Marketplace Facilitator Rules in Canada: What Amazon, Etsy and eBay Cover, and What Shopify Leaves Entirely to You

A platform-by-platform breakdown of who collects your GST/HST, who doesn't, and the registration obligation that stays with you no matter how many platforms you sell on.

A seller we talked to recently had a clean-looking setup. Around $180,000 a year through Amazon.ca, another $90,000 through their own Shopify store, a few thousand at markets in the summer. They had never registered for GST/HST. Their reasoning was reasonable on its face: Amazon was already charging tax at checkout and sending it to the government, so the tax was handled.

Amazon was handling its slice. The $90,000 running through Shopify was not being collected, not being remitted, and had not been for two years. And because total sales were well past $270,000, this was not a "should I register" question. Registration had been mandatory since somewhere in year one. The only open question was how large the gap had grown.

This is a common and expensive question in Canadian e-commerce. "The platform handles tax" is true for some platforms and some of the tax. It is the gap between those platforms, and the registration obligation that never transfers to any of them, that can quietly turn into a compliance issue.

A quick note before we get into the details: Canadian sales tax rules are highly fact-specific, and platform policies can change. This article is general information only, not tax advice. Before changing your registration, filing, or remittance approach, speak with your accountant or tax advisor so they can review your sales channels, registration status, product types, provinces, and platform reports.

What "marketplace facilitator" means

In July 2021, Canada brought online marketplaces into the GST/HST system. The federal rules made certain platforms responsible for collecting and remitting tax on sales they facilitate, rather than leaving it to the individual sellers behind those listings. The CRA calls these platforms "distribution platform operators." Most people call them marketplace facilitators. The provinces followed with their own versions over the same period.

How does it work? 

For qualifying sales, the platform is treated as the supplier for tax purposes. It charges the tax, it collects the tax, it sends the tax to the CRA. The seller behind the listing is, for that transaction, stepped over.

This applies most cleanly when two things are true: the seller is not registered for GST/HST, and the goods are already sitting in Canada (for example, in a fulfillment warehouse). Sales of digital products and certain cross-border services by non-registered sellers are caught as well. The rules were built to close a fairness gap. A Canadian shop down the street charged tax. An anonymous third-party listing shipping from a warehouse two cities over often did not. The platform rules ended that.

The rules describe what the platform must do on the sale. They say nothing about whether you are supposed to be registered. Those are two different obligations, and only one of them is the platform's problem.

The platform you're probably wrong about

Before the platform-by-platform breakdown, the single distinction that matters most.

Not every "platform" is a marketplace facilitator. Amazon.ca, Etsy, and eBay are. Shopify is not. Shopify is a storefront tool. When you sell through your own Shopify store, you are the seller of record on every order. Shopify gives you a tax engine that can calculate and collect GST/HST at checkout, and that collected tax flows into your payouts. But Shopify does not remit anything to the CRA on your behalf, and it does not register for you. Every dollar of tax on a Shopify sale is yours to collect, track, report, and remit.

The same is true of WooCommerce, a custom-built store, Squarespace commerce, direct invoicing, wholesale, and in-person sales. None of these is a facilitator. All of the tax obligation sits with you.

The reason this matters: sellers who run both Amazon and Shopify routinely assume the two work the same way. They do not. The Amazon side is largely handled. The Shopify side is entirely on you, and it is usually the higher-margin direct channel where the dollars and the exposure are largest.

Platform by platform: who collects what

The platforms that are facilitators do not even behave identically to each other. The differences become clear the moment you register, which is exactly when most sellers stop paying attention.

Amazon.ca

While you are not registered, Amazon collects and remits GST/HST directly to the CRA on your Canadian sales as the marketplace facilitator. Because you are not a registrant, you generally do not file a GST/HST return for those sales. The revenue still counts for income-tax and recordkeeping purposes and still feeds your registration-threshold calculation.

Once your GST/HST number is on file with Amazon, the mechanics flip. Amazon stops collecting GST/HST as the facilitator and instead includes that tax in your payout, leaving you to remit it to the CRA yourself. Registration moves the GST/HST responsibility onto you for your Amazon sales, rather than leaving Amazon to handle it.

Provincial tax is treated separately. Amazon may collect and remit PST, RST, or QST where marketplace legislation makes it responsible, but the treatment can vary by province, where the goods are located, your registration status, and the transaction type. Work from Amazon's Marketplace Tax Collection reports rather than assume every provincial amount was handled by Amazon, and do not report amounts Amazon already remitted as tax you collected.

