Seven ideas that keep your margins, the 2026 dates, the rules for sale signs, and a five-week plan for your team.
From a Montreal team behind $2M+ eCommerce sales
Connect your storefront to local shoppers through an AI-powered online shop
Tailored to the needs of brick-and-mortar storefronts and local, neighbourhood businesses.
Syndicate builds your physical shop a powerful and simple online storefront that works for you and your customers. Serve local shoppers with convenience and grow revenue with no platform fees.
What we build
Syndicate builds custom online stores for brick-and-mortar neighbourhood retail businesses
Running a store takes a lot of work, and sometimes there’s not enough hours in the day to run a second one online. Syndicate provides merchants with the tools to tackle the complex and time-consuming tasks that used to be a headache, and today are a breeze.
Tailored to brick-and-mortar businesses
Physical retail stores are not the same as online stores. We build for these types of businesses.
Time-saving features for busy owners
It takes a lot of time and effort running your storefront. We automate features for inventory management, accounting and more.
Simple pickup, local delivery and shipping setups
Turn on shipping through a shipping integration we show you how to use, whenever you want to reach further.
Personalized consultation from our expert team
Each business is different. Syndicate advises you with devoted customer success support on how to best achieve your goals.
AI-powered features for the boring stuff
Automate simple, repetitive or low-risk jobs with AI
Tons of products on your shelf. How will you take pictures of them all? Online orders you received. What’s your most popular product with users? In-store shopper wants to know how to use your product. How can you explain each one? With Syndicate, AI-powered features built into your store are saving you time and setup headaches.
Own your relationship with your customer
Create long-term value by connecting to your customers directly
Tired of paying Uber Eats or another ordering platform fees every time you want to connect with your customers? Still paying rent to TikTok, Meta or Instagram? Not over here.
With Syndicate, your website belongs to your business, and we give you the power to instantly connect with a database of past and current customers at a time that makes sense for you.
Convenient ways to shop with you
Offer in-store pickup, local delivery and simple shipping setups
Give your loyal customers a chance to buy, even when they’re not standing inside your store. Need to approve what they buy, or control who can and can’t place orders? Your site can display “Request a Quote” forms, details on your products or even a AI-powered customer service agent to answer qustions.
Track your online and in-store purchases with your POS
Synergize your online and in-store purchases and inventory
Inventory connected to your point of sales system? Look no further than Syndicate with an integration to keep track of transactions, inventory levels and customer profiles with a POS integration that handles all the headaches.
Recurring + Subscription sales
Develop new revenue models with your frequent customers
Café? Vitamin or supplement shop? Grocery store with B2B wholesale business? With Syndicate, you can implement effective, sales-generation subscription plans that automatically renew and charge your customers for convenience purposes.
Drive foot traffic to your store with redeemable digital promotions
Created online, redeemed in-store – and vice-versa
Drive foot traffic to your storefront with effective digital strategies to bring customers in-store: for the first time, and new customers as well.
Put QR codes, website links and deal promotions on your storefront to drive traffic digitally with exclusive online deals for in-store customers – and for people walking by that have never paid you a visit before.
Syndicate vs. other popular solutions: how we compare on price and ownership
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- Generic pay-to-play platform, no leads or expertise provided With Shopify, you pay a monthly subscription fee to have your store online. Additional features require monthly add-on subscriptions.
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- Multishopping platform charging 15-30% per order Platforms like Uber Eats require you to pay 15-30% per order processed. Over the course of 1 year, that could be costing you 10s of thousands of dollars!
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- Starts at $15,000+, no specialization Other Agencies publish custom B2B development at $15,000 and up with no industry-specific approach.
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- CAD, with Syndicate eCommerce you own the store Starts at $500 / month financed for 1 year, and it belongs to you! Built by a team based 100% in Canada.
Real sales results with Syndicate
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- Real results: 40% of total orders, $100K in sales 12+ months through online purchases on a site built with Syndicate Montreal's Le Kioko was paying a cut of every order to delivery apps. The in-house ordering system we built now handles 40% of all their orders, with $100K in sales over 12+ months, and puts them in direct contact with every customer.
| Feature | Syndicate eCommerce | Shopify store | Store builder | Delivery app |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Someone builds it for you | Yes | No | No | No |
| You own the store itself | Yes | Varies | Varies | No |
| Customers pick up at your counter | Yes | Varies | Varies | Varies |
| Your own local delivery, at a flat rate you set | Yes | Varies | Varies | No |
| Subscriptions, like monthly coffee | Yes | Varies | Varies | No |
| No commission to a delivery app on each order | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Help packing orders, by the hour | Yes | No | No | No |
| In-store signage that brings your regulars online | Yes | Varies | No | Varies |
| Your store in English and French | Yes | Varies | Varies | Varies |
| Your own website that Google can list | Yes | Varies | Yes | No |
- A dash means it varies by provider or plan.
When storefronts start looking for an online store: for marketing needs and repetitive tasks
What pain are you dealing with? Let us know at the bottom of the page.
