Frequently asked question about ShopCanadianStuff.ca
What are the criteria for being listed in the ShopCanadianStuff.ca directory?
Products must have a clearly identified Canadian manufacturing or production claim. This will include the official claims of “made in Canada” and “product of Canada”, but also other claims such as prepared in Canada, bottled in Canada and assembled in Canada. For digital services such as apps and videogames the listing will require confirmation that the company has its headquarters in Canada or that the team responsible for a specific product is majority located in Canada.
What about foreign owned companies that make products in Canada?
Foreign owned companies that make products in Canada would be eligible for listing but only for the specific products actually made in Canada. Many companies make products in multiple countries, only those products actually having a claim like made in Canada (or another as addressed above) would be eligible for listing.
What about Canadian owned companies that make products in other countries?
Products made in other countries will not be listed even if they are made by a Canadian company. One single exception to this is we are listing Support-Ukraine.ca which sells pro Ukraine and anti-Putin merchandise designed in Canada with 100% of profits going towards aid in Ukraine.
Why is ShopCanadianStuff.ca listing products made by American companies?
We are listing products that are manufactured (made, prepared, bottled, assembled, etc.) in Canada or meeting the standard to claim Product of Canada. Many American owned companies have factories in Canada with Canadian workers making products for American brand names. The Canadians working for these businesses are real people earning a living, paying taxes and spending their wages in the Canadian economy.
Don’t the profits from buying made in Canada products owned by American parent companies go to the USA?
They might, they could also be reinvested in expanding the company’s operations in Canada. Corporate profits are usually a very small portion of what you pay for an item as a consumer. Take for example PepsiCo Inc. which makes familiar American brands like Pepsi but also a huge range of food and beverage products. PepsiCo Inc. reported a worldwide revenue of $91.8 billion for 2024 and a net profit of $9.6 billion, the difference is all the money they spent making, shipping and advertising their products, and they are left with almost exactly 10% profit from all the money they earned.
Suppose you buy a 2 L bottle of Pepsi at Sobey’s for $3.99. Pepsi doesn’t get the full $3.99, they get whatever Sobey’s pays them as a wholesale price, which is going to be a heck of a lot less or else Sobey’s would be buying their Pepsi at No Frills for $2.50 (actually on sale for $1.69 at time of writing). So maybe Pepsi gets $2 for a 2 L bottle, their 10% profit would be $0.20. Some of the profits are distributed to shareholders as dividends, but nobody knows exactly who all the shareholders are, though interestingly enough the Canada Pension Plan owns about half a billion USD worth of the company. The other $3.79, goes to the costs of the grocery store and bottling plants (including labour, rent, utilities, maintenance, trucking) and the grocery store’s profits.
Do you use affiliate marketing links?
We are not using affiliate marketing links for any products or services with one sole exception, which is an affiliate marketing link for the Voilà delivery and in-store pickup service used by Sobey’s, Safeway, Farm Boy, Longo’s, and IGA. There are many products in the searchable database and links in the blogs that have links to Voilà because it is an option to buy online across most of the county, but none of those links are affiliate links. There are no hidden affiliate links, the one and only affiliate link which you are encouraged to use if you’d like to help financially support ShopCanadianStuff.ca is right here, explicitly identified as an affiliate link for the Voilà delivery service. We aren’t using more affiliate links because we want to be transparent and we don’t want to take away money from the small Canadian businesses you are trying to support, Sobey’s is a very big business and will probably be okay either way.
What about advertising?
First to be clear, the entire site is advertising, free advertising for products and services made in Canada.
We don’t have any paid advertising on the site for three reasons:
1) Website advertising is annoying, especially the pop-ups but also all of it,
2) Almost all website advertising is run by Google (a massive American company) and we don’t want to help them earn more money,
3) We don’t want Canadian businesses spending money to put ads on our site, we made the site to help those businesses not take their money
Many websites sell advertising through Google and then spend that money advertising through Google to get more visitors to the site, we aren’t doing either of those, again we aren’t going to give Google money.
What about selling user data?
We actually aren’t tracking much user data except if you want to login to post something, you do register an email address. That helps keep trolls and bots from flooding the sites with false listings and spam comments (they still do that, but we manually delete those before they are shown on the website). We aren’t selling any data and we aren’t tracking what you are doing on the site and can’t even tell how many visitors the site has (which we don’t need to know because we aren’t trying to sell advertising). A bit more information is in our privacy policy.