Bill 96 guide

Bill 96 for Shopify merchants: what Quebec's French-language law actually requires of your storefront

By LocaleGuard · Updated July 2026 · A calm, merchant's-eye guide — not legal advice

If you sell to customers in Quebec, you've probably heard that your online store needs to be in French — and maybe felt a small knot of "am I doing this right?" This guide is here to replace that knot with a clear picture. No scare tactics, no legalese. Just what the law asks of an online store, where merchants most often fall short, and how to tell where you stand today.

I build LocaleGuard, a Shopify app that checks and fixes French compliance, and I'm based in Quebec and bilingual — so this is the guide I wish had existed when I started. It is not legal advice. For a binding opinion on your specific situation, talk to a lawyer. What follows is the practical, merchant's-eye version.

The short version

Quebec's Charter of the French Language, strengthened by Bill 96 (in force since 2022, with obligations phasing in since), requires that commercial communications to Quebec consumers be available in French — and that French be "markedly predominant" where other languages appear. For a Shopify store, that means the pages your Quebec customers actually read — product pages, your policies, order emails, and more — should be in proper French, not just machine-approximated French.

The good news: this is very doable, and being genuinely bilingual is also just good business in Quebec. The catch: a few high-risk pages are easy to miss, and "we ran it through auto-translate" often isn't the quality the law — or your customers — expect.

What "markedly predominant" actually means

This is the phrase that trips people up. It does not mean "French somewhere on the page." The regulatory standard is that French must be markedly predominant — French text must have a much greater visual impact than the text in any other language in the same visual field. In practice the regulation puts a number on it: the space given to French must be at least twice the space given to another language, and the French must be at least as legible and visible.

This got stricter recently. A revised Regulation respecting the language of commerce and business came into force on June 1, 2025, replacing the earlier rule that defined "markedly predominant" — so if you last looked at this before mid-2025, the bar has moved.

In practice, for an online store, the safe reading is simple: if a Quebec customer can land on it, it should be fully available in French. A storefront that's 90% English with a sprinkle of French is the thing to avoid.

Which parts of your store this touches

Here's where Bill 96 meets a real Shopify storefront. Think of it as the surfaces a Quebec shopper — and a regulator — could encounter:

• Product titles and descriptions — the core of the shopping experience.
• Collection pages — category and campaign landing pages.
• Store policies — refund, shipping, terms, privacy. This is the one most merchants miss (more below).
• Checkout — Shopify localizes the standard checkout UI automatically, but anything you add (custom fields, messages) is on you.
• Customer emails — order confirmations, shipping notices. These are commercial communications too.
• Theme text — buttons, menus, banners, section headings — the "furniture" of the store.
• Pages and blog posts — About, FAQ, guides, anything a customer can navigate to.

Not every field is equal risk. Your policies and customer emails carry the most weight — they're formal, they're clearly commercial, and they're exactly the kind of communication the law is written about. Product and theme text matter too, but the policies are where I'd look first.

The three gaps merchants actually fall into

Most non-compliance isn't willful — it's one of these three quiet gaps:

1. The policies that quietly fell out of sync

Shopify's built-in free translation is genuinely useful: publish French and it auto-translates its own default policy and email templates for you. But there are two catches, and both hit the highest-risk surface. First, that French is France French, not Québec French — "e-mail" where Bill 96's regulator expects "courriel". Second, and worse: the moment you edit your English policy, Shopify leaves the old French in place and never updates it. Most merchants do rewrite their refund and shipping terms — so a store can look fully translated, pass a casual glance, and still show Quebec customers French that no longer matches the English they're agreeing to. And any policy text you write from scratch, Shopify doesn't translate at all. If you check one thing after reading this, check that your French policies still say what your English ones do.

2. "Auto-translated" that reads as off

Generic machine translation will happily give you France French, not Quebec French, and sprinkle in anglicisms. To a Quebec customer, "email" instead of courriel, "shopping" instead of magasinage, or "week-end" instead of fin de semaine reads as careless — and to a regulator, obviously-machine French can undercut the "genuine French" expectation. Quality isn't a nicety here; it's part of being compliant and trusted.

3. Drift — you were compliant, then you changed something

You translate everything, you're in good shape — then you add a new product line, edit your return policy, or launch a collection. The new content is English-only until someone notices. Compliance isn't a one-time project; it's a state you have to stay in as the store changes.

What the enforcement picture really looks like (an honest read)

You'll see a lot of alarming headlines. Here's the measured version, so you can make a calm decision rather than a panicked one:

• Complaints are rising sharply. Quebec's language regulator (the OQLF) logged a record 10,371 complaints in 2024–25 — up 14% in a single year and roughly 140% over five years — and websites ("sites Web") were among the top-three things people complained about. The OQLF also ran 9,813 inspections that year, up 47% on 2022–23.
• The potential penalties are real. Fines run $700–$7,000 for an individual and $3,000–$30,000 for a company, and they apply for each day the offence continues — doubled for a repeat offence and tripled after that. Bill 96 also introduced a private right of action: Quebec residents can seek injunctive relief, damages, and even punitive damages themselves, rather than waiting on the regulator.
• But actual prosecutions are rare. The OQLF publishes every conviction, and the list is short: 4 convictions in 2024 and 6 in 2025. The regulator overwhelmingly prefers working with businesses to fix the problem over prosecuting it. Worth knowing, though: one of those 2025 convictions was a website case — a restaurant fined $1,500 under section 52 for commercial publications that weren't in French, "including on a website and on social media."

So the honest takeaway is not "you're about to be fined." It's this: the risk is real and rising, the downside is expensive, and the fix is cheap — so compliance is a smart, low-cost way to remove a nagging risk and serve your Quebec customers in the language they prefer. That's a much better reason to act than fear, and it's a more durable one.

How to tell where you stand

You don't have to guess. Here's a five-minute self-audit — or, for a guided version, try the free 2-minute Bill 96 self-check:

1. Open your store policies in French. Are refund, shipping, terms, and privacy all there, and in real French?
2. Trigger a test order and read the confirmation email. Is it in French for a French customer?
3. Spot-check five product pages — titles and descriptions.
4. Look at your theme: menus, buttons, the footer, cookie/announcement bars.
5. Note anything you've added or changed recently that might not be translated yet.

If all five look good, you're likely in solid shape. If a couple gave you pause — especially the policies — that's the normal starting point, and it's fixable.

Getting compliant, and staying that way

The path is straightforward: translate the gaps into proper Quebec French, weight your effort toward the high-risk surfaces (policies, emails), and put something in place so new content doesn't quietly drift back to English.

That last part is the one people underestimate. A store isn't static, so "compliant" isn't a finish line — it's a setting you leave on.

But whether or not you use a tool, the important thing is the habit: know your gaps, close the high-risk ones first, and don't let new content sit untranslated.

LocaleGuard helps you reduce Bill 96 compliance risk and effort. It is a positioning and monitoring tool, not legal advice or a certification. For a binding assessment of your obligations, consult a qualified legal professional.