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The questions owners ask us on the first call, answered in plain language. Each guide opens with the answer and ends with the sources. No gating, no newsletter popup, no fluff.
Platform choices, migrations, site speed, and what a Shopify Plus build actually costs.
Shopify Plus licensing starts at CA$3,400 per month in Canada, and a proper Plus build typically lands between CAD $30,000 and $150,000 depending on integrations. Here is the honest math, what actually moves the number, and when Plus is the wrong answer.
Read the guide →Most stores should stay on a Shopify theme. Headless earns its cost when you need control Shopify's theme layer will not give you, and it charges you in build time, hosting, and a permanent front-end maintenance job. Here is the honest test.
Read the guide →A Shopify migration for a catalog of a few hundred to a few thousand products typically takes 8 to 14 weeks, and the work that protects revenue is a complete 301 redirect map built before anything else. Customer passwords never migrate, Shopify sets your URL structure for you, and the old platform's bad data follows you unless it is cleaned first.
Read the guide →Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds are a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits. On most Shopify and custom stores the failures come from images, third-party scripts and fonts, in that order, and fixing those three is a few weeks of work rather than a replatform.
Read the guide →What internal tools, web apps, mobile apps and automation cost, and when to build them at all.
In Canada a focused internal tool typically costs CAD $15,000 to $40,000, a customer-facing web application $40,000 to $120,000, and a SaaS product you can charge for $100,000 to $250,000 before the first paying customer. Integrations, user roles and undecided requirements move the number; the count of screens does not.
Read the guide →Most business apps should be built once in React Native and shipped to both stores, and a surprising number should not be apps at all. Native wins when the app leans on the camera, sensors or heavy graphics; a well-built web app wins when nobody will install anything. Here is the decision in the order it should be made.
Read the guide →The automations that pay back fastest are the ones where someone today reads something and retypes it somewhere else: product data, supplier documents, support replies and weekly reports. A well-chosen first automation costs CAD $10,000 to $30,000 to build and removes a recurring task within weeks. A chatbot on the homepage is usually the wrong place to start.
Read the guide →Redesign when the problem is how the site looks and reads; rebuild when the problem is what the site cannot do. The tell is the workaround list: if the team keeps more than a handful of manual steps, plugins or spreadsheets propping the site up, a redesign buys about a year before the same conversation. Here is how to decide, and what each one costs.
Read the guide →Listings, A+ content and advertising for brands selling on Amazon.ca.
On Amazon the listing is the product page, the search result, and the sales pitch at once. Title, images, and A+ content do most of the work, and A+ content is free for brand-registered sellers. Here is what to fix first and in what order.
Read the guide →Start Amazon ads only once a listing converts on its own, then begin with Sponsored Products on automatic targeting for two to four weeks and move the search terms that sell into manual campaigns. Judge spend by total advertising cost of sales across the account rather than the ACOS of one campaign, and treat the first month as paid research.
Read the guide →Where the first marketing dollar goes, and how to get cited by AI assistants.
AI assistants recommend businesses by reading pages that answer a question directly and by cross-checking claims against third-party sources. You influence that with extractable answers, structured data, and citations you do not control. Here is what actually works.
Read the guide →Put the first dollar into Google Ads if you need customers this quarter and your site already converts; put it into SEO if your margins cannot carry a cost per click and you can wait 4 to 6 months for results. Most small businesses should run a small search campaign first, because it shows in weeks which searches are worth years of SEO.
Read the guide →What Ontario's AODA and Quebec's Law 25 require of a website, with the deadlines and penalties.
Since January 1, 2021, Ontario organizations with 50 or more employees in Ontario must make their public websites conform to WCAG 2.0 Level AA under the AODA. Here is who it covers, what it actually requires, and how to check your site.
Read the guide →Law 25 applies to any business that collects personal information from people in Quebec, whether or not it has an office there. Since September 22, 2023 that means a published privacy policy, a named privacy officer, consent that is specific and separate, and tracking that stays off until the visitor turns it on. Administrative penalties reach the greater of $10 million or 2 percent of worldwide turnover.
Read the guide →The real math of a retainer against an in-house hire, and what to ask a developer before signing.
A CAD $120,000 developer costs roughly $155,000 a year once payroll costs, recruiting, equipment, and ramp-up are counted, and buys about 160 usable hours a month whether you use them or not. Here is the honest comparison against a $5,000 monthly retainer, including the cases where hiring wins.
Read the guide →Most bad web projects in Ontario fail on the same four things: who owns the code, who actually writes it, what happens after launch, and whether the quote includes the work that always appears later. Here are the questions that surface all four.
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