Fellow Canadian here. Incorporating a federal corporation is easy and can be done online. If you want to have a named corporation you need to do a NUANS search

Fellow Canadian here. Incorporating a federal corporation is easy and can be done online. If you want to have a named corporation you need to do a NUANS search first. As far as I'm aware, the cheapest NUANS searches are from here: http://www.corporationcentre.ca/docen/pns/home.asp http://www.corporationcentre.ca/docen/pns/home.asp No affiliation, just a satisfied customer. Note that even if it finds a 'hit', it doesn't mean that your choice of name will be disallowed. Online incorporation is cheaper than filling out paper forms, and the online wizard includes a bunch of boilerplate options that make life super-simple. If you live in certain jurisdictions, the wizard will even do the provincial registration for you. As for collecting payments, this is a "problem". If you have good credit, you may be able to use Beanstream to provide merchant services (they provide merchant accounts through TD). If you don't have good credit, then PayPal is probably the option to go for. Depending on what you're doing, this may or may not be a positioning issue. If you're doing merchant stuff, you definitely want to have some kind of corporation in place. BTW Beanstream is one of the few Canadian merchant service providers supported by ActiveMerchant (if you're doing the Rails thing). I have no experience with Moneris. My experience with Global Payments is that you can't just talk to a person - they have a (probably commission-based) outside salesforce. If you don't have an existing business, they want to see personal asset and liability information. All seems far too annoying. Finally, regarding data security: if you do anything with credit cards, outsource that liability by using tokenization or PayPal. You don't want to have to deal with PCI compliance directly. I recently completed a project for a very large electricity retailer who needed to get to PCI compliance and took the outsource option, so it's not like that's just a choice for "the little guys". Yes, you'll probably want to collect GST or HST, and remitting that back to the government is pretty simple; make sure you don't spend "their" money! The mechanics are: take customers' money, keep track of the amount that belongs to the CRA, give them that money according to a schedule you must meet. As a startup, you can remit GST annually (the mandated minimum frequency is based on your sales, if you expect to have very low sales, you can choose annual - but you can even file monthly if you like paperwork). Hope that helps a bit!