Canadians doing FHWW (or others outside of USA)?

[FrozenCanuck]

Hi there,

Are there any fellow Canucks doing muses and selling online? Tim doesn't explicitly talk about this, but I think that you MUST (as a Canadian) offer your product to customers in the USA. Canada is too small to keep a muse alive in most cases.

The problem: Yahoo Stores (Tim's recommended) seems to only accept USD currency and has pre-programmed interfaces to work with UPS that assume you are American. Has anyone done this in such a way that being a Canadian was not an issue?

For electronically downloaded products, I assume you can just setup a store with a US-based merchant solution provider and sell online that way?

Who has gone through the trouble of figuring out when you are legally bound to charge sales tax (PST and GST in Canada!) and when you do NOT have to charge such taxes?

Best regards,
FC

[raycee]

Hi there,

Who has gone through the trouble of figuring out when you are legally bound to charge sales tax (PST and GST in Canada!) and when you do NOT have to charge such taxes?

Best regards,
FC

PST will depend on the province your business resides in and is only taxable to residents of that province. So for Ontario residents, you charge them 8% and BC residents, you charge 7%. There are different rules for what you must charge for PST. For example, books and magazines do not incur PST in BC. But in Ontario, only magazines are charged PST. So I would contact the provincial government tax site to check if your product or service is taxable in your province or not. Note: Albert does not have PST, only GST.

HST must be mentioned too. This tax is a harmonized tax for both GST and PST for certain provinces like Quebec, Nova Scotia etc. Whatever you have to charge for GST, you charge as HST (15% I believe).

GST is the main one. All goods and services are taxed at 6% to all Canadian residents. Nonresidents are not taxed. Two things are not taxable: exempt goods (such as medical services) and zero-rated goods (groceries). You don't need to charge GST if your business make less than $30,000 in your business in a year.

Long story short - don't charge taxes to people outside of Canada. However, there may be custom or duty for shipping goods over the border - usually purchaser's responsibility, but you should warn them. I haven't worked out the drop-ship scenario, but the drop-shipper should tell you their deal for worldwide shipping.

If your primary market is US and it's an online business, why not incorporate your business in Nevada for instance? Then you won't have to worry about taxes - and neither will your customers. You can draw a cheque (or check - yes I'm a real Canadian!) from the Nevada corp to pay you. I'd seek some profession advice to determine if this situation fits your business plan or not.

Hope this helps. My first post on this forum. Woo hoo!

Ray

[Mike Rhodes]

Hey Ray,

Some great advice. I've been meaning to set up a Nevada (or Delaware) corp for a while now - anyone have any advice on a good company to help with this?

Cheers,
Mike

[NinjaCOB]

So you are saying that even if I'm in Canada, I could start a US business?

And what if for now I just want to test my business as a Canadian business (exporting to the USA)

What do I use? Yahoo store won't work. What other options do I have?

Is there ONLY yahoo store? (I'm not interested in paypal btw)

thanks