Industry committee  I don't know what you're talking about.

Industry committee  The only thing I want to say is this. In 1866, a guy named John Wanamaker, a famous U.S. politician and businessman, created the advent of the modern-day shopping mall—1867. Basically between that time and today, retail has been pretty boring: it's been the exact same thing.

Industry committee  I'm not going to regret that.

Industry committee  Very seriously. Shopify is not a payment gateway, but we do work with 65 of the largest payment gateways in the world. We are PCI level 1 compliant, which is the highest level of PCI compliance, meaning that we do have to spend quite a bit of time monitoring it. The way we do it is we self-assess.

Industry committee  It's a good question. I have a Canada Goose jacket, and I bought it off Canadian Icons. Now, Canadian Icons is not Canada-goose.com, it's a retailer. But what I did was I went to Canada-goose.com, and there's a section that says “Find a Retailer”. I put in the URL, the domain name, of the actual retailer, and within a matter of seconds I knew that they were an officially licensed retailer.

Industry committee  Totally.

Industry committee  Yes, I do. This past week I was with Canadian Icons—they do sell Canada Goose jackets—and my first question to them was what happens when Canada Goose opens up their own online store and goes direct-to-consumer? Their answer was that they were going to have a lot more brands. They understand that Canada Goose can go direct-to-the-consumer.

Industry committee  The original business model was just to be a snowboard retailer. We basically blogged our way through building that snowboard retailer. When we got to the point of selecting an e-commerce platform, we were especially verbose in terms of our disappointment with what was on the market.

Industry committee  I think the anecdote you describe is showrooming. That's an example of showrooming: you've gone in and you've used the showroom, but you haven't actually made the purchase in the store. Now, presumably if they had an online store and their prices were competitive, they may have gotten the sale themselves online.

Industry committee  That's right. I can't speak for why postal prices are the way they are. But we have a report from Forrester saying that Canadian consumers are finding it cheaper to purchase things from the U.S. than purchasing the same products from Canada. This is something that I'm concerned about and that I think we should all be concerned about.

Industry committee  Correct.

Industry committee  That's correct.

Industry committee  It's mostly a long tail as well, so it's not a Pareto—

Industry committee  I'd say that the first thing is competition. There's a lot less competition here, which means that companies can charge more. They have this great thing in the U.S. called the “one box”. Basically, you're given one box. If you're a small business in the United States, you can put anything you want in it, no matter what weight it is.

Industry committee  No. That's in 100 countries; 5,000 are in Canada.