One more Amazon-specific trap: North American Remote Fulfillment orders, where Amazon ships from US inventory to a Canadian buyer. On those, Amazon is the seller of record on the cross-border sale and handles the Canadian tax itself. Identify these orders separately and confirm whether they sit outside your Canadian return, rather than folding them in with domestic FBA sales.

Etsy

Etsy works much like Amazon federally. When a Canadian seller has not added a GST/HST number, Etsy collects and remits GST/HST (and QST from Quebec buyers) on physical-goods orders. Once a seller adds a GST/HST number, Etsy stops collecting GST/HST on that seller's Canadian physical-goods sales, and the seller is expected to build the tax into the listing price and remit it through their own return. Etsy continues to collect BC PST, Saskatchewan PST, and Manitoba RST regardless of provincial registration. The practical issue for Etsy sellers is that Etsy is rarely the whole business. The handmade brand that also sells through its own site, at craft shows, and through a few wholesale accounts has a large slice of revenue that Etsy never touches, and that slice is what drives the registration obligation.

eBay

eBay is the platform that most often surprises people, because it does the opposite of Amazon after you register. Since July 1, 2022, eBay collects and remits Canadian sales tax (GST/HST, PST, and QST) on Canadian orders regardless of the seller's registration status. When you do register, eBay does not pass the GST/HST into your payout the way Amazon does. Instead, registered sellers provide their tax numbers and complete eBay's billing-agent election, and eBay continues to handle collection and remittance on those sales rather than passing the GST/HST into your payout. Use eBay's tax reports when preparing your return and confirm the treatment with your adviser.

So on eBay, registration is not about taking over collections. It is about recovering input tax credits on eBay's Canadian fees and your Canadian costs. The collection keeps running through eBay either way.

Shopify and other storefront tools

Covered above, and worth repeating in the breakdown because it is the one people skip. Not a facilitator. You are the seller of record. You register, you collect, you remit. Shopify's tax engine helps you calculate, but the obligation is yours end to end.

The registration obligation that never transfers

Here is the rule that sits underneath all of this, and the one the platforms have no reason to tell you about.

You must register for GST/HST once your total taxable sales exceed $30,000 over four consecutive calendar quarters, or in a single calendar quarter. This is the small supplier threshold. A few features of it matter for marketplace sellers specifically.

It is based on revenue, not profit. Gross taxable sales are what count, not what you keep after fees and costs.

It is measured across all of your channels together, not per platform. Amazon, Etsy, eBay, your Shopify store, wholesale, markets, and direct sales are added up. There is no per-platform $30,000 allowance.

For a Canadian resident, it is based on worldwide taxable supplies, not only Canadian sales. A Canadian seller doing most of their volume into the US still counts that volume toward the threshold.

The timing is important: The timing runs on two different tests. If your taxable supplies exceed $30,000 in a single calendar quarter, you stop being a small supplier on the sale that pushes you over, and you must charge GST/HST starting on that sale, with no grace period. If you exceed $30,000 over four consecutive calendar quarters but not in any single quarter, you generally remain a small supplier until the end of the month following the quarter in which you crossed, your effective date is set then, and you must register within 29 days of it.

Now apply that to the seller from the opening. Amazon was collecting on the Amazon sales, which made it feel as though the tax question was settled. But the Shopify and market revenue alone, at roughly $95,000 a year, was more than triple the threshold. Registration was mandatory regardless of what Amazon was doing. The facilitator collecting on one channel changed nothing about the obligation that the total triggered.

Why the platform collecting can make you under-report

The original worry sellers have is double payment: if the platform already sent the tax, won't I pay it twice when I file? In practice the bigger risk runs the other way, and it is driven by the info that the CRA now checks.

This applies once you are registered; while unregistered there is no GST/HST return to reconcile. Report your total sales but separate the marketplace-facilitated portion from the direct sales where you collected the tax yourself, and do not report facilitator-collected tax as tax you collected, or the CRA may read it as tax you still owe. Platform totals will not map to a single return line once you account for refunds, fees, shipping, and exempt or foreign sales. The aim is a reconciliation you can explain, not forcing every platform total onto one line.

