Building a website for a Niagara business that sells across the border

Think about how you give somebody directions to your house. To a neighbour you say "the blue one past the church" and that's plenty. To somebody driving in from out of town you have to say the street, the town, and which exit off the highway, because every shortcut you would normally leave out is exactly the piece they don't have.

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A website for a business that sells on both sides of the border is directions for somebody from out of town. Everything a single-country site gets to leave implied has to be said out loud, because an assumption that's correct for your customer in Fort Erie is wrong for your customer in Buffalo, every single time. That's the whole difference, and it's bigger than it sounds.

Say which dollars you mean

A price that reads "$95" isn't a price when half your visitors are American. It's a question, and the answer they guess is whichever one makes them feel worse about it.

Write the currency beside the number. "$95 CAD" costs you four characters and removes the entire problem. If you want to show both, show both, and say plainly which one the card actually gets charged in and that the other figure moves with the exchange rate. A customer who sees $95 CAD and about $69 USD knows exactly what's happening. A customer who sees two bare numbers doesn't.

What I would skip is the clever version, where the site guesses your visitor's country and silently swaps the currency. It guesses wrong often enough to matter, and worse, it means the number on the screen can differ from the number you quoted somebody on the phone an hour earlier. Then you're explaining your own website to a customer, which is the opposite of what the thing is for.

Build the contact form for two countries

This is where most cross-border sites quietly fail, and the failure is invisible to the owner because the form works fine when you test it from your own kitchen.

The postal code field is the usual culprit. A field that insists on A1A 1A1 will refuse 14201 outright, and the person in Buffalo doesn't email you to report a bug. They close the tab and call somebody else. Either accept both formats or stop requiring the field at all, which is often the honest answer since you rarely need it to reply to an enquiry.

The province dropdown is the same trap wearing a different hat. If the list is thirteen Canadian entries and nothing else, you've told an American customer that this form wasn't built with them in mind, which is a strange thing to say on a page you built specifically to get their business.

Phone numbers are the easy one, because Canada and the United States share the same ten-digit system, so nothing needs converting. Just write your own number with the country code in the link, +1 905 682 4642, so a tap from a US phone connects instead of failing.

And hours are easier still. Ontario and New York are both on Eastern time, so nine to five means nine to five on both sides of the river. Say so on the page anyway. It's one sentence and it removes a hesitation you'll never otherwise hear about.

Say where you go, in town names

"We serve Niagara" is one of the least useful sentences on the local web, because there are two of them. There's Niagara Falls, Ontario and Niagara Falls, New York. There's the Niagara Region on this side and Niagara County on that one. A person reading your page can't tell which you mean, and neither can a search engine.

Name the towns instead. Fort Erie, Ridgeway, Crystal Beach, Welland, Port Colborne on this side. Buffalo, Amherst, Cheektowaga, Niagara Falls NY on that one. Then say what actually happens at the border for your business, whichever way the answer goes: you ship to US addresses, or you don't, or it's pickup only and American customers cross for it regularly. All three are fine answers. Leaving it unstated is the only bad one, because a customer weighing a trip over the Peace Bridge won't phone to ask, and every unanswered question is a reason to stay home.

Where the web design part stops

Sales tax, duty, cross-border shipping rules, whether you're licensed to perform your service in another state: none of that's web design, and I won't pretend otherwise on a first call. Your accountant and your lawyer answer those, and it's worth asking them before the site goes live rather than after, because the answers change what your pages should say.

What I can do is make sure the site says the answer clearly once you've got it.

I build for businesses on both sides of this river, including dedicated pages for Buffalo, NY and Niagara Falls, NY. If you sell across the border and you aren't sure what your current site is telling American customers, tell me what you sell and where, and I'll walk through it with you. Call 905.682.4642 or email hello@niagarawebdesigner.com.