web Vitals pass
- Deployment, domain and SSL configuration, plus a 30-day snag list
The terms for a Canadian client
| Starting price | From $150, quoted and invoiced in CAD |
|---|---|
| Typical timeline | 7 days once content is supplied |
| Tax position | GST/HST at 5–15% depending on province — my invoices are zero-rated exports and carry no Canadian tax |
| Data protection | PIPEDA federally, with Quebec Law 25 layered on top if you have Quebec customers — resolved by a written DPA naming Pakistan as the processing location, which PIPEDA requires you to disclose to your own customers |
| Payment rails available | Stripe, Interac e-Transfer for deposits, and Moneris where an existing merchant account has to stay |
| My day in Vancouver time | 00:00–09:00 — a shifted window is agreed in writing instead |
Why this matters for Canada specifically
Quebec Law 25 caught a lot of Canadian sites out: consent has to be explicit and granular, and the default cookie banner most agencies drop in does not meet it. I build the consent layer properly rather than bolting on a plugin.
Accessibility on a Vancouver build, and why it is not optional
Keyboard navigation, real contrast ratios, form labels that are actually associated with their inputs, and alt text that describes rather than repeats. None of it is expensive when built in from the start and all of it is expensive to retrofit, which is the entire argument for doing it in the first pass.
The commercial case is simpler than the legal one: a site that a screen reader can navigate is a site that a search engine can parse, because both are reading the same semantic structure. Accessibility work and technical SEO overlap far more than either discipline usually admits, and in Vancouver the same build serves both.
Hospitality and venues in Vancouver
Restaurants, cafés, hotels and venues are judged on four things a visitor looks for immediately: today's opening hours, the menu or rate as a readable page, real photographs of the actual room, and how to book. Everything else on a hospitality site is decoration arranged around those four.
The PDF menu deserves its own warning. It is invisible to search engines, unreadable on a phone without pinch-zoom, and it is the most common reason a Vancouver venue never appears for searches naming the dishes it serves. Menus belong in HTML.
A mobile layout nobody tested on a real phone
Desktop-first builds fail in predictable places: a navigation menu that cannot be closed, a table forcing the whole page sideways, tap targets too close together, and a sticky banner sitting over the button. Each one is invisible on a laptop and each one loses customers.
Most visitors to a Vancouver small business site arrive on a phone, so I design at phone width first and widen from there. That ordering is not a stylistic preference — it is the only way the small screen gets the attention the majority of your traffic deserves.
What I am not claiming about Vancouver
- I have no office, postal address or phone number in Vancouver
- I cannot meet you in person, and if that is a requirement you should hire locally
- I am not claiming existing clients in Vancouver specifically — my live work is listed on the work page and you can check it
- Nothing on this page is a guarantee of search rankings, which no developer can honestly offer
E-commerce website development in Vancouver — common questions
- Do you provide ongoing maintenance after launch?
- Thirty days of snag fixes are included after launch at no extra cost — anything that does not work as specified gets fixed. Beyond that there are monthly plans for updates, backups, monitoring and small changes. They are optional and cancellable; a site handed over properly does not require a retainer to keep running.
- Can you fix my existing site rather than rebuild it?
- Often, yes, and it is usually the cheaper answer. Speed problems, a broken mobile layout, a form that silently fails or missing structured data are all fixable on the site you already have. I will tell you which of the two you need after looking, and a rebuild only gets recommended when the fix would cost more than starting again.
- What hours will you be available to us in Vancouver?
- Honestly: very little, by default. My standard day lands at 00:00–09:00 your time, which barely touches a Vancouver working day. So Canada projects run on a deliberately shifted schedule — I commit in writing to a fixed daily window that falls inside your morning, plus asynchronous written updates you can read before you start. If a supplier in your own timezone is what you need, that is a legitimate reason to hire locally.
- How long does a Vancouver project actually take?
- Three days for a business site, seven for a store, ten for a custom application. That holds because the process is fixed rather than improvised and because your content exists on day one. What stretches a build is almost never the code — it is waiting for copy, logos and photographs, so those are requested before the clock starts.
- Can you migrate my Vancouver site without losing rankings?
- Yes, and the redirect map is the whole job. Every existing URL is mapped to its new equivalent with a 301 before launch, and anything with no equivalent goes to the closest relevant page rather than the homepage. Sites lose rankings in migration because that mapping was skipped, not because migration is inherently risky.
- Do you build on WordPress or something custom?
- Whichever the project justifies. WordPress when you need to edit content constantly and want a familiar admin. A static build when speed and security matter more than a plugin ecosystem. Custom PHP and MySQL when the logic is genuinely yours. The choice is explained in the quote with its trade-offs, not presented as a foregone conclusion.
- What happens if I am not happy with the result?
- Work is delivered in milestones against a written scope, and you review each one on a staging URL before it is paid for. If the delivered milestone does not match the scope, it gets corrected before anything moves forward. That structure exists so disagreement is resolved at the stage it happens rather than at the end when it is expensive.
Related pages
Other services in Vancouver
E-commerce website development in nearby British Columbia towns
The full service detail — process, deliverables, what is excluded and the FAQ — is on the main e-commerce website development page. Everything I build for Vancouver is on the Vancouver page, and every town in Canada is on the Canada coverage page.
E-commerce website development in Vancouver — get a fixed quote
Send the brief and you get a reply within one business day, priced in CAD from $150. If e-commerce website development is not what your project actually needs, I will say so.
- Response
- Replies within 1 business day
- Hours
- Mon–Fri, 09:00–18:00 PKT — overlaps 05:00–14:00 UK, 00:00–09:00 US Eastern
- Booking
- Booking projects from October 2026