This is where the platform-by-platform differences can stop being minor:

• On Amazon, after you register, the GST/HST on your Amazon sales lands in your payout and you remit it. You report those sales and that tax as yours.
• On eBay, even after you register, eBay keeps remitting the GST/HST as your billing agent. You report the sales, but the tax was already sent by eBay, so you are not remitting it again.
• The PST and QST that Amazon and eBay send directly to the provinces are not yours to touch on your federal return.
• On Shopify, all of the tax was collected by you through the storefront and all of it is yours to remit.

A seller running three of these at once has three different reconciliation patterns happening in the same filing period. This is precisely the work that gets done wrong, and it is rarely the seller's fault. The mechanics are not intuitive, and many bookkeepers have never had to separate facilitator-remitted tax from seller-remitted tax across platforms.

The upside of registering, and the reason to do it well before you are forced to, is input tax credits. Once registered, you may be able to claim ITCs on eligible platform fees, advertising, fulfillment, software, and imports where you are the importer of record, to the extent the costs relate to commercial activity and you hold the supporting documentation. A new registrant may also recover tax embedded in eligible inventory and capital property on hand when registration takes effect, under the new-registrant and change-of-use rules. The recovery should be calculated rather than assumed to start strictly on the registration date.

The provincial layer

Federal GST/HST is one system. The provinces that run their own sales tax are separate, and they each made their own marketplace rules.

British Columbia requires marketplace facilitators to collect PST on goods located in Canada that are sold to BC buyers. BC has more than one PST test: certain Canadian sellers of goods into BC face a $10,000 BC-revenue threshold, while some BC-based businesses may qualify for the province's more restrictive small-seller exemption, and direct (non-marketplace) sales can still create a registration obligation. Saskatchewan PST and Manitoba RST do not offer a broad small-supplier exemption like the federal $30,000 rule, so direct sales of taxable goods into those provinces can create obligations at relatively low volumes, depending on your activities and whether a facilitator is already responsible. Quebec's QST runs separate general and specified QST systems; a $30,000 threshold applies in several circumstances, but the calculation depends on your location, activities, GST/HST status, and whether sales run through a specified platform.

The practical takeaway is to verify per platform and per province rather than assume. Marketplace platforms such as Amazon and eBay may handle PST, RST, or QST on facilitated sales, depending on the province, transaction type, product location, and seller setup. Shopify does not, which means your Shopify sales into BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec may carry provincial registration and collection obligations that no platform is covering for you. A seller who is fully covered on the Amazon side can still have an untouched provincial obligation on the Shopify side.

The cross-border layer: US sellers into Canada

The same rules that catch Canadian sellers also reach US and other non-resident sellers, and many do not know it.

The mechanism that most often creates the obligation is inventory. A US seller using Amazon FBA with stock held in Canadian warehouses can be treated as carrying on business in Canada. Holding inventory in a Canadian warehouse is an important factor in whether a non-resident is carrying on business in Canada, but it is not a stand-alone test. The conclusion turns on the seller's full Canadian footprint, including inventory, contracts, delivery arrangements, personnel or agents, and where the business activity happens. If the seller is carrying on business in Canada, the normal regime can apply, with the worldwide threshold. If not, the special digital-economy rules for qualifying goods and platforms may apply instead, and those use different threshold calculations, including the possibility that sales through a registered platform are excluded from the seller's threshold and attributed to the platform.

If you have been selling for years and never registered

The instinct when someone realizes they are years behind is to stay quiet and hope. That is usually the most expensive option, because the CRA's platform data matching makes the gap easier to find every year, and being found is treated very differently from coming forward.

The CRA's Voluntary Disclosures Program is the structured way to correct this. It was rebuilt for applications received on or after October 1, 2025, and the current version is more forgiving than the one it replaced. For an unprompted disclosure, one you make before the CRA contacts you about the issue, the program offers full relief of penalties and 75% relief of interest, along with protection from gross negligence penalties and from prosecution on the disclosed issue. If the CRA has already reached out, the disclosure is treated as prompted, which still allows up to full penalty relief but only 25% interest relief. The gap between those two outcomes is the cost of waiting.

Here is an example: Take a seller who should have collected roughly $40,000 of GST/HST over three years on their non-facilitated sales and did not. Coming forward unprompted, penalties are forgiven and most of the interest is forgiven. A professional review may also identify eligible ITCs or new-registrant credits that reduce the net position, though those are subject to timing, documentation, and commercial-use requirements rather than guaranteed. Worth noting nearby: a VDP application is not automatically accepted; it must be complete and accurate to hold, and the underlying tax remains payable. The program relieves penalties and interest, not the tax itself. Waiting until a data-match review lands turns the same situation into full penalties, far more interest, and a process they no longer control.

