Northern Direct
An e-commerce platform for 130 underserved Northern communities.
Northern Direct is the digital arm of Northern Stores — The North West Company's retail network serving rural communities across Northern Canada, Western Canada, rural Alaska, the South Pacific, and the Caribbean. Customers in these markets are often hundreds of kilometers from the nearest large retailer. The site had to do something a typical e-commerce platform doesn't: handle government subsidies, treaty status, and a catalog that crosses currencies and languages — all at checkout.
- Role
- E-commerce Manager, The North West Company
- Year
- 2020
- Industry
- Retail E-commerce
Highlights
- 01Nutrition North Canada subsidies calculated at checkout
- 02Treaty Status tax exemptions applied automatically
- 03Multi-currency, multi-language catalog
- 04Integrated with NWC's ERP and POS systems
- 05Magento foundation built for B2B and B2C
- 06Fastly CDN for performance from the network edge
The Challenge
Serve 130 markets with rules no off-the-shelf checkout handles.
The North West Company's customers aren't typical online shoppers. Many live in remote communities where Northern Stores is the primary retailer for hundreds of kilometers. Pricing for grocery and household essentials in these communities is supported by Canada's Nutrition North program — a per-item subsidy that has to land correctly at checkout.
Indigenous customers with Treaty Status are exempt from sales tax — also at checkout. The NWC's banners span currencies and languages. And while the consumer storefront had to feel simple, the back end needed to be ready for the B2B and foreign-market growth coming next.
The Approach
An open commerce platform built for what's next.
We chose Magento as the foundation — open enough to be molded to NWC's business rules, mature enough to handle multi-currency and multi-language out of the box, and architectural enough to extend into B2B without a rebuild.
Custom logic was built directly into the checkout flow to apply Nutrition North subsidies on eligible items and Treaty Status tax relief based on customer profile. The platform was wired into the existing ERP and POS systems so inventory, pricing, and orders flowed bidirectionally between digital and physical stores. Fastly handled content delivery from the network edge — important when customer bandwidth varies wildly by community.
The Outcome
A digital storefront for communities that needed one.
Customers across 130 markets can now order online and have orders fulfilled through the existing Northern Store network — with subsidies and exemptions applied correctly, in their currency and their language. The same platform underpins the B2B expansion and supports the rollout to the rest of the NWC banner portfolio.
Stack
