Industry committee  Plus a 2% transaction fee.

Industry committee  How ironic is this: the fact that the people who can benefit most from the Internet and the democratization of technology are the very people who don't have access to it? I cannot go ahead and build a brick-and-mortar store across the street from a Walmart. I would have to get the building, leasehold improvements, inventory, payroll, and all those other things.

Industry committee  Fifty-five thousand are currently actively selling every day.

Industry committee  Correct. You can expect that some large companies, like the Foo Fighters, for example, won't want to give me 2% of what they are making. So there is a plan at $179 per month with no transaction fee, just to be clear.

Industry committee  I don't think they are. I think maybe they sell more papers. Maybe RIM is an interesting story.

Industry committee  I think we need more role models here. I think the companies here that are doing really well, like Canadian Icons.... It's a shame that not everyone knows about this story, that three guys out of Aylmer, Quebec, have built a million dollar company in less than six months selling Canada Goose jackets using real time delivery.

Industry committee  I'm really happy you asked that question. Ten years ago, if you wanted to sell a product, you had to do a couple of things. You had to raise some money to manufacture that product. You had to manufacture that product. You then had to find an agency or a distributor to distribute that product.

Industry committee  I think currently we are lagging. Forgetting about population size, because that would be misleading, but just looking at percentages as opposed to real numbers, we have half the online retail penetration that the U.S. has. The most recent numbers that I've seen show that online retail in Canada is growing at about 14.5%.

Industry committee  I don't mean to repeat myself, but I think a lot of it is inspiration. I think we have to tell the story of Canadian business a little better. Now that Shopify is a successful business, I feel that one of my responsibilities is to help other Canadian entrepreneurs realize that you can build a company and you can stay in Ottawa and you can stay in Canada.

Industry committee  The Internet, of course. I'm actually just kidding. But beyond that, I think the media has done a decent job of highlighting some interesting, cool, tech companies here in Canada, but if you open most of the major newspapers in Canada, the tech stories are about U.S. companies not Canadian companies.

Industry committee  Again, I think it's a great idea, but I don't think it's a great idea for the reasons you may think. I don't think it's a great idea to allocate a chunk of money to encourage Canadian small businesses to move online. What I do like about it is that there's a program in place that inspires these people and shows them these case studies.

Industry committee  I think, first of all, that is vintage specific a little bit. What I mean by that is that some of us are used to actually not walking out of a store with something in our hand; we're used to actually going online and purchasing it. I would also say that if there is a price differential that is in a certain range....

Industry committee  Yes. Okay. Sorry.

Industry committee  Foot in mouth, foot in mouth. There's an app, for example, it's a real app. It's called RedLaser, which allows you to take a picture of any bar code you want and tells you where you can buy that product more cheaply within a certain geographic radius. So you can go into Best Buy, play with the camera, take a picture of the UPC bar code, and you may actually be sent to a different store to purchase it.

Industry committee  Right. Even for people who are savvy with technology, like me, still want to talk to a salesperson and ask questions about the different shutter speeds on a camera, for example. I can't always get that experience online. I may want to ask questions of a real person. I think I can do that using the showrooming techniques and I think we'll see that a lot of these big stores will actually get smaller very soon.