This is genuinely a situation where the right move is to get a clear assessment of the size of the gap before deciding anything, because the disclosure has to be complete and accurate to hold. It is not a form to file casually.

Final Thoughts

The marketplace facilitator rules did something useful. They put tax on a large category of sales that used to escape it. But they were never designed to manage your registration, your other channels, or your provincial obligations, and they do not.

Facilitators such as Amazon.ca, Etsy, and eBay may handle tax on certain facilitated sales, but the treatment varies by platform, tax type, transaction, and seller-registration status. Storefront tools (Shopify, WooCommerce, your own site) hand the entire obligation to you. And underneath both, your registration obligation is triggered by your total sales across everything, and it transfers to no one.

If you sell across more than one channel and you are at or past $30,000 cumulative, the registration and reconciliation questions are already live, whether or not anyone has told you. It is a far better conversation to have on your own timing than on the CRA's.

If you sell across marketplaces and your own storefront, the tax picture is rarely as handled as it looks. We help Canadian e-commerce businesses sort out what each platform is actually doing, get registered correctly, recover the input tax credits they have been missing, and clean up gaps before the CRA finds them. See how we work with e-commerce businesses - book a complimentary call here.

Key takeaways

• Not every platform is a facilitator. Amazon.ca, Etsy, and eBay may collect and remit tax on certain facilitated sales, depending on the platform, tax type, transaction, and seller-registration status. Shopify does not. On Shopify and other storefront tools, you are the seller of record and the whole obligation is yours.
• Registration is triggered by your total sales, not per platform. Once worldwide taxable supplies (across all channels, plus associated persons) pass $30,000, you must register. Crossing it in one quarter starts collection on the sale that crosses it; crossing it over four quarters generally produces a later effective date, with 29 days to register from there. No platform collecting on one channel removes this.
• The facilitators differ after you register. Amazon passes the GST/HST into your payout for you to remit. eBay keeps remitting as your billing agent. That changes how each gets reported.
• Reconcile platform reports, do not copy them into a return. Once registered, report total sales, separate the facilitated portion, and do not remit facilitator-collected tax twice. What belongs on which line depends on who was legally responsible for the tax.
• The provinces are separate. PST in BC, SK, MB and QST in QC have their own rules. Marketplaces handle them on their sales. Your own storefront sales into those provinces may not be covered by anyone but you.
• If you are behind, coming forward beats being found. The Voluntary Disclosures Program is materially more generous for unprompted disclosures than prompted ones.

Frequently asked questions

Does Amazon collecting GST/HST mean I don't have to register? 

No. While you are unregistered, Amazon collects and remits on your Amazon sales, but your registration obligation is set by your total taxable sales across every channel. If that total is over $30,000, you must register regardless of what Amazon is doing.

Is Shopify a marketplace facilitator? 

No. Shopify is a storefront platform. You are the seller of record on every order, and you are responsible for collecting, reporting, and remitting GST/HST yourself. Shopify's tax engine can calculate and collect the tax at checkout, but it does not remit to the CRA for you. 

If the platform already remitted the tax, will I pay it twice when I file? 

Generally no, if it is reconciled correctly. Once you are registered, keep records that separate sales where you collected the tax from sales where a platform collected or remitted it. Do not remit tax the platform already sent. The correct reporting depends on who was legally responsible for the tax on that transaction and how the platform handled it.

I'm a US seller using Amazon FBA in Canada. Am I caught by this? 

Possibly. Holding inventory in Canadian fulfillment warehouses can mean you are carrying on business in Canada, which brings you under the normal GST/HST regime and the $30,000 worldwide threshold. Many non-resident sellers are both unregistered when they should be registered and overpaying recoverable tax. This is worth professional advice rather than a guess.

Do I need to register provincially as well? 

It depends on where and how much you sell. BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec run their own sales taxes with their own rules and thresholds. Marketplaces handle the provincial tax on their sales, but your own storefront sales into those provinces may create separate provincial obligations.

I've sold for years and never registered. What now? 

The Voluntary Disclosures Program lets you correct past non-compliance, with more relief if you come forward before the CRA contacts you. Get a clear read on the size of the gap first, because the disclosure has to be complete and accurate to be accepted.