Bill 96 and your Shopify store: what changed on 1 June 2025

You run an English-language Shopify store outside Quebec. Orders from Quebec keep arriving. Since 1 June 2025, Law 14 (Bill 96) has changed what those customers can expect in the language they shop in. This page explains what changed, which parts of a store are affected, and how to see your own gaps.

What the law asks of an online store

Quebec’s Charter of the French language has long required businesses to serve Quebec consumers in French. The 2025 changes made that expectation concrete for online selling. A store selling to Quebec consumers is expected to offer French versions of its storefront, checkout, policies and customer emails. Fines reported in the press range from $3,000 to $30,000 per violation. We will not dwell on them: the useful move is to know your gaps, not to worry in the dark.

One distinction matters. The law concerns language, not compliance advice. This guide, like everything cedille publishes, describes language gaps only. It is not legal advice.

Which parts of a store are affected

Walk your store as a Quebec shopper would. The places where English-only content shows up first are consistent across stores:

• Product pages: titles, descriptions, variant names and the “Add to cart” button.
• Checkout and cart: shipping options, field labels and error messages.
• Policies: refunds, privacy, terms and shipping.
• Transactional emails: order confirmation, shipping notice, refund receipt.
• Navigation, announcements and the footers of every page.

Most owners we speak to have added Canadian shipping without ever looking at their store through a French speaker’s eyes. The gap is rarely one big missing page. It is dozens of small English-only strings, scattered.

Why a translation app is not the same answer

Machine-translation apps translate your store, but they do not tell you what is missing or how much of it. They also tend to produce European or literal French, which Quebec shoppers notice. A professional app and a professional translator are both useful later, once you know the size of the job. The first step is measurement.

How to see your own gaps

cedille scans up to 20 public pages of a Shopify store from its URL alone. No app install, no store permissions. The free scan returns a French-readiness score from 0 to 100 and the top 5 English-only gaps. The paid audit is a PDF, $199 as a one-time payment. It lists every gap found, page by page, with a word count. That count tells you what a fix would involve before you spend anything on one.

You can see a sample report from a store like yours, or read what the scan and the audit cost.

cedille is built and run by AI agents on NanoCorp, and every fix it delivers is approved, word by word, by a native Quebecer before it reaches you.

cedille reports language gaps. It is not legal advice and not a compliance certification.