Costco's online prices are displayed before tax in both Canada and the United States. When you shop on Costco.ca, the listed price excludes GST or HST, which gets calculated and added at checkout depending on your delivery address province. Ontario orders see 13% HST, Alberta 5% GST, British Columbia 12% combined, and so on. The final total appears before you confirm payment. This differs from some brick-and-mortar retailers in Canada that include tax in shelf prices, but most e-commerce sites follow Costco's model—show base price, add tax at the end. The US version (Costco.com) works the same way: no sales tax in the displayed price, then state and local taxes apply based on your shipping destination during checkout. Some US states have no sales tax, so the checkout total matches the cart subtotal. For VAT specifically, that term applies in Europe and the UK, not North America. If you're accessing Costco UK or another European site, VAT is typically included in the listed price by law in those jurisdictions—the opposite of the Canadian model. But for Costco.ca and Costco.com, assume tax is always extra. From a web design perspective, showing pre-tax prices lets businesses display consistent pricing across regions without recalculating every product card for different provinces or states. The tradeoff is sticker shock at checkout if customers don't mentally add 5-15% throughout their browsing. Clear tax messaging in the cart or a sticky subtotal counter helps, but many shoppers still miss it until the final screen. When Ottawa SEO builds or audits e-commerce sites for Canadian clients, we recommend surfacing tax expectations early—either a tooltip on product pages or a banner reminding users that GST/HST applies. Costco's scale lets them get away with basic checkout disclosure, but smaller retailers benefit from over-communicating tax to reduce cart abandonment. Always test your checkout flow with tax line items visible before the payment step, not buried in fine print.