When Does a Canadian Business Actually Need Both .CA and .COM? (14.Viewing)

I don’t think the answer is automatically yes, but I also think more businesses should at least think about it properly. If the business is very clearly Canada-first and mostly serves a domestic audience, .ca often does the job just fine.

But once there’s any real concern around expansion, brand protection, or cross-border visibility, the decision looks a bit different. Then it stops being a simple .ca versus .com question and becomes more of a “what happens if I leave one open?” question.

Would be interested to hear how people here are looking at this now, especially from the perspective of small businesses rather than domain investors.

I think its never been more important for any business serving Canadian customers to clearly show they are Canadian, so .CA is more than "just fine" - its nearly mandatory. Even if you're lucky enough to score the .com equivalent, the .ca should be forward facing for Canadian customers.

Of course if your business crosses borders, then you have to ask yourself, does being Canadian help your cause or hurt it? Personally, I'd have multiple domains, the .com if possible, otherwise a ccTLD for each country - for seo and user familiarity.

For Mapledots I have the .com and the .CA and I used to separate them for .com and .CA sales but now I just forward the .com to the .ca

I'm finding the .CA builds trust even when selling to other countries. People seem to trust Canadians because we are not high on the fraud list like Nigeria for example.

completely unrelated but, @MapleDots - nice work on "cleaning" things up quickly, lol. No chance for the dust to settle, haha.

rlm said:

completely unrelated but, @MapleDots - nice work on "cleaning" things up quickly, lol. No chance for the dust to settle, haha.

Click to expand...

Yeah, we block VPN's from registering now so once we add the country (in this case Poland) they cannot register using a VPN.

We allow viewing and logging in but you cannot register an account using a VPN. So if we block the country they have to use a VPN and then that is blocked because VPN's cannot register.

Caught it pretty fast and the person is deleted and banned for spam.