Most e-commerce platforms are built by people who have never counted stock.
Joel Gathercole has. From 2009 to 2012 he operated CafeVox, a brick-and-mortar internet cafe with real foot traffic, a point-of-sale system, and a public network that had to stay up while the room was full. He also ran a computer store and built multi-channel online retail through eBay and Amazon — which meant reconciling physical inventory against two marketplaces, handling shipping and returns, absorbing platform fee changes he had no say in, and doing customer service face to face and by email on the same afternoon.
That is where the operational half of MapleBuy comes from. It is also where a specific frustration comes from: the marketplaces own the customer. A retailer builds years of sales history on a platform, and the platform holds the customer relationship, sets the fees, changes the rules, and can suspend the account on a Tuesday with no appeal. The seller carries all the risk and rents all the leverage.
The security half comes from the other career. From 2006 to 2026 Joel served at TriageLogic, rising to Director of IT, responsible for architecture, security and scale on systems handling highly sensitive healthcare data. He knows what a properly secured transaction path looks like, what has to be logged, what must never be stored, and how to build a system that stays trustworthy under load — not as theory, but as two decades of being personally accountable for it.
MapleBuy puts those together for Canadian businesses. A secure local purchasing environment where the merchant owns the storefront, the customer relationship and the data. Canadian hosting, so transaction and customer records stay under Canadian jurisdiction rather than crossing a border by default. Real payment rails Canadians use — Stripe, Interac — without a middleman inserting itself between the merchant and the buyer. Inventory and fulfilment designed by someone who has personally reconciled stock across channels and knows where the counts go wrong.
There is also an AI dimension, and it is the current version of the shift Joel has been early to three times before. Buyers increasingly start with an answer engine rather than a search box — asking ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini what to buy and where. Products that are not structured to be understood by those systems simply do not appear. MapleBuy is built with that in mind, the same way Joel built for the web in 2003 and VoIP in 2002.
MapleBuy is part of the MapleWorkSuite ecosystem from Joel & Nanz Inc., built in New Brunswick — by someone who has been the retailer, the developer, and the person responsible for keeping the transactions safe.