An ecommerce platform for 130 underserved Northern communities.

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, and that exemption also has to be applied at checkout. Beyond Northern Stores, NWC's banners span currencies and languages, so while the storefront had to feel simple, the back end needed to be ready for the B2B and foreign-market growth coming next.

I selected 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 extensible enough to grow into B2B without a rebuild.

We built custom logic into the checkout to apply Nutrition North subsidies on eligible items and Treaty status tax relief based on the customer's profile, and connected the platform to NWC's ERP and POS systems so inventory, pricing, and orders flowed both ways between the website and the stores. I owned the plan, the budget, and the vendor relationships, and kept IT, finance, logistics, and store operations working to the same launch date.

Customers across 130 communities can order online and have their orders fulfilled through the Northern Store network, with subsidies and exemptions applied correctly. The site launched on time and within budget, on a platform built to carry the B2B expansion and the rollout to the rest of the NWC banner portfolio.