Most advice about increasing online sales is written for nowhere in particular. Improve your product photography. Write better email subject lines. Post consistently. Reduce friction at checkout. It is not wrong, exactly, and it is also the same list you would get in Manchester or Melbourne. What it leaves out is everything that is actually specific to operating from here — the two separate sales tax systems you have to run simultaneously, the municipal licensing that fragments the moment you serve more than one city, the question of which privacy statute governs your customer list, and a set of operational realities that come from sitting three hours behind your largest domestic market. This guide is about that layer. It assumes you have already read the general advice and want the part that applies because you are in Vancouver. Some of it is tax, some is legal, some is infrastructure, and one item has a deadline nineteen days from the date this was written. Scope and a necessary disclaimerTax and licensing rules change, thresholds get adjusted, and the right answer frequently depends on facts specific to your business. Everything here is general information, not tax or legal advice, and it is written as of September 2026. Verify anything consequential against the current guidance on gov.bc.ca, vancouver.ca or with your accountant before acting on it. The cost of getting sales tax registration wrong falls on the seller, not on the customer. What is actually different about operating from Vancouver Four things, and the first two catch people repeatedly. You run two sales tax systems, not one British Columbia does not have harmonised sales tax. You collect federal GST at five percent and provincial PST at seven percent as two separate taxes, with different rules about what is taxable, different registration thresholds, different filing, and — critically — different recoverability. GST paid on business inputs is generally recoverable through input tax credits. PST paid on business inputs generally is not. That second point is the one that changes decisions rather than just paperwork. In an HST province, tax on your business purchases washes out. Here, PST on the things you buy to run...
