Quebec's Bill 96 and Your Shopify Store: The French-Language Compliance Guide for Canadian Merchants (2026)

01. What Bill 96 Actually Requires From Your Online Store

Bill 96 is Quebec's 2022 amendment to the Charter of the French Language, the provincial law more commonly known by its original number, Bill 101. Bill 96 tightened and extended the Charter's requirements, and rolled its remaining provisions into force in stages through 2023, 2024, and finally June 1, 2025.

For an ecommerce business, the operative rule is straightforward to state and more work to implement: commercial communications with Quebec consumers must be available in French, and French content must be at least as prominent as any other language on the same page. That covers product names and descriptions, pricing and promotional copy, the checkout flow, order confirmations, and ongoing customer service communication. A store cannot require a Quebec customer to use English to complete a purchase.

The law does not require every word on your site to be French only. What it requires is that French not be an afterthought: a smaller font, a lower-priority tab, or a machine-translated summary of an English original that the OQLF or a complainant could reasonably call inadequate.

Why it matters: the compliance bar is "genuinely equivalent," not "present somewhere," and most stores that have added a translate button assume they already cleared it when they have not.

02. Does This Apply If Your Business Isn't Based in Quebec

Yes, and this is the single most common misunderstanding among Atlantic Canadian and other out-of-province merchants. Bill 96 is triggered by where your customer is, not by where your business is registered, warehoused, or headquartered. A Shopify store based in Fredericton, Halifax, or anywhere else in Canada that knowingly sells to consumers in Quebec is expected to serve those customers in French, the same as a Quebec-based competitor would be.

This is a meaningful shift from how a lot of small and mid-sized merchants have historically treated the province: as just another Canadian postal code range that Shopify's shipping settings handle automatically. Bill 96 treats Quebec as a distinct linguistic market with its own legal requirements layered on top of ordinary Canadian ecommerce compliance.

The practical trigger point is whether you are knowingly selling into Quebec, which for most Shopify stores means: does Quebec appear as a shippable region, does your ad targeting or marketing reach Quebec IP addresses and postal codes, and have you fulfilled orders to Quebec addresses. If the answer to any of those is yes, the law considers you to be doing business with Quebec consumers.

Why it matters: "we're not based in Quebec" is not a defense, and treating Quebec as an afterthought market means you are exposed on close to 9 million potential customers.

03. The Fines and How OQLF Enforcement Works

Bill 96 sets real financial penalties, not a warning letter followed by an indefinite grace period. For a business (a legal person), fines run from 3,000 to 30,000 dollars per offense. That amount doubles for a second offense and triples for each subsequent offense. Individuals face a lower range, generally 700 to 7,000 dollars. Because each day a violation continues can be treated as a separate offense, a non-compliant checkout flow left unfixed for weeks is a materially different risk than a single one-time infraction.

Enforcement does not require a government audit to find you. The OQLF can open an investigation from a single complaint, and complaints can come from a customer, a competitor, or a language-advocacy organization. In practice this means the OQLF is increasingly reviewing web content directly rather than relying solely on in-person storefront inspections, which was closer to how enforcement worked under the original Charter of the French Language.

Bill 96 also lowered the employee threshold that triggers mandatory francization registration with the OQLF, from 50 employees down to 25, effective the same June 1, 2025 date. Registration is a separate obligation from the customer-facing French requirement and mainly affects mid-sized manufacturers and wholesalers, but the customer-facing requirement itself applies regardless of company size or registration status.

Why it matters: this is an active enforcement regime with a real fine schedule, not a symbolic law, and a complaint from a single Quebec customer is all it takes to start the clock.

04. Comparing Your Shopify Compliance Options

Most Shopify merchants facing Bill 96 for the first time choose between four approaches. They are not equally compliant, and the cheapest option on paper is usually the least defensible one if the OQLF ever looks at your store.

For the large majority of Canadian manufacturers, wholesalers, and DTC brands, the second row from the bottom, Shopify Markets combined with a genuinely reviewed translation, is the right target. A fully separate French storefront is usually more infrastructure than a mid-sized merchant needs, and it introduces its own maintenance risk: two storefronts that drift out of sync as products, pricing, and promotions change.

