Handing an Online Store to the Estate the Right Way

The situation

Antonio was twenty years old and in his second year of college in Owen Sound when he came to Treadstone Law with a problem most estate planning conversations do not anticipate. Two years earlier he had started an online store selling a niche line of custom accessories, running it out of his dorm room in the evenings between classes. What began as a side project had grown into something real: a modest but steady stream of orders, a small warehouse corner rented from a friend's garage for overflow inventory, and about $9,000 in cash sitting across a business bank account and an online payment processor. Between that, a modest RESP balance he had not yet spent, a small life insurance policy his parents had kept up since childhood, and a few years of savings from part-time work before the business took off, his total estate came to somewhere around $150,000.

Antonio did not have a will. Most people his age do not, and there is rarely an urgent reason for one. But Antonio had something unusual for a twenty-year-old: a functioning business with logins, supplier relationships and a customer base that depended on someone actively managing it. He had read a news story about a small business owner who died suddenly and whose online store simply stopped working — orders unfilled, a payment account frozen, a domain name that lapsed within a year because no one knew the renewal was coming due. He did not want that to be his shop.

He came to Treadstone Law not because anything had gone wrong, but because he wanted to know what would happen to the business if something did.

What the review found

Our team's review started with a basic but often overlooked fact: a will only controls property that a court can see and administer. Digital assets are not always visible in that way. Antonio's business lived across several places — a hosting account, a domain registration, a payment processor, an inventory-tracking spreadsheet stored in a cloud account, and a set of supplier accounts each secured with separate login credentials. None of that was written down anywhere his family could find it.

Under Ontario law, when a person dies without a will, the Succession Law Reform Act sets out who inherits and, separately, the process for appointing someone to administer the estate. That process takes time — typically months before a court issues the authority needed to act, called a certificate of appointment of estate trustee. An online store cannot survive that kind of gap. Orders go unfilled, a payment processor may flag the account as abandoned and hold funds, and a domain registration or hosting subscription can lapse within weeks if a renewal payment fails silently in the background.

Even with a will, the review found a second and more immediate gap. A will only takes effect after death. It says nothing about what happens if Antonio were alive but temporarily unable to manage the business himself — hospitalized after an accident, for instance, or unreachable while travelling. For that situation, Ontario law provides a different tool: a continuing power of attorney for property, made under the Substitute Decisions Act, 1992. Without one, even a spouse or parent has no automatic legal authority to log into a business bank account or renew a hosting subscription on someone else's behalf, no matter how urgent the need.

The business itself was structured as a sole proprietorship, meaning Antonio and the business were legally the same person, with no separate corporate entity holding the assets. That made the planning simpler in one respect — there were no shares or corporate directorships to deal with — but it also meant every account, every contract with a supplier, and every dollar of business cash formed part of Antonio's personal estate, mixed in with his student loans, his savings and his personal belongings.

What we did

1. Built a will naming an executor with clear authority over the business. Antonio named his mother as executor, the person responsible for administering his estate after death, and the will gave her explicit power to continue operating the business for a defined period, sell it as a going concern, or wind it down — rather than leaving her to guess what he would have wanted or wait for a court to clarify her authority.
2. Prepared a continuing power of attorney for property. This document let Antonio name the same person to step in and manage his financial and business affairs immediately if he became unable to manage them himself, without waiting for any court process. Because it is called "continuing," it remains valid even if Antonio later loses the mental capacity to manage his own affairs, which is precisely the situation it is meant to cover.
3. Created a separate, non-legal reference document listing every account and where to find it. This was not part of the will itself — wills become public documents once probated, meaning anyone can request to view them, so login credentials and account details never belong inside one. Instead, our team advised Antonio to keep a private, regularly updated list of his hosting provider, domain registrar, payment processor, supplier accounts and cloud storage, referenced only by description in the will and stored securely where his executor could find it when needed.
4. Flagged the payment processor and domain registration as the two highest-risk points of failure. Many payment processors freeze an account once they learn the account holder has died, sometimes holding funds for months during an internal review. Domain registrations typically renew automatically on a credit card that may be cancelled or frozen at the same time. We advised Antonio to set a longer prepaid renewal term on the domain and to document, in the private reference list, exactly how to contact the payment processor's support line with a death certificate if that situation ever arose.
5. Discussed incorporating later, once revenue justified it. Antonio's business was still small enough that a sole proprietorship made sense for now, but our team noted that if the store kept growing, incorporating it as a separate legal entity would eventually simplify a future transfer — shares can be gifted or sold as a unit, whereas a sole proprietorship's assets must each be dealt with individually. That was flagged as a future step, not an immediate one.

The outcome

Nothing dramatic happened to Antonio in the months after the plan was put in place, which was exactly the point. He finished his second year, kept running the store, and periodically updated his private reference list as he added new suppliers and switched payment processors once. The value of the planning was never tested by a crisis — it sat quietly in place as insurance against one.

What changed was concrete and durable. If something happened to Antonio, his mother would not need to spend months establishing her authority to act before she could even log into the business bank account. She would have a will that named her, described her powers plainly, and pointed her toward a private list of exactly where the business lived online. If Antonio were temporarily incapacitated rather than deceased, the power of attorney meant she could step in the same day, rather than waiting for any court process to catch up with the reality of an online store that does not pause for paperwork.

Across the roughly $150,000 estate, the business piece — cash and payment balances of about $9,000, plus inventory and a domain and customer list that, while hard to price precisely, had real value as a going concern — was the part a traditional estate plan would most easily have missed. But the planning was never really about the dollar figure. It was about making sure a business built on logins and subscriptions did not simply evaporate the moment no one was left who could get into it.

What you can learn from this