We publish the numbers other shops leave out

Before launch. Our registered business name, street address and GST/HST number will appear here before this store opens for orders. Until then the fastest way to reach a person is WhatsApp on +1 672-203-4941.

Why this store exists

Rooftop Tents Canada sells roof top tents and vehicle camping equipment to people camping in Canada, in English and in French.

We started it because of one specific thing wrong with how these tents are sold here. Almost every roof top tent on the Canadian market is designed in the United States, Australia or China, and it arrives with the spec sheet it was written for. That spec sheet was not written for a Prairie January. A tent sold as four-season in Queensland is being sold to someone in Winnipeg on the same two words.

And those two words mean nothing. There is no standard behind “four-season” — no test, no definition, no body that certifies it. Any tent can be called four-season by whoever is selling it. We say that out loud on our four-season guide rather than leaning on the phrase in our own product titles.

What we do differently, concretely

Four things. Each one is on this site now, not a promise.

1. We publish roof loads per vehicle, with the source

The load your roof can carry while parked is not the load it can carry while driving, and the two are confused constantly — including by people selling tents. Our fitment pages give the figures for specific vehicles and name the document each one came from. Where a manufacturer publishes nothing, we say so instead of estimating. There is a real standard for the rack itself, ISO 11154, and we work to it: the usable payload is the lower of the vehicle’s limit and the rack’s rating, minus the weight of the rack.

2. One delivery price, shown before you order

A roof top tent is crated freight, not a parcel, and most shops handle that by burying it in the small print or correcting the figure after you have paid. We would rather carry the risk ourselves: $89 to any Canadian address, free once your order reaches $999, shown at checkout before you commit. If a crate to your corner of the country costs us more than that, that is our problem and not your invoice.

3. We correct ourselves in public

Our guide used to repeat the industry line that a roof rack costs you a little fuel. Then we read the underlying research — a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study in Energy Policy — and found the retailers, including us, were understating it: a loaded rack at 70 mph costs a car about 24.8% more fuel. We rewrote the section and said on the page that we had been wrong. We would rather be corrected than quoted.

4. We do not use other companies’ product photos

Sourcing images for a new store is the point where most catalogues quietly fill up with competitors’ photography. We rejected roughly twenty otherwise-good images because a rival’s brand was legible in them, and we keep a written image rights register recording the source and licence of every photograph we publish. Where a photo shows the type of product rather than the exact item, the product page says so.

🔴 What we do not know yet

This is the part most About pages leave out.

• Some product weights are provisional. They are marked as such on the product page until we have confirmed them against supplier documentation. A provisional weight is not good enough to plan a roof load around, which is why we label it rather than present it as fact.
• We are a new store. We do not have years of reviews, and we are not going to borrow any.
• Some questions we simply cannot answer yet — exact lead times on some lines, for instance. When you ask us something we do not know, we will tell you we do not know. That is worth more to you than a confident guess, and it is the standard we hold ourselves to on the phone as well as on the page.

Compliance, plainly

Tents imported into or sold in Canada are regulated: SOR/2024-217 requires flammability performance to CAN/CGSB-182.1 and a permanent warning label on every tent. We read those rules directly rather than taking a supplier’s word for it, and we will not list a tent we cannot show is compliant.

How to reach us

WhatsApp on +1 672-203-4941 is the fastest way to reach a person, and it is the same channel that confirms your freight cost and sends your payment request. You can also use our contact page.

If you want to see how we work before you buy anything, read the guides — particularly dynamic versus static roof load, which is the single thing most likely to save you from an expensive mistake.