There could be a multitude of reasons why you’re visiting Syndicate today. Is business slow? Maybe people are having a hard time to find you. Are you wondering if it’s possible to sell your products to new customers online? Or have you seen that customers are buying from competitors who make it easier to shop: ordering ahead, delivery, a subscription, etc.? Or maybe, you or your team spends hours on the phone telling people what products are in stock and what they cost?
Three jobs eating up your time (that your online shop could handle) that we see at many businesses
How much time are you spending on a task that can Syndicate can build once to take care of it forever? If you’re afraid of how much it would cost, what we’d like to mention is this: the cost of not building the tool is much higher than the cost of building it, when you account for the time it takes doing all of this manual, mundane, repetitive work by hand.
Rather than have your team work on strategic goals, they’re instead handling inventory issues, answering phone calls and perhaps even balancing transactions. Your own online shop consolidates much of this work, allowing some relief for your team to focus on the things that truly matter.
It also finally makes it possible for people to find you online, which could be good for business!
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- Challenges with inventory Counting what's on the shelf, what sold and what needs reordering, sometimes by hand.
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- Answering phone calls "Is it in stock? How much is it? Can you hold one for me?"
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- Balancing the day's transactions Balancing transactions and still finding time to market the shop.
If nothing changes
What those jobs cost you
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- Time wasted Every repeat question and last-minute edit by hand takes your team away from the customer in front of them.
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- Missed sales Customers who can't check your stock or order ahead buy from whoever lets them.
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- Hard to find online An online store puts it in writing online, where everyone who searches Google can find it.
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- No product knowledge for customers The product knowledge that makes your shop worth visiting lives in your staff's heads, and it leaves when they do.
Common concerns
Reasons why eCommerce doesn’t work for you (the ones we hear, anyways!)
Building an online shop can seem like a daunting task when you’re already overwhelmed with so much to do: managing the store, stocking shelves. The biggest concern for achieving this isn’t choosing which technology, what to sell, or how to build it. The biggest concern is knowing what to do. With Syndicate, we provide you with the expertise needed to launch your store and make it a success.
Business owners have questions about how the process would work. Here are some common ones.
- Either that, or it’s been a bad experience trying this once before. The question is: what results were you hoping for that you didn’t get and what did the process look like from start to finish last time? What was the exact objective? Who built it? We often do post-mortem examinations and failures on what’s happened.
Who this is for
More questions from shops, cafés and restaurants with a counter and regulars
If you have a storefront that sells retail, this is for you. That means a store we can find in the neighbourhood, inside a shopping mall or strip mall, or somewhere with open hours that allows people to walk in and buy, sometimes serving themselves, and other times, having an employee help them.
Some common questions and concerns
- Yes. Customers sign up once and receive their order every month. For one coffee client, subscriptions bring in 20–30% of monthly revenue.
What you’re working toward
What goals your storefront is looking for (that your online store can help achieve)
Every business is different. If you have a publicly accessible storefront for retail that invites shoppers to come and make purchases off your shelves, or from your ordering table, then we can safely draw some general conclusions on what success looks like for you.
- New and regular customers
- Recurring revenue / sales
- How easy (or not) it is to reach customers
- How easy it is to find your store
- Products / services you sell
- The price of your products
What we track
What we measure once your store is live and selling to customers
How can we know if your store is a failure or success, if we don’t have any tools or objectives to measure? Having a plan in place to track progress and specific objectives is critical for this. Your Syndicate store generates reports about your online performance, and with the necessary puzzle pieces implemented, we’ll be able to compare these numbers with your physical storefront’s data. Here are some of the numbers we watch with you.
Why Syndicate
A store you own, built by a team achieving success since 2015
Syndicate has launched online stores for storefronts, from a Montreal restaurant’s own ordering to a coffee shop’s subscriptions. On a delivery app or a rented platform, your online channel belongs to someone else. When we build your store, the domain, the hosting, the files and every login are yours.
- A team behind $2M+ in eCommerce sales, based in Montreal and serving businesses since 2015.
- We run our own online shop, so we know the day-to-day of selling online.
- Funding help. We’ve helped businesses across Canada secure government funding for digital projects, including through the Canada Digital Adoption Program.
- No lock-in: no proprietary platform, and no contract on the care plan.
Read more
How a pickup order runs from website to counter, the four questions owners ask first, and a checklist to keep beside the till.
Both apps' published rates side by side, what they cost on a holiday catering order, and where your own ordering fits.
Plan prices and card fees in Canadian dollars, a worked first year for a small shop, and what decides how long a build takes.
How to size your delivery area, price a run so it pays for itself, batch orders into windows, and what to ask your broker.
What the AI Adoption looks like: Software tools to cut time + effort
Using AI to analyze product photography, one small web tool custom made for a fashion wholesaler contributed to massive time reduction in costing, manufacturing lead time, and hours of effort.
-95%
time and effort
From weeks to 4 days
Cuts to lead time