Why it matters: the option that looks fastest to ship, a translation plugin over an unchanged English store, is exactly the one most likely to fail a real OQLF review.

05. Building It Right: Shopify Markets and Metafields

Shopify Markets is the native mechanism for running a multi-language, multi-region storefront on a single Shopify backend, and it is the foundation for a defensible Bill 96 rollout. Markets lets you configure a French-language storefront experience for Quebec (and for French-speaking customers anywhere else) with locale-specific URLs, so a Quebec visitor lands on a genuinely French version of the site rather than an on-the-fly translated overlay of the English one.

Shopify's built-in translate and adapt tooling handles the mechanical layer: theme strings, navigation, static pages, and a first-pass translation of product content. The part that separates a defensible implementation from a risky one is what happens next. Product titles, descriptions, and variant options should live in Metafields structured so the French and English versions are both first-class content, not a translation layer sitting on top of an English source of truth that gets updated and forgotten in French.

That structure matters operationally as much as legally. When a merchant updates a product description, a price, or a promotional banner in English and the French Metafield does not get the same update, the store drifts out of compliance quietly, one product at a time, without anyone deciding to let that happen. Building translation into your product update workflow, not as a separate one-time project, is what keeps Markets and Metafields compliant six months after launch rather than just on launch day.

Why it matters: Shopify Markets gives you the infrastructure, but compliance lives in the workflow that keeps French content current every time the English product data changes, not in the initial setup alone.

06. What Still Needs a Human Translator

Bill 96 does not require certified professional translation. What it requires is French content that is complete and genuinely comprehensible, matching the English version in substance, not just approximating it. That is a lower bar than certification, but it is a real bar, and machine translation run without review does not reliably clear it, especially on the pages where precision has legal weight.

Three categories deserve a human pass even on an otherwise machine-translated store: pricing, promotions, and any conditional terms attached to them, where a mistranslated word can change what a customer is legally owed; warranty, return, and legal policy pages, where ambiguity creates real dispute risk; and checkout fields and error messages, which are the part of the funnel most likely to be reviewed if a Quebec customer files a complaint after a bad purchase experience.

Everything else, general product descriptions, blog content, and marketing copy that a native French speaker can review quickly rather than translate from scratch, is a reasonable place to start with machine translation and tighten over time. The goal is not perfection on day one. It is a credible, improving standard that a reviewer would recognize as a genuine French storefront rather than a workaround.

Why it matters: the pages carrying legal or financial weight are exactly the pages where a machine-translation error is most expensive, so that is where review budget should go first.

07. Beyond the Website: Emails, Receipts, and Service

A common gap: merchants translate the storefront and stop there, leaving the rest of the customer relationship in English. Bill 96's requirement extends to commercial communications generally, which in practice means order confirmation and shipping emails, invoices and receipts, abandoned cart and marketing emails sent to Quebec addresses, and live chat or phone support when a Quebec customer initiates contact.

For Shopify merchants running email and SMS through Klaviyo or a similar platform, this means building a French template variant for transactional and marketing flows and routing Quebec customers into it based on shipping address or stated language preference, not assuming the storefront translation covers messages sent outside the site. For customer service, a French-capable support option, even a scripted set of common responses reviewed by a fluent speaker, closes a gap that a translated storefront alone does not.

Why it matters: a customer's most common Bill 96 complaint point is not the homepage, it is the order confirmation email or the support ticket that stayed English by default.

08. A Practical Rollout Plan

Treat Bill 96 compliance as a short project with a clear order of operations, not a single settings change.

For merchants already investing in Canadian market positioning, this work pairs naturally with the broader Buy Canadian marketing playbook, since a genuinely bilingual store is itself a signal of commitment to the Canadian market, not just a compliance checkbox. And because a French storefront is also new content for search engines and AI answer engines to index, it connects to the GEO and AEO guide for Canadian ecommerce on getting that content discovered.

Why it matters: sequencing the work, measure, build the infrastructure, translate, review, then wire it into checkout and messaging, is what turns a compliance scramble into a store upgrade that also improves conversion with French-speaking customers.

09. Frequently Asked Questions